Fireweed Zinc: New Exploration Targets in an Exciting Zinc District

0:13 Hi, my name is Bianca Bichola. I'm the CEO of 6 and welcome to the fireweeds Inc live investor summit. I'd like to start today by introducing our presenters, Brandon McDonald CEO and Jack Milton chief geologist to kick things off random will be telling the company story, and then jack will talk about the exploration plan. Finally, we'll be accepting investor questions. We're gonna focus today on exploration of the property, which is gonna be handled by Dr. Jack Milton, our chief geologist. But I'm gonna kick us off with an introduction to the project, a discussion of the project economics, and a little bit about the 2018 PEA and how we see things improving since then. A necessary prerequisite to just remind everyone that I'm making forward-looking statements.

1:04 Jack's mostly talking about things that happened 400 million years ago. I'm going to be talking a little bit about things that might be happening in the future. So, you know, to kind of encapsulate perhaps the thesis here, you know, why do you want to invest in zinc projects? Why would you look at fireweed? You know, I want to touch on a little bit on the zinc market without holding anyone's hand necessarily there, just kind of an overview. What the impact of COVID might be, a little bit about what the future projects are and what could fill the demand supply gap there, talk about our project in particular, how it sits within the world and what the resource looks like compared to peer projects. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about how we can improve the project within the context of Tom and Jason.

2:00 I am however going to turn it over to Jack to discuss end zone boundary zone and the broader property exploration potential. So without dwelling on this, for those who don't know, zinc is dominantly used for galvanization, then alloys, brass, bronze, chemicals, fertilizer, etc. Broadly speaking, you know, galvanization used in automobiles and infrastructure. I've consistently told people that if you're an infrastructure bull, you know, if you think that the aging US infrastructure needs refreshing and that very low interest rates and long-dated bonds might be a great way for them to do that, as Trump has mentioned, then you're fundamentally a zinc bull. You know, a massive investment in infrastructure is going to mean a massive demand for zinc.

2:54 You know, as well, automobiles, continued strong automobile demand, the transition from internal combustion engine to EVs is going to mean more new vehicles, is going to mean more galvanization. So we see that as pretty bullish for zinc as well. Renewable energy, you know, everything from, You know, the high voltage power towers, line towers, the steel that's used for solar panel arrays, the wind turbines themselves, you know, their towers are all very heavily, you know, steel and galvanization. So it's something that we see, you know, the electronic, or I should say the renewable revolution also critical to zinc demand. But what's interesting, you know, in terms of when you talk about infrastructure demand or infrastructure spending is that this is likely to be the key, the largest component of stimulus that comes out of the COVID-19 aftermath.

3:54 The USA has talked about a $2.5 trillion in stimulus. A lot of that intended to refresh aging infrastructure, using long-dated bonds. I mean, how long-dated bonds can they sell? But nonetheless, using long-dated bonds at near 0 interest rates, you know, they see as a great way to refresh their infrastructure. And that's critical to zinc demand. And, you know, if the US is talking 2.5 trillion and certainly China is going to be approaching 2 trillion as well, that could mean that the global stimulus between US, China, you know, EU, etc. Could easily exceed, you know, and the rest of the countries could easily exceed 10 trillion aggregate total stimulus post COVID-19. So as that gets spent over the coming decade, that means a lot for the change in zinc demand.

4:47 And then the question, you know, if you're thinking about zinc demand, you're thinking, well where does the supply come from? The amount of mine supply that came out of China between early 2000s and up to about 2015-14 really increased rapidly and then leveled off and even dropped a bit at times. But the interesting thing about China is there's not a single zinc mine in China that would be considered a large-scale zinc mine. They are working on 1 but the rest is really medium-scale, small-scale and private mines, you know, down to sort of 2 guys in a backhoe, you know, mining the top level of a small scale deposit. So a lot of these Chinese mines are unpermitted. They will not stand up to regulatory scrutiny, they are polluting, China has been cracking down on them. So, you know, our view is that, and this is not uniquely our view, is that China is going to not only struggle to increase their supply in response to increased demand, they're going to absolutely struggle to even maintain their existing supply.

5:58 You simply can't, these small mines, it's not a matter of applying capital to make them big mines. They are short, ephemeral operations. And I think that as the low-hanging fruit is plucked there, China's really going to struggle to keep that sort of 6 million tons almost of mine supply, which is 6 of the 13 million tons mine supply aggregate in the total world. They're going to really struggle to maintain that. So there's not really 1 base metal in the world that is so reliant on 1 producer. So we see a real threat to this global supply for zinc if China cracks down on environment and if these mines start shutting down.

6:45 So with that in mind, why Fireweed? I think the initial reason would be that we built this vehicle, the company from the ground up in 2016, 2017, around this asset. This was the asset we wanted. This was the metal we wanted. You know, the trade wars disrupted the thesis a bit in 2018 as Trump kicked off trade wars with China and the zinc price softened quite a bit. But the long-term thesis is still there. We still think that zinc is a critical metal. We think that the pipeline for advanced and large scale projects is really limited. The cupboard is bare, so to speak. So we've managed to bring in some pretty good investors here. Resource Capital Funds has invested quite a bit of money of us, a sophisticated private equity fund out of Colorado.

7:36 Tech and Hudbay both vended part of the property, although Tech followed that on with a $2 million investment in the property in 2019. So there's some sophisticated and intelligent money that's looked at this and as a believer. So the Middle of the Path project itself, as I'm sure most of you know, located in eastern Yukon near the NWT border. The resource we did in 2018, this was just on Tom and Jason, 2 of the 4 known zones of mineralization in the project. 11.2 million tons indicated, 39 and 500,000 tons inferred at around 10% equivalent average. This was significantly larger than what Hudbay thought they had sold to us. You know, we had some success in step out drilling. We had some success in reinterpreting the old data and fixing the density values.

8:25 But you know, the fundamental thing is we don't think this is the, you know, nearly the end of the scale in Tom and Jason, let alone the broader property. So where does that put Tom and Jason or Macmillan Pass as a resource within a global context? At about 4.5 million tons of contained metal. That's one of the top 40 in terms of contained metal in the world. Certainly one of the largest undeveloped, one of the largest undeveloped, if not the largest undeveloped held by a junior. So we see a clear eye to that sort of 6 million ton contained metal. Certainly alone within Tom and Jason and when, you know, bringing in the rest of the project, you know, shooting way past that line. And when you're kind of past that 6 million ton contained markets, what tech considers to be a giant, you know, That's the point at which your project is considered a giant.

9:17 And you look amongst the giants that are on the other side, that 6 million ton contained metal ISO line there. And with very few exceptions, they're all on production or development. So you think about the size of the property, 540 square kilometers. So we originally acquired about 50, 50, 60 square kilometers off Hyde Bay. That was the Tom and Jason deposits. We subsequently did deals with Newmont Tech and 3 other juniors to acquire the rest of the ground. Zones that are not represented in the resource include the end zone, which we had great drilling in 2018, and also includes the boundary zone, which Jack will touch on a little bit later. But this is a really significant

10:03 scale of a project. You know, it's very easy to say, well, look, we think we have a district, but there's multiple things that are essential to saying you have a district scale project. One is scale. 2 is a repeatable thesis for finding deposits, you know, so we know there's 4 there now and we think there's potential for more. And to give you some context for how big 540 square kilometers is, here's the Macmillan Pass project in yellow overlaying on Vancouver, British Columbia. So those familiar with Vancouver geography would see that in this map, Tom's around Queens Park in New West, Jason somewhere in South Burnaby, End zone would be near Central Park in Burnaby and boundary zone would be around Kitts Beach or Jericho perhaps.

