Fireside Chat with Darcy Vis, VP Exploration at GoldInxs

0:00 Okay, we are now live. Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for this live event. We have fireside chat with Darcy Fiss, VP of Exploration at Gold in Excess Mining Corp. So instead of a presentation today, I've composed some questions for Darcy to get to learn more about him and gold in excess. If you have any questions, please submit them using the chat feature and we can address them at the end. As always, this event is being recorded and will be available for replay shortly after we conclude. With that, Darcy, welcome back. We'll dive in with some questions to get to know you

0:31 better. Now for people that don't know, you got your start in geology at 16, doing till sampling and terrain mapping northwest of Prince George. So my question is, what pulled you into the rocks back then and what has kept you in the field for over 17 years? Yeah, for sure, Kyle. Yeah. And thanks for having me on here. Pretty excited to do a bit of a laced down version of a chat for the fireside. Yeah, I think, you know, it's been a lot longer than 17 years that I've been interested in rocks. You know, ever since a really young age, I've been sort of fascinated. I was one of those kids who had a lot of rocks in their pockets every time we went for a hike.

1:12 And yeah, so basically, you know, from a really young age, I was really interested in rocks themselves. Actually, my mom, back in the day, before we had iPads, to keep me busy, she'd go to the driveway and she'd put a whole bunch of rocks in just this little plastic dish and she'd give it to me and I'd sit at the counter and the sink and I'd scrub the rocks for hours just trying to see what was in them. I think back then I was looking for diamonds and gold. I didn't find any but I could have because I grew up near Smithers, near Dome Mountain and those places. There was technically Gold in those rocks, but I never found any. Anyway, fast forward, when I was a teenager, a friend of our family was a geologist and he was doing a project with Geoscience BC and SFU.

2:05 The students they had hired for that year had to leave to go to field school or something. They had a couple of weeks of work where they needed somebody to help them with their till sampling. He asked my dad if any of his sons were looking for work. I was working at the time, but I said, well, that sounds like a ton of fun, so yeah, I'll go do that. I went out for a few weeks with them and did till sampling. I just was blown away that I could make a career out of just hanging out in the forest looking at rocks. So you know even though I sort of grew up in an environment where mining was somewhat prevalent I didn't really know geology was a thing until I actually went did that and it opened up my eyes and yeah I haven't really looked back and I definitely have had a lot of cool experiences and found a lot of cool things and I wouldn't trade this career for anything. I think I really found my purpose in life, I guess, just at the age of 16.

3:00 And You've definitely made a career out of it. You've worked across BC, Saskatchewan, Ontario, the Yukon, and even in the US. Are there any projects or a moment early in your career that really shaped how you approach exploration today? I think it's always a culmination of things. It's always small influences. I think the thing that really triggered the way that I see geology and the way that I do it was my early work with, they were then known as 1st Point Minerals, they're now FBX Nickel. I was part of the team there that did the inaugural drill program at their Dakar project. I was exposed to a lot of really high-level geologists, including Ron Britton and Peter Bradshaw, and That project was led by Trevor Rabb, who now works as a partner at Equity.

3:54 Working with that team, they were somewhat old-school, I guess, in a lot of ways, but very efficient at exploration. That group was very innovative at the time as well. We were looking for a brand-new deposit type, so we had to make things up as we went along. We didn't even have the DTR Nickel thing at that point, so A lot of our exploration was visual. We did a lot of fly camping, drilling, early-stage stuff. That really set me on this path of working with early-stage companies and doing early-stage exploration.

4:29 I still work with some of these people that I've worked with back then. And I see them all the time and we chat. It's a really tight knit group. And, you know, one person in particular through my life that's really influenced me has been Peter Bradshaw, who's in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame now and a very prominent person. And, you know, He's always been incredibly innovative and kind, and we've always shared a lot of interest in things. I'm doing a few things with him still, and he's still incredibly active to this day. I think those people, and then obviously, throughout my career, there's been influences on all the drill programs I've worked on, working at the Kemes East project, working in the US, that really shaped the way that I approach these programs.

