Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
0:38 Without any further ado I'll hand it over to you Brandon to kick it off. So before I hand this off to Jack who's going to talk about our new Gaynor River project, I thought it was worth revisiting what we've done at McMillan Pass, because I think for the context of a new project, it's worth understanding the absolute step change in projects that, in that project that has occurred since we picked it up. You know, it's not the Tom and Jason that we originally acquired. And I'm not going to, I think everyone here, well maybe not everyone, but most people have probably seen my usual presentations. I'm not going to run through the usual investment case, but you see it here. Look, there's a bit of a market route right now, but the sector rotation into commodities is imminent. We're doing well, you know, so we're just closing up the financing now. We'll have about 20 million bucks in the bank, and, you know, that leaves Iberia Capital as our biggest shareholder at 11%, Tech Resources at 9% and a very tightly held company.
1:44 So to remind everyone where Macmillan Pass is, But let's go back to the beginning, let's go back to 2017. For those who have been following the company since then, you know, we took a then private company where we acquired the Tom and Jason projects off Hud Bay and set that up in 2016, went public in 2017 with an oversubscribed IPO, opened immediately 80% above that IPO price, got 2,200 meters of drilling down that year, and reminded everyone just what Tom and Jason were capable of. Highlights include that great hit at Tom East, almost 9% zinc, 7.5% lead, and 130 grams silver, over 38 meters true width at Tom East, reminding everyone exactly how spectacular a deposit and sort of zone to our Mist is.
2:35 But then we also began the expansion of the Mellon Pass project. So as a reminder, what we originally picked up from HUD Bay was 54 square kilometers, optioning the MACK claims from Newmont on a very friendly deal. I expanded it to almost 220 square kilometers. And we began some work on geophysics, LIDAR and airborne. And That led into probably what was our biggest year, 2018. We started with a resource update that year. We picked up off HUD Bay. They had about 30 million tons at about 11% zinc equivalent in their historic resource from 2006. We immediately bumped that to 11.2 million tons indicated, 39 and 500,000 tons inferred at around 10% zinc equivalent.
3:26 So this was a 60% increase in the metal endowment over what HUD Bay thought it was. And this immediately, you know, obviously changed the project, dramatically exceeded expectations of what we were gonna be able to produce. It began what was a huge year for us, you know, and, you know, we followed that with a preliminary economic assessment. And the logic was that the expiration potential was not done, even at Tom and Jason, but we understood the cynicism around remote location. So wrapping some economics around it to show that what we had was viable, was critical. We hit every mark we wanted there. Long, multi-cycle mine life, healthy after-tax, MPV, and IRR.
4:12 So that was a good starting point. And this, again, was just on that little package of land that we acquired off Hutt Bay, 54 square kilometers, no exploration targets included in this. And at that time, we did not even own the mid-property, which includes the boundary zone, which we auctioned off. An option we acquired it outright from tech later that year. So 2018, like I said, big year, $12.5 million broker financing, 5,500 meters of drilling, which remains our biggest year of drilling to be exceeded only by this year. Ultra high-grade step-outs at Tom East, plus 35% SIG equivalent.
4:59 End zone, reminding everyone that end zone existed because this is a high grade little pod that people forgot about was not in the 2018 resource, was not in the 2006 resource that Hyde Bay had done. And then we added another 244 square kilometers through deals with 3 different juniors in addition to the NID claims. So that kind of bumped us up to, I think over 500 square kilometers total by the end of 2018.
5:28 And you know, 2019 really the Big thing that year was the, we call it the rediscovery of boundary zone. We did 2,600 meters of drilling and the final 2 holes were a boundary. And these were intended as a metallurgical sample, but It was also kind of testing a bit of a theory we had on controls for the grate. And it dramatically exceeded expectations. You know, 230 meters of 4.5 percent zinc from surface. The first 100 meters of that, almost 9 percent zinc. And locally, 42 percent zinc over 6 meters. So this was very different than the boundary zone of old, although consistent with the geology of what they were seeing, Kaminko's holes way back in the day, very broad, low grade, intermittently high grade.