10:56 So this is like really well you know that in a city is you know half an hour 35 minutes worth of driving. I ride my bike from near Burnaby Lake to downtown to get into work, and that takes me about 45 minutes, and that wouldn't even get you halfway across the property. So this is a really large project, and we see this is both a challenge and opportunity in terms of the amount of space that we have to explore and we'll, you know, Jack will touch on what we're doing to tackle that project and how we use both data and and theory to generate targets. So 2018, we also did a PEA. You know, a PEA is a snapshot at a point in time. What does the project, you know, if that was it look like at that point in time, you know, It's loose, but we thought this was a pretty good look at what Tom and Jason, based on the drilling that had been done to that point, would look like as a mine. And the key things we wanted to see in a PEA was a manageable CapEx, long multi-cycle mine life, healthy AfriTex NPV, healthy AfriTex IRR, and we sort of hit all those points. And I think for us, the critical thing was, don't get too aggressive with our assumptions.

12:11 You know, every junior mining company who puts out an economic study is going to say, oh, we were conservative. We really honestly do believe we were. And we think that's reflected in things that have happened recently. When we're looking at things like, for example, pit sizing, we made the assumption that 100% of our waste rock was going to be acid generating, which is the most amount of your waste rock that can be acid generating. So that restricted our pit size. We think now that it's not going to be that and that could change the open pit life, you know, mine life and change the allocation of sustaining capital and the payback period. So we see an opportunity to tweak this.

12:57 We think the mine plan underground was not that aggressive. We think we can tweak that. So you know, for us it was with a PEA put forward a credible but basic mind plan. Don't get too cute in a PEA. Typically I find that that economic studies, these early economic studies that are getting too detailed tend to need that detail or not details that they're looking for. When they're getting too cute, they're trying to get too creative, suggest there might be an issue with the project. You know, we felt that the capital was achievable for a junior mining company. We've seen independent juniors raise this level of capital for building mines, including in Yukon, Victoria Gold. But the critical thing for us was, you know, you see in this pie chart here, the offsite infrastructure, 78 million direct costs, and then the associated indirect and EPCM and owner's costs, etc. Bring offsite infrastructure to around 104 million. That was the improvement of the Cannell Road, which goes from the community of Ross River to our project site.

14:02 But we know we've recently had an announcement during PDAC from the Yukon government, they're putting 71 million into the improvement of the Camel Road and the Robert Campbell Highway. So that's an immediate reduction in the capital required for the project to be built. And that, you know, we'd always suspected that that was going to happen, and we felt that, and we still feel that the rest of the capital for that road improvement is also going to be handled by the government, but it felt disingenuous to just assume that the government shows up and improves the road in time. So we felt the most conservative thing to do was to put the burden of that road improvement on the project and on the company for the purpose of the PEA.

14:48 You know, in terms of operating costs, this is probably going to be, middle of the road in terms of, mines out there, despite the remote location, you know, it is a serious haul of about 800 kilometers to get the concentrate from the mine site to the port of Skagway and then out to Asia. But because of the high grade and large size and the converse of scale, it still manages to be compatible on both a by-product and co-product basis in terms of cash cost and adjusted cash cost in terms of your all-in sustaining cost although you have to be careful discussing all-in sustaining costs particularly with base metals because there's not really a hard definition of them so every person with a study tends to calculate it a little bit different.

15:38 But you know, one of the key things for us as well was making sure we had a good handle on metallurgy, it tends to be one of the things that A lot of juniors leave last and then catches them by surprise at the end. You know, they use benchmarks from similar deposits in the region or something like that. You know, we did quite a bit of metallurgy on Tom and Jason, I would say, well beyond a PEA level for the PEA. And what was important for us is 1, we saw very manageable processing consistent with set textile deposits elsewhere in the world. But importantly, it produced a very attractive concentrate high grade low in iron, very minimal elements that you're kind of tracking, mercury and silica kind of being at the fringe of penalty level, but not so much that you're going to have issues marketing into certain jurisdictions or something like that. The feedback we've had from trading companies and smelters is that they would consider this desirable and clean concentrate.

16:40 So now as I mentioned, you know, so with that 2018 snapshot, how do we make it better? I think you start looking at detailed optimization. You think about the mine plan, you think about that pit size that I mentioned. How do I increase the pit size? How do I manage the extra strip ratio? What's the maximum pit size I can get? I'd like to see a pit life such that we don't have to fund underground development until the mine has been bought and paid for and we think we can achieve that at Tom and Jason. Now you know we want to do some more metallurgy, we want to look at geometallurgical demining, understanding how 1 deposit may be different from another, how do we campaign, how do different metals recoveries and change and that influences payables, net payables as you're in different parts of the project.

17:30 But then also how do you keep your capex from ballooning? How do you keep that out of control? As I mentioned, in March, the Yukon government announced 71 million to help fund the Robert Campbell and Camel Road improvements. So this is an immediate improvement for us. And, you know, this was an agreement with the local First Nations and to us you know this is this shows that the government and the First Nations are willing to cooperate on a funding package for improvements for a project like ours. You know it's not an endorsement of the project by those 2, but it's certainly it is not a condemnation. It's the opposite of a condemnation, right? It shows they have an interest in seeing it advanced further. In terms of open pit life now at Tom, you know, we have 3 zones before in the 2018 resource, we identified the Tom West zone, the Tom East zone and the Tom Southwest zone.

18:30 What we drilled in last year was the Tom North Zone, which is a long strike from Tom West and it's a bit of a fault offset. Hit pretty good grades there, but the critical thing was open pittable. So this is an extension of the open pit life. So most of the pit life from Tom and Jason is the top of the Tom West zone. So being able to extend that pit over towards the Tom North zone, as you see in this long section to the right of the slide, that's going to be critical to building the open pit life. Maybe also taking the pit a little bit further down in terms of depth. And then at Tom East, you know Tom East about 2.5 million tons, 25% ish Zinc equivalent there.

19:17 That's a very high grade and meaningful zone not large, but we did hit a step out there in 2018 that was a pretty stunning step out. So 16.4 meters intersected. That's a you know, true width there We're unsure about sort of 4 to 10 meters, but absolutely stellar grades, 21% zinc, 13.5% lead and 240 grams silver. So as you add extra tons at those sort of grades, that is incredibly, incredibly high margin material and makes a huge difference to economics. And then at Jason, one of the things that we've been interested in doing kind of since inception of the company is exploring not just the fault offset of Jason South, what we consider lower Jason South, But looking at Jason Main, which you see on the right, and Jason South on the left, and how do those 2 connect? We interpret them as opposite sides of a sink line, and we think they're likely connected at depth. And we think that there's a pretty good chance that the Galena in particular has entered pressure solution and remobilized and perhaps exists at the keel of that fold.

20:25 So the not only about the additional tonnage potential at the bottom end of that fold but it might also be a grade story. We do see very high grades at the bottom of folds at Tom East And we think we might hopefully see something like that here, but that is a deep hole and we're looking at potential You know directional drilling or similar to explore that at a future date.