5:17 And then, and then, yeah, starting TriPoint and just working on all of the, all the projects across Canada and the U.S. That we have for the past almost 8 years now, you just see a lot of rocks, a lot of different methods and you sort of just consolidate that down into what works, what doesn't and what is really efficient. I want to get into that as an economic geologist, when you first walk onto a property, what are the signs that make you think there's something real here?

5:44 In other words, what separates a good target from a great one in your eyes? Yeah, so I think it starts before you set foot on the property. I'm an avid reader, I always have been. I read a lot of novels, but I also read a lot of assessment reports, technical reports, papers, constantly reading things. And so, you know, whenever a project crosses our desk, either it'll be a project that a client wants us to work on, or it'll be a project that we're looking for put into another company, or even just to something that, you know, I see a news release about, I'll do a bit of a deep dive and I'll read everything I can find. Usually before I set foot on a property, I've read every single assessment report ever written. And I'll skim through them.

6:31 It can be a lot of technical information. And then I go there with sort of an idea in my mind, but the challenge that we find with these old reports is interpretation can be hit or miss sometimes. And they may have missed something that, you know, they may have gone down a path with an idea in mind that wasn't necessarily correct. And so when I set foot on property, I'm always looking at, is this matching with the descriptions?

6:57 Is there something potential? But really the key things that I look for in a good project are not all just geology. A lot of it is geology. I look for something that could have potential size. I'm looking for areas where there might be enough structural fracturing for pore space for things to be in place. I'm looking for large alteration zones, something that has a lot of fluid in the system. And I'm looking for the grades don't have to be crazy high, but I actually look a lot more at trace geochemistry typically, depending on the deposit type, of course, and to see if something that sort of piques my interest that somebody may have missed. And then obviously looking for the obvious things such as high grade gold, copper, all the usual suspects. And then beyond that, I always look at infrastructure as well, Is it road accessible? Could it be road accessible? Where's the nearest power line?

7:50 Is there water around? Would it be easy to access water? You always have to start with the end in mind. And the end goal of all of the projects that I work on is to hopefully build them into mine. And so if there's ever going to be a point where it's like, OK, we can have a great project, but it's going to be very challenging to develop, that's worth thinking about. But ideally, you'll want to have, especially for an early stage project, As few hurdles in the future as you can, sort of project and think of. And so you need to have great geology, great location, etc. And so yeah, it comes down to that. But Again, I like to look for big things. I think having a big mind is easier to build than a small mind, often.

8:38 And looking for size and grade, essentially that's always gonna be king. Thank you. So you're touching a lot on how to read a project, but you wear a lot of hats or wore a lot of hats. Founder of TriPoint, VP Exploration at multiple companies and also a director of AMEBC. How does seeing the industry from all those angles change the way you run a program?

9:02 Yeah, so I think it comes down to. These projects are always multifaceted. You know, There's no mineral exploration project that's isolated where all we need is good geology. All we need is good infrastructure. It's a marrying of so many different facets. And so, you know, my experience of looking at all these projects and having all of these different perspectives on things, sort of why I do a lot of different things. So I kind of want to stay on top of all these changes that we are impacting us. You know, I like to stay heavily technical. I like to learn as much as I can about the technical side and stay on top of the latest in technologies and methods and things that we're utilizing and hopefully influence what we're studying and how we're studying it from an economic lens.

9:52 But I also, you know, my time with AME has really given me very good exposure to government and, you know, changes to regulation and influencing those regulation changes a little bit and fighting for the needs of the industry. I've done some work with the BC government as well and on the technical liaison committee for the BC Geological survey, so just trying to help them target the right areas for regional exploration and government-funded exploration.