6:18 But this hinted at some potential there that perhaps previously was not recognized. In 2019, we also drilled quite a bit into Tom North. The 2018 PEA highlighted open-pit potential at Tom. Then what we saw at Tom North was a moderate grade expansion of Tom West, sort of fault offset of Tom West that could potentially be open pitted. So we had some good intersections there. And that fed into 2020, which obviously started as an awful year for everyone. But we quickly got back on our feet that year, ended up raising $8 million that year, 3,500 meters of drilling in what was a year that we thought was going to be a write-off.
7:08 And I think the most impressive part of 2020 was that we did a ground gravity survey that year at Boundary Zone, and that year, you know, managed to target new drill holes based on that ground gravity survey and turn it around into drill holes that discovered the boundary west zone. So this was a true discovery, a totally new zone that had not been identified before, had no drill holes in it. So to go from that season doing the gravity survey, field level maps, discovering this gravity anomaly, drilling it, and making a discovery really is a testament to how intelligent and capable and nimble our exploration team was. So the first hole into Boundary West there, 6.5% zinc, almost 1% lead, and 48 grams silver over 24 meters.
8:02 Pretty great. And also exposed as lower sequence in in Ordovician and Silurian rocks, which are previously never thought to be mineralized in this district. And all of that, it's important to remember that, you know, we, During PDAC, when the world was collapsing because of COVID, the Yukon government announced that they had signed an MOU with the Ross River Dental Council First Nation for 71 million in funding for access roads to our project. That's the North Canal Road and the Robert Campbell Highway. So the best news I could produce coming at the worst possible time but you know this absolutely should not be forgotten. 2021 you know last year I continue to build on this in uncertain markets. We had $9.5M in financing pre-season, including a $5M investment from Ibera Capital, which was their first toehold in the company.
8:58 We did 3,850m of drilling last year, focused really on boundary and boundary west. So you know the most impressive part of you know last year really was a discovery of the new horizon, a new zone Above the massive sulfide zone at boundary West you know almost 24% zinc 3.5 percent lead and 75 grams silver over 10 meters true high-grade zone very much texturally like Tom and Jason But also the the red horizon you see there the the massive sulfides at boundaries on West continuing to get better grade to depth, 40 meters of over 10% zinc. And also first little sniff of copper at boundary zone. TBD, if that's economically meaningful, but certainly may help us vector towards a hotter part of the system. So 1.5% copper and 5.5% zinc over 2 meters there at the main part of boundary zone.
10:01 So where does that leave us now? So 2022 is going to be our biggest year yet, you know, thanks to a strategic raise at the end of last year in December for $5 million, and then closing another $13.2 million just now. We now have our strongest of our financial position with 19 plus million in the bank. Our 2 biggest shareholders, Tech and Ibera Capital, committing additional funds to increase their ownership levels in this recent financing. We've got 8,000 plus meters planned. This will be holes at Tom and Jason, which we haven't drilled in a while, and lots of holes at Boundary and Boundary West with the intent to target a maiden resource there. As Jack will be talking about in detail, the addition of the Gaynor River project, which was very opportunistic, very intriguing project that we acquired for 40 grand, right? So It was an opportunistic move and we see immense potential there. And so this all is going to the work at Ebekmel and Pass this year is going to feed into the preliminary economic assessment, a resource update we're going to release next year.
11:15 But as we're talking, I think it's worth setting the stage for that. You know, what does that mean? What can people expect? So I'm going to kind of talk through some things here. You know, first we think about the 2018 PEA is the base case. You think about the numbers we put out there. You know, basically everything has improved since that 2018 PEA. So when you look at those numbers and you think about the IRR, the MPV, et cetera, we think we can beat this on almost all counts. Critically, first, we had loaded 100 million into the CapEx for the improvement of the Cannell Road. Since then, we've got 71 million in commitment from the government in part for that road, and we've also got a nod from the government that they would expect that as the project matures, they could do more of the improvement. So if I were to do this study again today or next year, as it were, the capital cost of the improvement of that road will be very much off our shoulders and onto the government's.