20:51 Boundary zone, this is the one we had last year. Jack's going to go into a lot of detail here, but you know this these were pretty incredible holes. You know 230 meters of 4.1 percent zinc from surface in 1,230 meters of 3.4 percent zinc from surface in the other. These are both true thickness, those intersections. You know and then some super high grade Spots within that as we are, you know, right on the fluid conduits 6.5 meters of 42% zinc. So you know boundary zone previously interpreted as low grade is you know is a fair interpretation on average but I think excludes the potential of these unique and distinct high grade zones.

21:38 So now to talk on that and the broader part of the broader exploration on the project. I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Jack Milton, FireWeed's Chief Geologist. Thank you, Brandon.

22:00 I'm also going to be making a few forward-looking statements about the exploration potential. And Bram, I'm kind of focused on what we know at Tom and Jason and these, you know, the large zone that we have at boundary zone as well. But I'm gonna focus on what we have on the rest of the property and what new targets we have come up with. But first, there's a little primer on these kinds of deposits and why are they good targets. Well, these are the type of deposit formerly known as SEDEX, and we refer to them as sharehosted zinc deposits. They're typically large, continuous, high-grade, stratiform deposits, which make some good targets. And there's 2 sort of competing models for how they form.

22:47 And without diving into an academic debate about this, we're going to focus on what is different in terms of how we explore for them and what this means for the district. So the classic model which was proposed in the 80s as the SED-X model in the Solemn Basin, where the hydrothermal fluids come up these faults and they exhale into seawater where the sulfides precipitate. This results in a very narrow search space for where you may expect these deposits to form. They form at a certain position within the stratigraphy, and that's where you look for them. Whereas in the replacement model, this is where these same fluids come up the faults, slightly different fluids, come up these faults, and they replace baryte in the subsurface.

23:33 So that means that you don't have to be at that stratigraphic level when you're looking for them, and they could potentially form in much older host rocks. So it really widens the search space for zinc. So what makes a good target? So the key things that are similar between those 2 models is the structure. And structure is really key in exploration. The map that you see is of the property, the topography, and a few key faults are laid on top of that. And you see there's 2 dominant orientations. There's a northwest, southeast, and the northeast, southwest faults, and they form these orthogonal arrays. And these are early-form faults. They form the bounding faults of the basins, and they were the likely conduits for mineralizing fluids. As you can see in this diagram to the right, particularly at the intersection between these 2 fault sets is where you see focusing of fluid flow, and these are the best places to go out and look for shell-hosted zinc deposits. So you can see Jason, end zone, boundary zone, they're all located not only near faults but at the intersection between these 2 orthogonal fault systems.

24:42 And what else makes a good target? Well, for direct detection mineralization, We typically look at soil geochemistry, often lead, sometimes zinc, although zinc is a bit more mobile, and gravity, ground gravity, is a good geophysical prospecting tool for these systems. So our 2020 targets that we are going to take a look at, shown on this map, I'm gonna go through them one by one, starting with the 240 mile target in the east and work our way down through the fertile corridor towards boundary zone. So we'll start with the 240 mile target. And this target was named because it's on mile 240 of the Canal Highway, which runs down the center of the property.

25:27 And it's located in a good address, if you like, right between Tom and Jason deposits.

25:36 So, what we're gonna look at is a series of different geophysical images, because this target is located in an area where there's no outcrop, so we have to rely on the geophysics to infer things about the geology to generate targets in this area. So this is a 50 meter depth slice through a conductivity model that we derived from flying VTEM survey in 2017.

25:58 So the hot colors show very conductive rocks and what whereas this EM method is not particularly good in these systems for direct detection and mineralization, what it's really good at is seeing stratigraphy and from that you can get structures such as these linear features that you see in these northeast and southwest orientations. And we are inferring these to be parts of these early formed sin sedimentary faults that are prospective for zinc. So the targeted area is within these really conductive package of rocks. And from that, we just overlay cartoon geology here, kind of simplified, and without getting bogged down in the stratigraphy.

26:43 The key thing to realize is that it's in what we call the lower four-leg member. And this member hosts the Tom deposit. And so when you have, and it goes just above the Tom deposit. So when you're in areas of these rocks, you know that that sequence that hosts the Tom deposit is not too far in the subsurface. And we can map these changes using the E-app. This is a ground gravity map, and we did a ground gravity survey in 2018 and 2019, and these are some of the results from that. We do some standard things, removing regional low frequency trends and emphasizing some of the higher frequency trends with a high pass filter. And at the Jason deposit, which is in the west here on that image, and the Tom deposits, you see good gravity highs associated with the dense parts of the deposits.

27:36 And there's a few other highs in this image, but most of those are related to terrain effects, where you have rapid changes in the topography that has not been properly modeled out.

27:45 But the 240-mile target is not related to terrain, and it's not related to changes in thickness of the overburden, which we know from detailed spatial geological mapping and from passive seismic surveys. We know the overburden is uniform thickness, And sometimes in gravity surveys, this can cause a problem and that you generate false positives or false lows as well. But we know this to be not the case. It's between about 1 and 7 meters thick in this area, which means that the signal we're seeing from the gravity must be from a density difference in the bedrock. So when we look at all this put together, we see geology map, since elementary faults, the 240 mile target sitting right next to one of those. And now we're gonna look at cross section AB.

28:34 So we see that fault again, and this is just a schematic and conceptual representation of what we think the 240 mile target may look like in the subsurface. So we're in the right host rocks, and at that interval in the stratigraphy where the TOM deposit occurs, just a couple of kilometers to the east, we see what we think the 240-mile target may look like. We've schematically shown that gravity response, but it's important to note that the gravity can only see down about 200 meters. So the pink dashed line shows the depth limit of investigation for ground gravity surveys. And we know this because we did some forward modeling of the wireframes from Tom. And we, the forward modeling is where you take a body, a known body mineralization, and you predict what kind of geophysical signal would come from that. And we did some experiments where we then covered that by certain thicknesses of barren bedrock to see where we'd no longer see a signal coming from top. And we know that's depth to be about 200 meters, give or take.

29:41 So if this gravity height does represent buried mineralization, then it likely occurs within 200 meters of surface. And there's also no geochemical expression of this deposit on surface, which means that if it's there, it does not crop out or it does not free air or break the surface at any point. And this deposit kind of, or this target rather, ticks all the boxes of what we would look for in one of these kind of systems. And it's also a kind of target that may have been overlooked in the past because the developments in processing gravity data were just not there at the time where these deposits were last explored in the 80s and 90s and it's buried and buried deposits are typically very difficult to look for.

30:32 So we'll move on to our round mountain target. So we'll hop from 240 miles to the other side adjacent, just 900 meters west of adjacent to round mountain.

30:44 And This is a map showing soil geochemistry. So it's a lead in soil anomaly at Round Mountain. That's coincident with the geophysical anomaly as well. So the dashed outline shows a gravity high. And that's an 1,800-meter-long linear gravity high. There's no drilling in this area whatsoever. So it's never been tested, it's not exposed in outcrop. And we'll just take a look at that cross section AB in the dashed white line. And that shows the geology. So the red blob you see, lead in soil anomaly and gravity high, that is the Round Mountain target. It's occurring as this lead anomaly is being mechanically dispersed down slope. But the origin of that, the source, is at its uphill end, and that is right near the contact between the road river group and the rocks above, which are the River Lake member and McMillan Pass member, which are parts of the Ur group. But the important thing is that this is the same stratigraphic interval that hosts the boundary zone deposit.