10:24 I'm also on the advisory committee for engineers and geoscientists BC, so From the regulation side, practice guidelines and things like that, making sure that we have a clear path, make sure we're doing things properly as geologists, but also enough leniency that we can actually do our jobs effectively. Then TriPoint has obviously been something that's taken a significant amount of my time over the years. You know, we're just looking to do really good applied hands-on work throughout North America and continuing to really develop those skills and our procedures and really do good work. And then, yeah, my VP positions, obviously,

11:09 you know, it's sort of just a natural evolution. You kind of fall into that if you're a consultant working with all these companies. And Golden Excess is definitely one of those. Now, Golden Access got involved really early and I like the team and I like the project. So I really like to enjoy helping them sort of develop that in a more direct manner. Usually I'm sort of in the background, you know, of a lot of these companies quietly, making sure that they're exploring and they were trying to find and really develop their projects into the best they can be. But yeah, with Gold Nexus, I definitely sort of stepped out of that, the darkness, I guess, into the light, the limelight a little bit more, which is an exciting side of things. You know, I've done a bit of this before, but it's really cool to sort of see the side of things, particularly the marketing and being involved in an early stage sort of startup company.

12:03 It's been pretty cool to learn that. So I guess to somewhat answer your question as well, like I just really like to learn and I like to see new things and learn new things. So yeah, it definitely gives me some pretty good perspective on

12:17 what's possible and what's good in the province in terms of internal exploration. Let's dive into that a little bit more. Why Gold in Excess? What was it about the team or the ground that made you want to be part of this one? Yeah, so I mean, really, the easiest answer is I was asked to join. And I said, yeah, sure, why not? So really, it started, I was chatting with Barry Miller, who's our Executive Chairman. This was a couple of years ago. We went to an investment conference thing for another one of the companies that we're working on, Tinova Resources, which is a Tin-focused company. I've always really loved tin as a commodity, which is how I got involved with them.

13:04 We were chatting about potentially starting up a Gold-focused explorer. Barry had the name Golden Access in his mind, based on the band that we had some really good hits in the 90s and 80s. And so we started chatting about more and Barry had a few of these projects kicking around that he was working on. And so I flipped through, I did what I always do. You know, I read through all of the assessment reports for the projects that he had And the fish pot just sort of stuck out to me immediately.

13:35 So, you know, when I'm getting involved with things, I'm always sort of led by the rocks first. You know, it's if a team comes to me, that's really great. You know, that's fine. But, you know, show me your rocks first and I'll tell you if I want to be directly involved. So this one, it was a bit of a challenge because it's a fairly challenging place to explore in terms of overburden, but I do really love the Prince George region inherently. I grew up in Prince George. The people there are absolutely fantastic, really solid folks. It's a great place to explore. A lot of industry is there. When I saw the location, and I also saw that it was near Blackwater and that it had potentially Blackwater sort of similarities. It piqued my interest for sure.

14:23 You know, and then beyond the geology, of course, it's the team that we were able to put together over the past few years, you know, hats off to Barry. You've brought in a lot of these names and really high profile people who've had success in the past. Our board of directors is very skilled. We've got a great CEO in Nick Michael, very technical guy. I think this is the right team to take something from such an early stage and through something to something more. And so, you know, that sort of re-enforced my decision that, you know, being a part of this is a good thing from my side of things. And then of course, since then we've done a lot of work on the project and just really moved it forward in a logical manner, I like to think, and to really try and have the best success we can early on, because, yeah, if you can get drill success right out of the gate, it definitely helps things smooth, smooth the sails a bit.

15:25 So yeah, so yeah, it's just been a really fun, a really fun adventure so far and I've been pretty excited to be involved. Now Fish Pot is your flagship and you've drawn comparisons to Blackwater-style systems. For someone new to the story, what makes that comparison compelling and what would you personally need to see in the ground to feel like it's playing out? Yeah, so I think the most obvious thing is location. It's about 65km from the Blackwater mine itself. It's hosted within the same surfs to Kenya terrain. You have Hazleton basement rocks, you have Eocene cap rocks or Utsa Lake stuff. And then you potentially, we're exploring this aspect of things that we actually have Casulka group volcanics or not in between.