12:16 So that makes an immediate difference to the capital intensity of the project. Second, and now if you remember, you've been around since 2018, I think you'll have heard me talk about the conservative assumptions that went into this 2018 PEA, one of which was the pit sizing. You know, we kind of were trying to figure out, okay, we've got these starter pits at Tom and Jason, how big do we make them? We wanted to make sure we weren't being too aggressive and had to walk anything back. So we made 2 critical assumptions based on limited data. 1 that, well, the assumption was basically that all of our waste rock in the pit was going to be the shales. Shales have 2 issues. 1, that they're not particularly competent. And 2, that they can be acid generating. So we made the assumption that first off, we had to have pretty gentle pit wall angles. And 2, that 100% of our waste rock from the pits had to be treated as peg, potentially acid generated. So what we understand now is that much of the pit, particularly at Tom, on the uphill side, which is where most of the strip comes from, much of that is likely to be conglomerate and not the shales. Conglomerate is the so-called stick rock, very competent, comes out of the drill hole and you can pick up almost the entire piece of it, likely to support a much steeper pit wall angle and likely to be much less asset generating, if perhaps not asset generating at all.
13:41 So that gives us a chance now this year to approach a much larger pit at Tom than we would have in 2018. And also, we have the addition of Tom North since 2018, which will help support that larger pit. So when you think about capital intensity, early cash flows, et cetera, being able to expand those starter pits at Tom and Jason is going to make a big difference. And then Tom and Jason have got better. You know, I mentioned Tom North, totally new zone that wasn't in the 2018 resource. And then one of the things that we've been harping on about that people may or may not have been picking up on is that there was aspects of the 2018 resource, particularly at Tom West and the high grade parts of Tom West. There was reliant on old drill holes that had very poor recovery.
14:33 And it became apparent as we started to drill near these holes that the recovery seemed to be lowest in the areas of highest grade. It had something to do with the friability of those high-grade sulfides. They were more pulverized and washed away during the drilling than retained and sampled. So as we came in with modern drilling with these big HQ drill holes, we got you know 95 plus percent recovery through these zones and when we twinned old holes found that the grade was substantially, substantially higher than old holes. So that would be a part of Tom that the tonnage probably not going to change much, but the grade may change meaningfully. And we're already over that sort of cutoff threshold for the grade. Every bit the grade bumps up is pure gravy in terms of cash flow. That's another thing that seems minor but is going to make a huge difference. You know when we see exploration potential at Tom East that will not be fully drilled off this year but will influence future studies. You know we see areas like for example the Tom Deep as we call it, 14 meters of 14.5% zinc, again not likely to be drilled next year but can be integrated into or this year but can be integrated as we go down the line. So I've been telling people don't sleep on Tom and Jason, and that's one of the things that we've been, of course, pounding the table on Boundary Zone and promoting the hell out of that.
15:57 Tom and Jason are not nearly done. These are 2 very special deposits that still have a lot left to give. But the big new thing, of course, is boundary and boundary west. We see significant open pit potential there, you know, these super broad intersections, laterally extensive. You know, We see an opportunity to – the intent is this year to get enough drilling in them to get a maiden resource on them, which feeds the resource next year and the PEA next year. But we're still just scratching the surface. We see over 2 kilometers laterally mineralization in the boundary zone area. Even further than that, we see targets like volcanic and bog, et cetera. The numbers we're going to put out on Boundary and Boundary West next year should look very good but they're just scratching the surface of a potential nut area that that is a big area you know a lot of fluid flow a long-lived system that there's little gems there for sure that there will be found you know hopefully this year and in future years. And it highlights broadly just, you know, the blue sky potential. Now, the blue sky potential will not be in next year's PEA because we don't have the meters to drill it off. And it's and it's a long term project.
17:18 But this is a district that there is 4 known deposits. There's hints of a whole bunch more. We have targets like BOG 11, Imperial Cobock, Banded Corvus, etc., all of which are bona fide exploration targets that we're not going to drill this year because we're focused on delivering that resource update in PEA. This is a wealth of opportunity and a bit of a Hollywood problem that you have too many targets to explore. But it establishes that no study is definitive, that this is the sort of project, like so many of the truly best in class mines out there, that get built and then exceed their initial intended mine life by 50%, 100%, 200% that they produce for generations.
18:08 And that's what we hope we have here and that's what we truly believe we have. So what does this all lead to? This is all about MPV is 1 metric of value. It's a pretty good one. And analysts will take that and make a nav out of it and what have you, which is the basis for what maybe a company is valued on. But you take the 2018 PEA of 450 million AfriTax NPV, take out the road funding, add those engineering optimizations, add the resource expansion, adjust Tom adjacent and the resource improvement at Tom, you add boundary zone and you look at exploration potential. All these things increase the NPV of the project eventually and all these things increase the value of fireweed. And when you think about what we've done just since 2017 is take a, you know, a small footprint project that was still a pretty big resource and just take it from, hey, these are 2 discrete deposits to, hey, these are parts of a real district that has immense exploration potential. You know, I'm extremely proud of what we've done.