31:48 So what has previously not been thought of as perspective because of the changes in the way we think about these systems, we see an opportunity there of exploring in these other areas where people have perhaps not looked in the past. And that's important in a district that is quite mature with exploration and people have been exploring here for almost 70 years or probably more. And how do we advance these targets? Well, initially, that would be from doing some detailed geological mapping of the stratigraphy around them to confirm some of these inferences that we've made from the geophysics, and to back that up with a little geochemical portable XRF mapping of the mudstones.

32:35 And we can go further in doing refined terrain corrections because we now have the LIDAR data that we flew last year. So we have a very detailed elevation topographic model of the topography of the property. And this should get rid of some of those topographic effects that we see and give us more confidence in anomalies that remain. And we can do some more sophisticated inversion of the gravity data to give us more detailed sort of a subsurface density model. And we may be able to start pulling out things like target geometries and sizes and that kind of thing. But the ultimate test will be drilling these targets.

33:15 So now we're gonna hop down the first hour corridor another 4 kilometers northwest along the Hesfalt. And the Hesfalt is the major structure that connects Jason to End Zone to Boundary Zone. And we think that it originated as one of these since sedimentary fluid conduits.

33:35 So End Zone was discovered in the early 80s, but we drilled it again in 2018 and outlined about 400 meter strike length of high grade lead rich, also silver rich mineralization that's not included in our current mineral resource. And when we see lead-rich mineralization, silver-rich mineralization, and also a red to red-brown color in the sphalerite, then we associate that with feeder-type mineralization. So Enzone appears to be a feeder, but it's not clear what it is feeding in that area. And the geochemistry, soil geochemistry in that area suggests that there may be other zones present at surface. So this is a drone shot taken from Enzone looking back towards Jason.

34:23 Enzone is the, or the known extent of Enzone I should say, is the red outline projected to surface. You can see trenches across that. But the target here for a new target is from this lead soil anomaly that you can see in the blue polygon. And typically, those soil anomalies will be dispersed down ice and downhill mechanically. But what we see here is a lead anomaly that is uphill and up ice of the known extent of end zone, which suggests that there could be another zone nearby at surface. You can see the outlines of where they've trenched in the past in this photo. It looks like they've just missed what we would interpret to be the source area based on our knowledge now about the ice flow and dispersion of these anomalies.

35:15 Of these anomalies. Looking at that in map form, so the camera icon shows where we were just looking at that drone shot towards the southeast at the known extent of end zone and the intense part of the lead anomaly. But that lead anomaly extends several kilometers down ice from end zone. And, you know, significant size dispersion plume. And the bigger dispersion plume, then the bigger the source. So there could potentially be parallel zones or the zone of whatever Enzone is feeding located at surface right next to Enzone.

35:57 And looking at this in cross-section form, we see the mass in the semi-acid sulfides at end zone itself where we've drilled it and previous operators have and there's no way that that lead soil anomaly is being sourced from the zone that we can see. It's uphill of that.

36:15 So now we're going to jump over to boundary zone. Brandon mentioned the grades, 230 meters of between 3.4% and 4.1% zinc from surface. And it's a completely different beast to what Tom and Jason are. Tom and Jason are laminated, barite, sphalerite galena deposits, a stratiform.

36:39 Boundary zone looks more like this. It's much coarser sphalerite, it's rare galena, and the sphalerite is always this this red brown color. It occurs as the matrix infill for mafic volcanoclastic rocks, replacing clasts in those volcanoclastics. And in the mudstones, it appears as the veins, stockworks of veins, and as vein breches, and occasionally as these thick, banded, side-right, pie-right, brick-red, sphalerite, beige sphalerite veins. So a completely different, much coarser, completely different system. And so we've tried to come up with a geological analog for this because it's not similar to what we see at Tom and Jason. And the most appropriate analog for what we think the system might represent and how we may explore for that is what we've seen, well, not what we have seen, but what others have seen at Red Dog.

37:36 So this is a section from one of the deposits at Red Dog, and the photos on the right are from Red Dog. And they show the vein ore, and The vein ore on this cross section is represented by the cross hatch unit. And that underlies the really high grade mineralization, which is massive sulfides where they've replaced a cap of baryte. In fact, the original discovery at Red Dog was made in the vein or in the creek. And it wasn't until they started drilling it that they realized that the true sort of really high grade material sat above this in the bareite layer. So thinking about this back at boundary zone, this slide kind of shows a conceptual target.

38:24 In the orange, in the lower half of the slide, that is what we know from boundary zone, the geology that we've drilled and is exposed on surface of boundary zone. But higher up in the stratigraphy, there is a layer of baryte, very close by in the stratigraphy. And if this baryte thickens up, adjacent to one of these since sedimentary faults, and it's plumbed into that same mineralizing system, then we may expect massive sulfide mineralization within that baryte that could potentially be higher grade than boundary zone. And boundary zone we know to be a large hydrothermal system. We see mineralization over about 2 kilometers strike length. So it may be that what we know from boundary zone is that there's already a significant amount of this style of feeder mineralization.

39:15 But there may be something else there, this barite-hosted massive sulfite, potentially high-grade mineralization. So how would you look for one of those kinds of deposits? Well, one thing you can use is soil geochemistry, looking for barium anomalies in the soils. And we have a lot of historic data from this property that we are going through the process of digitizing and using. And from this, there is a strong barium anomaly just west of the known sort of center of the boundary zone area. And it's in the right kind of rocks, slightly younger rocks, just up in the stratigraphy where we know that barylite layer exists. And if it's plumbed into that same fault we see at boundary, then potentially it could be massive sulfite in that barite. And a ground gravity survey will easily identify barite down to about 200 meters depth or so, again, along with those massive sulfites. We have no ground gravity data at all for all of this side of the property.

40:20 So next we'll talk about the volcanic target. So on this slide, that camera icon, we're gonna see another shot looking south in just a moment. But the volcanic target itself is located next to one of these major northeast-southwest structures. And it's about 3 kilometers from Boundary Zone. And it's a potential source of a boulder that was found at surface in the early 80s and named the Monroe Boulder. And that boulder was zinc mineralization. It had about 17% zinc but also 4% lead. And this is extremely unusual for the Boundary Zone area because there is no known lead mineralization at surface. It's very uncommon, maybe 0.1% lead or something like that. There's a little bit deeper in the system, but absolutely nothing at surface.

41:10 So where did this boulder come from? Is the question that we're trying to answer here, really. The lithology of the boulder is diamictite. It forms this foliation. It's mud-rich, so it means it breaks apart easily during glacial transport. So that boulder has probably only traveled several hundreds of meters, certainly not many kilometers. So we're, in other words, quite close to the source. So now we're going to look at that image looking south. So the ice flow in this direction from a spatial mapping is going down this creek towards the main valley where we see the Monroe Boulder. And the volcanic target itself is located on this spur that rises up out of Boundary Creek.

41:57 And at the volcanic target is a small outcrop of side right altered mafic volcanic plastic rocks. And that's significant for 2 reasons. One is that that is the favorable host rock for mineralization at boundary zone. The mafic volcanoclastic hosts some of the highest grade material there. And the fact that it's siderite altered, where we see mineralization at boundary zone, it's always accompanied by this siderite alteration. The mafic volcanic plastics occur regionally and they have a calcite dolomite cement, but These carbonates are replaced by iron carbonate, by siderite, where mineralization occurs. So from the volcanic target we see a lead anomaly that we're now going to look at in a soil map here. This is looking at lead geochemistry, showing up to 923 ppm lead in soils down ice from the altered outcrop at the volcanic target.