16:19 I made a fairly geologically compelling story from a regional context. Then just going to the project, sampling, I was there in November 2024, did a site visit there and That's really when I started to leave the story. We're seeing similar alteration styles. We're seeing Silica flooding, we're seeing Cerracite, Kaolinite, these classic sort of things. I always tell people, Fishpot is a great standalone project. It might not be exactly the same as Blackwater. I mean, no 2 deposits are the same, identical. There's always going to be some uniqueness, but as a standalone project, it's very compelling in and of itself. It looks very epithermal, like the alteration style is very epithermal. The mineralisation is very epithermal, which is similar to what Blackwater is, whether or not it's a higher level epithermal system or exactly the same as Blackwater. Only time will really tell.

17:17 We've got very similar mineralogy, very similar element grades and stuff like Gold, Silver, Copper. We're seeing some arsenic and antimony anomalies, pathfinders, bismuth. It's ticking all these boxes of similarities. And of course, yeah, time will tell. As soon as we drill and get a lot of rock, we'll actually be able to hopefully make some closer comparisons to it. But at the current time, it makes a very compelling target and definitely needs a drill hole into it. And it is worthy of 1 in my opinion. Let's really highlight that for a second here. You've secured the drill permit and completed the 3D IP survey ahead of a maiden program of up to 2,000 meters.

18:04 As the person interpreting that data, what are you most curious to test with the first holes? Yeah, so I mean, for me, it's always about alteration. And I've talked about this a lot, I feel like, especially in regards to this property. And so, we've got all of this data that we have and we've been building up the story and we've been building up our theories and exploration theories. And so, we started and every project sort of starts the same way in my mind. I mean, you start regional and you narrow the field down targets, right? And so we've got historic soils there that we looked at. We've got historic rocks. We went and collected more rocks And we did shortwave infrared on them and traced geochem.

18:50 And so that's where we really started to build this alteration story. And then, of course, we did our magnetics, which show magnetic lows and highs in areas that look quite compelling. And then now with this 3D IP, we're seeing chargeability and resistivity anomalies as well. So all of those are overlapping. And so it's really going to be those areas that we're going to target is going to be because we have good surface data. We don't have good data below the surface. There's only been 2 drill holes there. They were short. They were actually looking to be in between 2 systems. It was an interesting target. But of course, they just drilled off what they saw on surface. And so, yeah, those first drill holes are really going to be excited to see what the geochemistry is doing. I always target alteration itself because when you have these types of deposits come in, the deposit itself doesn't necessarily have to be very big and it can be easy to miss it. So if you're trying to hit something, and you have to think about the properties, 5,000 hectares, and you have a drill hole this big, it's pretty tough to, you really have to hit it really directly to plug into the deposit. And you saw that at Blackwater, like I forget what number of drill hole it took them to actually hit that deposit.

20:08 But for me, I look at the bigger target. The bigger target is always gonna be alteration because when these fluids come in, they're gonna alter the rock around it. It's going to impact. It's going to change it. It's not going to remain unscathed because you have all this heat and all this fluid. So really, we're targeting that alteration halo. And if we plug into that and see something of favorable alteration, we know we're on the right track towards the source, which is where our mineralization is going to be. And, you know, I think sort of an analogy is like having like a blueberry muffin, you know. So if you cut open a blueberry muffin, you have blueberries in there, but around the blueberry, there's going to be this big blue rim. And that rim is sort of our alteration. And that rim is bigger than the actual blueberry. So if you dig a drill hole into your blueberry muffin and you hit blue, you know, hey, we're near a blueberry.