27:11 And on the basis of this drilling, they defined an exploration target that can be stated as about 30 to 50 million tons, between 4 and 4.5 percent zinc, and up to about half a percent lead of potential. So this is not a resource, this is a conceptual exploration target that they define. But Rio let these claims lapse, believing that there was very low potential for a high-grade deposit. And we'll come back to that, because it was restaked by Eagle Plains again in 1999. And then they formed a strategic alliance to do some exploration in the area with tech. And they let those claims lapse in 2018, the same year that an academic research paper came out likening the geological environment of the Ghana River to the Kipushi mine, which is in the DRC in Southern Africa.
28:06 And we staked this last month at very low cost, as Brandon said, about $40,000 of direct staking costs, most of that being helicopter time, and have consolidated all the major anomalies and showings. And this graph shows the exploration history of the McKenzie-Selwet area. So through time, you can see the total number of showings. The total and the blue is just the NWT ones. You see the Tom deposit there, discovered 1951. Howard's Pass, discovered in the early 70s, and then Jason, 1975, same time as Gainer River, 1974.
28:52 So you can see the heyday of exploration was really in the early 70s. Many many zinc deposits and showings were found in this time and since then in terms of regional exploration there's been very little exploration success and it's kind of plateaued. So all these low hanging fruit are gone, but it provides good evidence that there's a large zinc lead system in the area. And because of this exploration success plateauing, we needed a new idea and something that can create a search space within what's a district that's had a thorough first pass of early stage exploration. So the search space that we've defined at Gainer River is using this paper that was published by Elizabeth Turner, Dave Broughton and Tim Brooks in 2018, economic geology, comparing Gainer River to the Kapushi mine.
29:53 We'll come on to that model in a moment. But we take this new idea, something new about the district that's going to inform our exploration and create the search space, along with technology that we can use to try and find and test that search space effectively and efficiently. And that technology is muon tomography combined with detailed ground gravity surveys. And we've partnered with IDEON and at MacPASS this summer, we will be deploying these borehole muon detectors. It's a brand new technology. And I'll come on to exactly how that works later. But it's a method that we can use to detect dense bodies in the subsurface.
30:41 And combining these things, leveraging our experience with sediment-hosted zinc systems at MagPas, and targeting these massive sulfide systems, we believe that we stand a good chance of making a discovery at Gainer River. So what is this new model for zinc peneurization? Well, I'll run through this in detail. So on the left, you have Gainer River, and on the right you have Kapushimine. And these are both schematic sections through the stratigraphy that you see in each area. In each area, you see some blue rocks on the section, and those blue rocks are both these carbonate reefs. These are reefs that build up and stand up above the seafloor with some relief. And as the sediments are deposited on the side, these reefs grow. And so they end up with these very sort of sharp and steep vertical edges to the reefs. And you also get things like breccias or this trash that falls off the reef and accumulates along the aprons that surround the reefs.
31:40 And this was a significant reinterpretation of the geology at the Kipushi mine, which is, you know, was first in production over 100 years ago. And the geology has been reinterpreted as being on the edge of a carbonate reef. And the edge of that carbonate, which was long thought to be a fault zone, is actually a lithological contact. It's the edge of the reef. So this texture has also been recognized at Gaina River. These reefs have been known for a long time and mineralization occurs in the upper peripheries and at the tops of these reefs. And at Kapushi, it occurs at the upper peripheries and tops of these reefs, as well as at the reef margins.
32:27 And those margins have been largely untested at Gainer River. And the idea is that fluids were focused along these reef margins, and you have large accumulations of massive sulfide at Kapuski on the reef margins. And we see potential for that geological environment producing massive sulfides at Gainer River that have never been tested. So to look at the target geometry in a little more detail at Kapushi, so Kapushi Mine, to step back, it has one of the highest grade zinc zones on Earth, the big zinc zone. Go and check it out on their website. It's about 35% zinc or so, extremely high grade massive sulfide, and they occur on the flanks of these near-protoerozoic carbonate reefs. And it's significant that they're near-protoerozoic.