42:56 And this was an anomaly generated purely out of historical data from the old mapping and from the old geochemistry. But on top of that, we have our new surficial geological mapping, which we've done in a lot of detail. And here we see pink colors, shows where bedrock is close to surface. The greens are tills, and light green is thin till, dark green is thick till down in the valley. And as soon as that target gets buried by those tills, you don't see it anymore in the soil geochemistry. And it's also cut off to the south by a colluvial cone. The colluvial cone is basically material that's being shed downhill from the mountain to the east. And so that anomaly could extend under that colluvial cone and be bigger than it appears, as those tills will be underneath that colluvial cone.

43:50 So now we're going to take a look at bog zone. Located along that same northeast-southwest structure, and it's very similar to boundary zone in terms of the style of mineralization. They, Cominco drilled this in 1982, it was the first hole they drilled on this property. And they located, were intersected 11 1⁄2 meters of 5.1% zinc and 8.8 meters of 6% zinc at relatively shallow depths. And we also know the zinc mineralization occurs at surface in trenches. And it's open to the west and at depth. So there's a lot going on in this map and we'll step through that. The boundary zone in the west there, where we see the very large 230 meter true thickness of 4.14% zinc from surface in the hole we drilled last year, or one of the holes.

44:45 And just over at Bog Zone, outlined in the dashed gray outline, is where we see that hole 8201, where those numbers came from. You can also see zinc in surface trenches, grabs, or boulders as the white stars. And all of these had to come from somewhere. And this ice flow direction here is to the south and to the west. So those mineralized boulders could not have been sourced from boundary zone. So we're in the right rocks here and it could be another sort of extensional system related to these mafic volcanic plastics that's occurring in an on-echelon fashion along this structure, opening up another potential zone of mineralization.

45:35 And the grades that we see in that hole at bog zone, they would look very much in place if they were on the margin of boundary zone. So there's plenty of room in there to fit in a boundary zone size deposit under those tills and colluvial cover that we see near Bog Zone. So zinc moss. Zinc moss is a distinctively bright green moss. It's almost neon green. You can see it from a helicopter, from ridges across the other side of the valley, and it exclusively grows on zinc-rich soils or rocks, and it's used a lot for prospecting across the Salmon Basin in Yukon and northern BC. And we've defined a zinc loss target in an area where there's been absolutely no exploration, no mapping, no soil sampling, no geophysics, nothing. It's located on these northeast-southwest trending structures that follows one of the creeks in the area.

46:35 And this was spotted on some of the high-resolution color aerial photography that we acquired during last year's LiDAR survey. And this is what it looks like in that aerial photography. So those boxes, we're just going to blow those up. And you can see that distinctive bright green color of the moss there, and also some very gossamous soils and gossamous material draining into the creeks there. And that indicates the oxidation of sulfites at surface. So this is gonna be one of the targets that we'll get out and take a look at this year. We've not been there yet, so this one is a big unknown. And the 11 target is the last target that we'll look at here. It's located along a splay of the Hess fault, which is that main syncytometry structure that connects Jason to end zone to boundary zone.

47:34 And there's a really strong zinc anomaly in the soil at the 11 target. It was previously drilled by Cominco, but they drilled uphill from that anomaly. And what we know at boundary zone is that the zinc anomaly in this area is located almost directly on top of the deposit, whereas in other parts of the property, you often see zinc anomalies be displaced downhill. And this is because zinc is very mobile in acidic groundwaters, but the sufficient conditions in this valley suggest that the zinc anomalies may be occurring right on top of the deposits. So that's a map of zinc in soil, showing the 2 holes in the top left-hand corner of that map that Kaminko drilled and the outline of the 11 target. There's up to 1.8% zinc in soil over the 11 target.

48:30 And Kaminko appear to have drilled uphill of that anomaly and down ice. The ice flow direction is to the west in this image. But they also found boulders at surface with visual estimates of about 12% zinc downhill of that area. So in my eyes, that anomaly remains untested, and it's a significant size. It's about a kilometer long, several hundred meters across. So how do we advance targets in the boundary zone area? Well, initially, that'll be ground-truthing, mapping, soil sampling, prospecting, rock sampling. And these things we're gonna get out and do, and I'll be heading up to the field in just 2 or 3 weeks here.

49:18 And this can be followed up by flying VTEM and MAG in this area, like we did in 2017, and extend the ground gravity coverage to the boundary zone area. And this will give us datasets to layer and prioritize drilling for these targets. So I'd just like to close with some thoughts of just that we're doing greenfields exploration for potential new deposits in this area. And for each one of the targets that we've looked at, we've probably discounted another 2 or 3 targets and prioritized the ones that we're showing here. But these deposits, as I said, they're quite rare to find. But when you do find them, they're large. So we think that any one of these targets has the potential to be another Tom or another Jason or another boundary zone.

50:11 And if we're right about that, then it would really change the face of the project. So we're excited to get out this year and test some of those targets. So thanks for listening. You can ask us any questions and load them up in the chat window. And if we don't get around to answering any of those questions, feel free to email myself or Brad. Thanks for listening. Online now and there you go, Jack. And we're going to be answering a few investor questions. All right. Ready to go, guys? Yep. Let's do it. All right. First question here. It's a 3 parter from Hugo. He wants to know, who are your institutional investors? What are your financial needs? And what is your end goal to be entirely bought out or to sell some of your discovery?

51:11 Yeah, I think you can kind of integrate Robert's question to that. How do we plan to pay for stuff? And what's our budget from, from Rolf was asking the same thing. You know, so there's 2 parts of this, you know, the, the immediate short-term needs, you know, when we raised money in, in February, March, you know, it was a question of, we were, no, actually it was March, we were in the middle of COVID, the worst of it. There was real concerns about whether or not we could even execute a program at Macmillan Pass this year. We didn't know that we could get people to UConn, what flying restrictions were gonna be, but we were allowed to do in camp. So we chose, in light of the extremely depressed share price, which is about 60% of what it is today.

52:05 So less than 40% down from what it is today. And the uncertainty around executing a program. We chose to basically raise only capital to keep the company going concern. Now that we have a bit more certainty around being able to execute a program and now that our share price has gone from mid 30s to mid 50s. Yeah, look, I think there's a real possibility in the short term here that we raise capital to get a drill program done. For us, we still want to make sure that we're not giving away too much. I mean, this is, although we're post the worst of it, we are still not what I would consider to be a healthy market for junior-based metal companies.

52:53 So for us, it's always how much of this company do we want to give away for 1 drill program? 50%? No. 25%? Probably not. So where are we at? How much do I want to give away? There's been 100 million probably equivalent sunk into this project. So you have to keep that in mind when your market cap is at 25 million. But we also recognize that, look, there's a real danger of stopping, you know, of deciding, hey, we're going to do nothing. First off, you get immediate investor apathy. Everyone loses interest and whatever value has underpinned your project, retail investors in Canada want to see things happen and we appreciate that. And we want to see things happen.