20:59 We better start targeting around to try and find out where that blueberry is, if you're looking for blueberries. That's a good analogy. I thought about that the past couple of days. I want to take a moment here to remind people that have joined the call live, we are taking questions so if you have any, please feel free to submit them. There is 1 in the chat, so I'm just going to go ahead and ask it right now, Darcy, for you. You're in the same region as Blackwater Mine. You noted there's potential for similar geology which could make Fishpot a major discovery opportunity, given Artemis announced tripling production at Blackwater and invest in $1.6B. What does that mean for gold in excess in Fishpot? Would Fishpot be a good takeover target? It's too early to say at this point.

21:46 It depends what the grades are and if it's economic. But I think that it would obviously make sense. I like regions where you have operating mines, where you have mills as well. The question of course comes down to would you want to truck it 60km? Is that going to impact your economics? Would you have a separate mill or whatnot? I can't speak for Artemis at all in that. But if it was me, obviously, you're looking at the region. If you're in an area that you're already operating, you're going to be looking at potential projects within your sphere of influence, where you have these connections with the locals. And so that would obviously be a future that we would embrace. But again, I mean, we've got to drill it first and we've got to come up with a resource.

22:36 You don't want to give it away. Are there other commodities outside of Gold at Fishpond? That's a really good question. We are targeting the epithermal. We've got Gold and Silver and a bit of Copper in the system that we see on surface. We're targeting something that's a similar grade, so a low-grade bulk tonnage type target in terms of the epithermal style deposit. But as with any of these systems, you don't want to lead with, we're hunting for porphyry because I think there's a lot of value in an epithermal system itself. But of course, we're not going to ignore the fact that these sort of intermediate sulfidation-style deposits can be connected to the Copper porphyry systems.

23:33 While we're out there drilling, we're going to be targeting 2 things. Obviously, the epithermal deposit nearer to surface, but we're also going to be targeting to see if we're seeing any alteration that can be related to porphyry systems. We're going to be keeping a tight eye on our Copper and Gold. If we're seeing anything that's potentially favourable, we might shift some things around and target a bit deeper. Basically, we're looking for Copper, Gold or Gold, Silver, but we definitely have our eye open for Copper and anything else of economic value. If you can find anything, it all gets credits at the smelter. We're not ignoring anything. There's also some low-level antimony in the region as well. I'm not saying it's economic in any sense, but we're keeping an eye out for that as well.

24:25 Great. Now you've also brought in some newer technology at Fishpot, specifically virtual drill, which is a remote sensing work alongside conventional geophysics. How do you think about blending emerging tools with the tried and true? And where does the science and art of geology begin? Yeah, no, for sure. So, you know, I've always been a champion of new technology, I like to think. But of course, it has to be supported by traditional methods. It's got to be the dessert, it can't be the meat and potatoes of the actual exploration. So really what we're doing is we're developing the project in somewhat of a traditional method, right, going from soils to rocks to try to intrude geophysics to drilling.

25:15 But that doesn't mean we can't try and refine our targets, utilizing newer technologies and test these technologies out as well. You know, I find that the mineral exploration industry is open to new ideas, as long as it's not replacing what we need to do to move forward, and as long as it's supportive of what we're trying to achieve. And so that's sort of where it kind of fits in. So right now we've got all of our Geochem, we've got our MagInversion, our Magnetics, We've got our IP that's being processed right now. So we'll have those. And then with this virtual drill system, which is a satellite-based method, we're going to take that and we're running it somewhat blind. It's a little bit of a test to see if it'll pick up the same areas of interest that a traditional geophysics and geology coupling will create, and we'll see if it reinforces those. And if it can identify the known, or known, But if it can identify other things outside of that, then we'll utilize that potentially to target some sort of quote unquote wildcat holes. But at the end of the day, it has to be supported by the drilling, as with everything. Any type of geophysics, you have to put a hole into it to figure it out.