53:41 Like nobody likes sitting around not drilling, right? So we would like to do something and we are actively looking for a means to make that happen that is not punitively dilutive. Now, how do we finance that? There's a few questions here. Do we look for a partnership? Do we consider selling a stream of royalty like James Quanta suggested. My concerns around partnerships, you know, and joint ventures are that if I sign a joint venture with a major mining company, that is my dance partner. So I've basically excluded the other major mining companies from creating competitive tension. That's not to say that the right joint venture on attractive enough terms doesn't interest us. It absolutely would. You know, a quality joint venture partner would be extremely valuable.

54:37 But again, you know, they're going to be a little more divorced from our current share price in terms of their negotiation flexibility than, for example, an investor would, an equity investor. But they're going to be looking at it. So we're still somewhat anchored to our current valuation when we're looking at joint ventures. So it is something we are actively looking at. We've had a tremendous amount of interest in the project, but again, you know, this is like a definitely measured twice cut once situation. And there's a lot of issues around, you know, if people want to come do site visits, where are they coming from, because the odds are that I'm not gonna be able to get them to Yukon. So if that's mandatory part of a financing package or a joint venture or something, it just can't happen.

55:23 So unfortunately, whatever the state of COVID infections in BC and Yukon may not matter if we're not able to get people to site and inspect things. In terms of long term, this is a big, hungry project. It does need a lot of capital to get the shovel ready, and it does need a reasonable amount of capital to get built. So for any junior, the question is, you know, how do I make this happen and give existing shareholders, you know, they still have something left at the end of the day. There's, there's of course the model of, well, just issue as many shares as you need to make happen and the mine gets built, but nobody makes any money. We're not particularly interested in that approach. So we're trying to figure out obviously a way to make sure that existing shareholders get a significant return and management are significant existing shareholders.

56:15 To kind of discuss what our exit is, I think that this is a cliche, but the goal is not so much an exit, it's that it's a share price appreciation. Everyone can take their, individual shareholders can take their exit in the market management. It's a bit tougher, you know, we need to pass the baton at some point if we want to realize our profits an exit would be clean. It would be simple certainly for our bigger shareholders, which include like resource capital funds out of Colorado, who own almost 12% of the company, a takeover is a lot simpler, right? So I think every junior, whatever they say, are of course going to entertain takeover offers.

57:03 You know, in the meantime, you know, James, your point about selling a royalty, the concern is royalty companies really want to be the last dollar in Because if they write you a check that doesn't then put you over the top to build the project, they have no idea when they're going to be able to cash in on that royalty or stream. And because of that, they have to aggressively dilute anything or discount anything when they don't know what the time frame for production start is. So as an example of what we could achieve on a stream on our project, you can look at Cooper Canyon did a deal with Royal Gold recently, last year I believe, and they sold 32 million ounces of silver streamed over 20 years for US $212 million so just about 300 million Canadian I mean that is the lion's share of the capex for this project that is less silver than our project would produce but they were basically permitted and ready to go right so if we were to sell our silver stream now I'm we're certainly not going to get us 212 million for it I'm not sure we'd get us 21 million for it maybe not even us 5 million for it right so this is the challenge of being you know years out from production and particularly having outstanding uncertainty around funding and time frames so look we certainly we have flexibility around streams and options

58:36 on tom and jason there's no royalty except for 1 on Jason which can be purchased outright so that is not a lingering royalty. Nid has a 1% NSR. The MAC claims have 0.25% on base metals and 1% on silver and 3% on gold. And the rest of the claims are 0.5% NSR on base metals and silver and 2% on other metals. So this is not a big royalty burden at all. So we do feel like we have a lot of flexibility in terms of financing, in terms of royalties down the road. But selling 1 now, it burdens the project. We're not going to get a lot for it. We're going to really eliminate our project finance flexibility when it comes to build it, if we're going to build it ourselves.

59:25 But having said that, you know, you've got to look at all the tools in your toolbox. So we are considering joint venture, we're considering equity, we're considering royalty streams, right? So in a market like this, every decision is some measure of suboptimal. There's no perfect solution to our problems. There's no, I mean, unlike what some shareholders think, there's no white knight out there waiting for me to find who's gonna write me a check at 100% premium to market. Unfortunately, it just doesn't exist. So we have to figure out what sacrifice we're willing to make. What are we willing to burden ourselves with the project with to keep this going. But, you know, hopefully the impression you can get is that we're giving this very careful thought.

1:00:11 No decisions will be made kind of willy-nilly on this. We want to make sure that we have the interests of shareholders in mind. Excellent. We have a question here from Stefan Ioannou, mining analyst at Cormark. Thanks for watching, Stefan. He says, thanks for the detailed update. Just wondering if there are any near-term plans to follow up the baryte thesis at Boundary Zone, namely as it pertains to bare-ite mapping via gravity geophysics. Would you look to identify slash test bare-ite units in close proximity to Boundary Zone for potential massive sulfide before mapping out your greater property package? Yeah, thanks for the question, Stephan. Yeah, we absolutely would focus on the boundaries of an area for a ground gravity survey as the highest priority before stepping out to the rest of the property.

1:01:04 And we combine this with the lithological or geological mapping that's ongoing in trying to track that particular unit in the stratigraphy. And the stratigraphy in the area has kind of been redefined. A lot of government work has been done over the last couple of decades, really since it's been explored last. And some of that redefinition has allowed us to interpret some of these areas a little differently. And we'd combine that with flying BTEM and MAG, which would show us what the stratigraphy is doing down in the covered areas in the valleys, so that we could follow those prospective units that may contain bare right. But doing that in combination with a ground gravity survey would absolutely be our top priority for exploring in the boundary zone area.

1:01:58 Excellent. Similar theme here from Caleb. Have you done any geochemistry, specifically soils, over the fault zone at the 240-mile target? Yeah, 240-mile target. There we go. We have done geochemistry over those faults. And in the area where directly over the 240 mile target itself it's actually covered by collithium and we've done really detailed superficial geological mapping so the collithium is being shed from outcrop and subcrop just upslope from there, which is obscuring any signal that would come from the bedrock. But when you follow that fault along strike to the north, you see it as a topographic expression of that fault, and we have done soil sampling over that and in those areas it is anomalous in lead up to several hundred ppm lead in some of the soils that are shedding off of that fault. So yeah, I didn't include it in the presentation.

1:03:05 It was long enough as it was, but that's a really good point, Caleb. And yeah, there is evidence that there's been fluids along that fault. Great. Blake McDonald wants to know, during this time of uncertainty, would a rights offering be of interest? You know, we looked at a rights offering like very seriously for our financing that we did earlier this year, because it was, you know, it was all time lows. So rights offering felt like the most fair, you know, solution to the situation. It ended up being a lot more challenging to execute. And there's a lot of issues with the rights offering that really, you know, kind of soured a little bit.

1:03:50 I agree in principle that it makes a lot of sense. What we ended up doing, you know, I kind of called a pseudo rights offering. Of the money we raised, literally 97% of it was from existing shareholders. And we did not turn a single shareholder away who came to us. So that's like without actually going through the motions of a rights offering, that was the closest we could kind of get to it. Makes sense. Of the 71 million committed to the North Canal Road and the Robert Campbell Highway, how much would directly offset CAPEX estimated in the PEA? I don't really necessarily know exactly how much that's going to be.