26:32 That's really where it slots in. I like to think of it somewhat as geophysics. Once we put the drill on it, we call it the truth machine and we'll find out if these things are true or not and then what it picked up. It is somewhat of a proprietary method. We're excited to get those results to see what it says and to see if it matches up and then use that. Because it is a remote sensing system, we can utilise that in other parts of the property as well, if it does work. It's a first-pass review to really narrow that field down. Let our geologists go in and say, hey, there's something here. Our geologists go there and look at it so that we're not just feeding around the bush, looking through the weeds, trying to find rocks. We can actually focus ourselves a bit better and be a bit more efficient in the field.

27:28 Over at Millar in the Golden Triangle, The field team just wrapped up work at the White Linears area. What did they come back with that has your attention and how does running a Golden Triangle property differ from Fishpond? We had the team up there a couple of weeks ago. It's our latest news release that was put out last week about there's some nice photos in there if you want to take a look at them. And really it's an interesting target, up until recently it was covered by glaciers. It's sort of a long trend and near the Quetzal Valley and Homestead Bridge, so Contago ground. And then, so it's sort of in between Stewart and those projects. So We're really looking at it for that style of mineralization.

28:17 The team went out and we discovered a bunch of really interesting structural features. They collected several rock samples of these light white linears. There's a mixture of quartz veining within these fractures and sort of these, or felsic, appellate looking dike formations. And so really what I'm looking for there is structural controls and anything that could point us in the direction of potential, you know, either scarn style mineralization or VMS or vein hosted things. It's still very early days. We're waiting for the assay results from that. And that's going to tell us a lot of information about potential trace geochemistry of the similarities or non-similarities of nearby targets.

29:07 But it's just been really cool to have a team actually go out there and do some work. It's sort of our golden, this is inaugural program there. The previous operator had done a little bit of work. And then, so yeah, so we'll get that back. Obviously the Golden Triangle is a tricky place to explore because it's incredibly rugged and they've got relatively short seasons there. So we had 0.5 decent weather window we were able to get in. September can be hit or miss up there because of low cloud cover. Then October or November, you start getting winter back again. That'll probably be the only time we'll be up there this year. We're going to do a lot of desktop studies and review of the rocks and results that we have. And then we'll be back up there next spring.

29:53 We're going to bring in high ropes, geologists and stuff so we can sample along the contacts and do a lot more work there next year. Great, Darcy, thank you for doing this call. I think it's important for people to understand the people behind the team. I do have one last question here, but treat it as closing remarks. For people that joined in, there will be a meeting request button when we close off here, so look out for that if you'd like to meet with the team. Also note that the replay will be available shortly after we conclude. But to wrap things up, Darcy, looking 12 to 18 months out, What does a great stretch look like for Gold in Excess and what are the milestones you'd point investors to as the ones that really matter?

30:39 Yes. We're well on our way towards our inaugural drill program. That's going to be happening in October. We're collecting our last bits of data that are going to really influence our drill plan. We already have a drill plan laid out, but we're tweaking it a little bit. In the next couple of weeks, we'll be getting our induced polarization results, our finalized results back. That's really the last piece of that. Then we'll be getting the virtual drill data as well prior to drilling. Those are the last pieces of data to really lock things in. Expect those news releases to come out. I've seen some of the preliminary data and it looks really cool. Get in now, obviously, before we start drilling.

31:27 Once we start drilling, it's going to be a really exciting time. We're really going to see what's in the subsurface and we're going to have those results coming out. And then, depending on what we find, the sky's the limit. There's no reason we can drill in the winter if we wanted to. Spring is fairly early. It's quite low-lying, road accessible. There's a lot of potential for ongoing exploration there if we hit success. And yeah and then we'll just keep on progressing it as we can And hopefully we'll find something of really good economic interest and find what's there. If it is there, we will definitely find it. Great. We look forward to future updates once the results start flooding in. But thank you so much, Darcy, for taking the time out of your day.

32:16 And until next time. Yeah, thanks, Kyle. It's been a pleasure, as always. No problem. Thank you. Thanks everyone for joining. Take care. Bye now.