1:04:36 So the Robert Campbell Highway between Faro and Ross River, they're going to surface it. And then the intent is to continue up the North Canal, not surfacing the North Canal, but improving it and replacing bridges. So even before the 71 million was announced, they'd already replaced a small handful of bridges on the North Canal that lead to our project. They had bought some additional bridges and had them there ready to replace promptly. So we'd already seen commitment from the government. So that including the 71 million that goes to offset, you know, what we had considered CapEx in our study. I, It's very hard for me to put an exact number on. I'm guessing a minimum of $40 million total, not out of the $70 million, but out of what they had done so far and what's coming from that. But the key thing that I think is relevant here is, you know, the government had also indicated to us in a letter of support that as, you know, we continue to advance the project, they would look to continue to do more work on the Kennel Road.

1:05:45 To my mind, that tells me reasonably conclusively that we're not going to be on the hook for the road. There may be an expected some sort of industry commitment to this, as you've seen elsewhere, maybe up to 10%, 20%. So my feeling, and of course, I'm going to be arm wavy and promotional is that of that 105 million we put in our PEA we're not likely to be on the hook for more than 10-20 million of it at the end of the day. Question from Julian, this is to Jack. What signature besides lead-zinc are you looking at when using the PXRF in the 240 mile target mudstones? The purposes of that PXRF mapping is not to detect mineralization itself, but it's to characterize the different mudstone units.

1:06:39 And we see 4 different sub-members within that mudstone package. And using immobile trace element geochemistry and major element geochemistry that we can see with the PXRF. We should be able to split those into distinct geochemical packages and map them out that way and hopefully see some of the thickening that you'd expect in the hanging walls of those faults, and map that out basically in the area between the Tom deposit and the 240 mile target, excuse me, in a lot of detail. And that will help us validate that geological model. Is that really what's going on? We see that in the geophysics, but we need to ground truth that before having the confidence to drill that target.

1:07:25 So PXRF mapping would mostly be using immobile trace elements. Great. How do you expect boundary zone metallurgy to differ from Tom and Jason? Yeah, Jack can talk a little bit more about that. I think, you know, I think the key thing is that we haven't done metallurgy on boundary. We did some sorting tests. And that was released in that result. Boundary zone, by its heterogeneous nature, seems to be highly amenable to ore sorting processes. But what we haven't done is with the ore sorting product, then do flotation tests to get an expectation of what the metallurgy would look like. But Jack maybe you can talk a little bit more about the mineralogy and crystallography of it.

1:08:12 Yeah the mineralization is much coarser grained at boundary zones so you know probably not so much of a finer grind needed, we would have thought, just based on the visual appearance of the rocks. And the heterogeneity of the deposit is much greater than it is at Tom and Jason. At Tom and Jason, you'll drill through consistent above cutoff grade material, whereas at Boundary Zone, your grade is going up and down. You'll drill through sections with absolutely no mineralization, and then really high grade material and veins. And that heterogeneous characteristic makes it really amenable for ore sorting.

1:09:02 And that's something that, that's why we drill those 2 holes in the first place was to get material for further ore sorting tests which are you know, we still have to do those tests yet, but I'd say that, yeah, those geological characteristics would, you know, you could use to predict some of those metallurgy. Another question for you, Jack. This is from Suzanne. She wants to know, what target are you most excited about working up this year? Great, yeah, thanks. So yeah, I'm excited about the 240 mile target. I think it's the, you know, really interesting geological target. And the potential that it's, you know, potentially been overlooked or not been able to be detected in the past because of advancements in exploration technology.

1:09:56 And yeah, if I had to sort of give a top 3, I would give that 240 mile target. I'd give the volcanic target, again, because it's never been drilled. It's got the same dead ringer characteristics for boundary zone style mineralization. And the 11 target as well, because that one, the zinc anomaly in soil is stronger and larger than the area of Boundary Zone and you know it's basically not been tested as they drilled down ice And uphill from the anomaly. Yeah, what's it? I mean, I've always been kind of jazzed about 11 Creek because it was interesting the 2 drill holes They put in there the second drill hole the very last Interval It was about 1.5 percent zinc, is that right?

1:10:50 Yeah, so they hit just, yeah, a sniff of mineralization. And that was because they drilled through that structure where they had highly sheared rock along that splay of the Hess fault, which is an indication that fluids have been along that fault which we know they have at boundary zone. So maybe they were just off and if you know they'd stepped back a couple hundred meters and drilled right in the middle of that zinc anomaly maybe they would have seen something very different. And that's such like a story of this project and others too. A big company comes in, they have a good target, they miss with a couple drill holes and they get a sniff in the last interval of the drill hole and they never come back. So it's like they know there's some mineralization there, They know that's got a strong anomaly.

1:11:37 They know they missed it, but just wasn't a target. You know, it wasn't a priority. And you know what I keep telling people is that when Kaminko was exploring this area, they were also working on a little project called Red Dog, which probably had the focus of their zinc team, right? So, you know, the fact that they were distracted and didn't come back and didn't give us a really good look, you know, has been our opportunity. Another question here from James. He wants to know, does declining use of lead for batteries in any way guide how you prioritize focus on various zones and targets? No. And I'm not even sure. You know, there's something I've been trying to get straight. I mean, for example, Teslas, for example, still have a lead acid battery, if I understand correctly, it's different parts of the, you know, that the I think the headlights and stuff like that still run off that system.

1:12:35 Someone's gonna probably make a good idea if I'm wrong here, but the actual expectation of lead demand is not changing any time soon. I understand that we commonly associate it with batteries for internal combustion engines, but I don't think that I don't think the story's over just because there's a rise in internal or EVs coming. Great. At least conceptually, how might boundary zone integrate into a mine plan with Tom and Jason? Yeah, just conceptually, and that's all we really have conceptually. You know, for us, we took our model from the Tom and Jason PEA and kind of thought about it well what would it look like if we if we mined boundary zone in parallel and that gave us a little bit of a thumbs up as to what economics might look like and it seemed like it could be very encouraging you know understanding that that was a thumbs up and nothing like a actual study.

1:13:37 An actual study would look at something more sophisticated, whether you would start with 1, transition to the other, do them all in parallel, yada yada, we don't know. And, you know, you know, do you start small and go big? And perhaps to Hugo's question there, you know, he said, could you start mining in high silver areas to be self-financing? One of the problems we had when we looked at the PEA was that as long as we had to shoulder the burden of 100 million in CapEx for the road, it was very hard to justify building a small mine. Because if I have a, if you say ignore the road, I have a mine that cost me 100 million to build or 50 million to build, doesn't matter. And then if there's another one that cost me 300 million to build, the 300 million to build one, the extra 100 million is only a 30% increase, only, only a 30% increase in your CapEx. But if you've got a little $50 million starter mine, well, the $100 million road is, you know, a 200% increase in your capex.

1:14:34 So with the government looking to assist with the road and some of that cost coming down, perhaps we look at a smaller plan. The challenge is that your permitting burden is pretty much the same, whether you're building 500 tons a day or 5,000 tons a day or 10,000 tons a day. At least the official guidelines for timeframes are about the same. A larger mine's going to take slightly longer to permit because it's more complicated. You've got more engagement to do. You've got more work with the permitting bodies. But it's still years and years for even a small mine. You know, if we could get out there with the existing underground workings, if I could drain the underground workings, which are plugged right into Tommies and start mining that, I mean, that's a lot of it arguably is direct shipable, right? So yeah, you could do that except that we'd still need to get that permitted and that's still going to take environmental baseline, it's still going to take wildlife studies, it's still going to take going through, yes, the permitting board and the water board and etc. Etc. Right? So times have changed. Unfortunately, most jurisdictions, it's not so easy just to start small and build big.

1:15:44 But it is still something that we're, we're keeping an eye on because, you know, obviously hopes and dreams is a major comes in and snatches us up and everyone makes a whole jillion dollars. But if we had to put our big boy pants on and build this thing, maybe there's a more manageable bite size for a junior to take on. Fair enough, fair enough. This is a question perhaps for Jack here. How do you narrow the search area for these deposits given the size of the project? Yeah that's a good question, particularly because with the changes in the genetic model for mineralization, we've opened that search space up to be larger. So how do you focus in and narrow down?

1:16:32 So we've used geology and particularly the structure. So we've defined what we call the fertile corridor running down from adjacent end zone to boundary zone. And that follows the Hesse fault. The Hesse fault is undoubtedly since sedimentary. It's got very significant changes in the stratigraphy on either side. So it's early formed. It was active during the formation of the basin and during the formation of these deposits. And the orthogonal structures, the North, East, Southwest trending structures are also really important. So we see a lot of evidence for these. A lot of the creeks follow those orientations. And all over the Selwyn Basin, in fact, even on the other side of the Selwyn Basin, down towards Faroe and the Anvil District, that orientation of fault is very important.

1:17:27 So in order to focus in on areas, we look along those fault corridors. And there's also more of an opportunity there because in an area that's so mature with respect to exploration the alpine has been picked over by prospectors and geologists for the last 70 years and the chances of finding an outcrop deposit there are very low. So the opportunity is to look in and along those creeks and valleys, and that also happens to be where some of these major structures run. So not only is there more opportunity because no one's looked there, we think that there's more opportunity because they're more geologically favorable too. Yeah, you know, per Jack's point, the discovery outcrop at Tom, You know, you can trace the mineralized boulders in the scree field up the hill until you get to the outcrop and whack off a chunk of massive sulfide, right? I mean, in terms of discovery, that's as easy as it's gonna get.

1:18:32 So for this district, finding Tom was the easiest, it's all gonna get progressively harder from there. Do you want me to, why don't I answer these remaining 3 questions? And we can take some more too, but there's 3 questions about drilling this year and I'll just kind of tackle them all now. So Rolf has asked what the timeline and budget this year is for drilling, Robert same thing what's our timeline on and then John Collins has asked do we have a program in mind would we 1 whole test our best targets and how much would that cost. So we don't have a budget yet for this year because as I mentioned earlier for drilling we didn't want to raise money when we did our earlier financing this year for drilling because it would just would have been punitively dilutive and we just didn't see that sufficient capital was there to do it also.

1:19:21 It was not just what terms can I get capital, it was also is the capital even there to write a check? Not surprisingly when when COVID-19 was a complete unknown and things were getting out of control and that was you know March when nobody knew how bad it was gonna get Nobody really wanted to write big checks So it's a bit different now Look timeline. I'm guessing it, you know, if we can If we can make a deal happen here and we can get some funds in place, which I'm cautiously optimistic about, but I wanna caution everyone that I'm not making any promises here. Probably mid July to early August would be the earliest start date. We're lucky our new permit on the project does allow us to drill quite a bit into winter if we wanted to, but you know I think really 2.5 months drilling is all we'd really want to do anyway, so you know August, September, maybe first bit of October would be ideal. Now as to what targets we test, one of the challenges of raising a little bit of money and then going back, raise money, get a good drill intersection, go back and raise more, is first the lag time to raise more money and get results. So if I hit a good drill intersection probably going to be 6 to 8 weeks till I get the results to market.

1:20:42 So if I hit that drill intersection in say August 15th is when it starts hitting minimization. I probably don't put results out till October. So let's say October 7th, I've got my news out. Everyone's like, oh great, our share price skyrockets. Now I've got to find money to start drilling in winter. Either that or it waits till next year. So we prefer to have money if possible for follow-up on good holes. There's also the reality, look, as is evidenced by 11 Creek, you can put 2 holes into something on a perfectly valid thesis and miss, But those holes may give you an indication of where to target next. What we don't want to do is pick our best targets and accidentally kill them in the eyes of the investor because we only get 1 shot at each.

1:21:27 It's very hard to hit on your first shot. Very few projects, you know, deposits are found on the first drill hole. Usually it's the, I don't know what the average is. What do they claim? The average is like the 30th drill hole. It's usually the discovery drill hole or something like, so, so it's challenging. Playing the, oh, we're going to drill a little bit and raise more money at higher levels is you're gambling. And you're not just gambling that you don't hit. You're gambling that you might actually take the shine off the project because everyone thinks your targets are not bust. So to summarize, like we're hoping to do something, we're hoping to get a couple holes on each of these targets. We're working on it, we don't know what it's gonna look like or even necessarily whether it's gonna happen. But suffice to say, there's a lot of interest internally and externally to help us make this happen.

1:22:17 Great. One final question here and then I'll throw it back to you folks for the final word. How big is boundary zone as currently delineated? Yeah, I mean, look, while tiptoeing around and I'll leave this to Jack to mostly discuss it. We can't mention tonnage figures because we have no resource estimate on it, but we can certainly talk about dimensions and perhaps people can do their own mental arithmetic and figure out what that might mean. I can't hear you. Oh, there you go. Oh, you're good now. Okay, The core of the system at boundary is about 400 meters in strike length. We know it's about 230 to 250 meters of true thickness and we've drilled it down dip to at least 250 meters and it's open in all of those directions and the density is approximately 3 tons per cubic meter.

1:23:20 So we can't put a number on any tonnages, but those are the approximate dimensions of a body of rock that it averages in those drill holes anywhere between about 2% to 3% zinc. Yeah, but there's not much, sorry, go ahead, Brandon. Yeah, I was just gonna say, and the key thing is that it's open, right? You know, one of the reasons that we don't wanna rush into a resource estimate on boundary zone is because we're just starting to get a handle on the controls for the higher grade, which are gonna make a real difference in terms of the grade of the resource, as well as what the dimensions of it are. Like it's kind of open in virtually every direction, right? So we really wanna make sure that we've properly delineated it before we wrap a number on it.

1:24:06 Yeah, and those sort of broad long intervals of 2 to 3% zinc, or in some cases higher 4% zinc, they're not representative of some of the nearest surface mineralization, which is much higher grade. We may end up defining a smaller but higher grade near surface resource if and when we come around to doing that. And certainly, parts of that zone are very high grade. We had assays up to about 62% zinc, which is almost pure sphalerite. And 1 section of about 6 meters of 42% zinc or something like that. Great. And with that, guys, we're done the presentation.

1:24:53 We're done the Q&A. A big thank you to everyone who attended and everyone who submitted questions. If you did have a question that you couldn't submit this time around, feel free to send it either to ourselves at friends at 6 dot com or directly to Brandon or Jack. We'll make sure that you get your handful and I'll pass it back to you Brandon for the final word. Yeah thanks, I just you know in case people didn't see if you want to contact me my email is Brandon at fireweedsinc.com. If you have geological questions Jack would be happy to field them he's Jack at fireweedsinc.com. You know we consider ourselves or at least try to be as much an open book as possible. Please come to us with questions, thoughts, suggestions, whatever, if you have them.

1:25:41 We're working hard and we hope we can do something for you this summer. Great, Thank you