33:23 It's quite unusual to find these reefs in near- protoerozoic rocks. They're only really known from Gainer River and Kapushi. But using this Kapushi mine as an analog for exploration that's going to inform of how we look within the search space is looking at these targets and looking at the geometry at capuchin to see what we might expect at Gena River. So on the left, we have a long section from Kapushi. That is showing the big zinc zone. On the left, it's the zinc grade. And on the right, the horizontal thickness. So that's within the plane of this roughly tabular deposit. It's quite an irregular geometry, but it's broadly tabular.
34:09 And that's about 600 meters or so in strike length and a width of about 200 meters. But if you flip that 90 degrees, and then you look at what appears like a cross-section view relative to the reef, it only has a thickness of up to about 100 meters. And it's quite irregular, quite variable. The long section on the left, you can see it has a core within that. It kind of looks like a fried egg. It's got a thicker center and thinner edges that thin to sort of 10 to 20 meters. But it's only in the sort of yolk of that egg that you see thicknesses 90 meters or more.
34:57 So what might we expect at Gainer River if this is an analog? So in a map here, we took those same dimensions and we look at the reef, which is colored blue in both the map and the cross section on this slide, and the off-reef rocks, So the rocks that have accumulated beside the reef and on top of the reef. It's going to be about 600 meters long, potentially, if it is an analog with capuche, and about 100 meters wide. And these reefs at Gainer River are relatively undeformed. The strata are quite flat line, which means that the vertical edges of these reefs are still pretty much vertical.
35:43 So if you look at a cross section through that, it's going to appear like the section AA through here. And we can imagine this conceptual capuchy-type target of these irregular massive sulfide zones accumulating on the margins of the reefs. And they'd only be about 100 meters thick in map view. So now let's look at some real geology at Gainer River. And this is geological map of the property. The important rocks to look at here are the blue ones. That kind of light sky blue is the reefs. And the margins of these reefs is where we would target for massive sulfide.
36:30 If you look at the Rio Tinto drill holes, those are marked by the black dots. You can see the grid drilling approach was used, a square spaced grid, and the spacing on that grid was about 610 meters or 2000 feet. There was a few areas where they drilled out around some of the better intersections to define what they called reserves, more like an inferred resource today, and define that historic estimate. But if you consider that 600 meter spacing, there's still a lot of room within there. So I'm now gonna highlight these reef margins in red. So you can see these would be the prospective areas for finding massive sulfides.
37:16 We have concentrated the drilling in the southeastern corner of the property, but there's also reefs off to the northwest and there could be reefs that are not exposed at surface that lay under the cover rocks to the reefs, the hard rock cover to these reefs. So the next slide, I'm going to focus on that bold box in the bottom right-hand corner and remove all the geology. So you're just going to see the reef margins and the drill holes. So this is what we see, the red outlines. These are the reef margins. And you can see that very few of these drill holes actually tested the reef margin location. So what might appear at first, like Rio Tinto have been in there, they grid drilled everything, they walked away because they didn't see potential for a high grade deposit.
38:08 On closer inspection, if you take the size of an expected target, if Kapushi is an animal, which you can see at the same scale in the inset box. And I want you to imagine lifting up that target and placing it anywhere within those red outlines. So you can see there's a lot of room left at Gainer River and a lot of these reef margin positions, which are still untested. And we anticipate testing these using an approach leveraging our experience with technology we've used at MacPaths. So again, this is a section view looking at the same kind of spacing that Rio Tinto used. And you can see they also use vertical drill holes. And for a target that's basically oriented vertically, it's just about the worst angle that you could test a vertical target, but their approach was testing stratiform layers within rocks that are mostly horizontal, so vertical holes would have been the best approach for that target.
39:17 An inclined hole would be a much better approach for testing some of these vertically-oriented reef margin mats of sulfide targets. This is the Same map with the geology pulled off. We've got the reef margins on there, and also some of the historic soil geochemistry. So in pink, we've got lead over 100 ppm. And in green, we've got zinc over 500 ppm. And look at the scale, 5 kilometers in the bottom left there. These anomalies are very extensive. Some of them are 6 kilometers in length, coincident lead and zinc soil anomalies, and many of them are located on top of these reef margin positions where we see the potential for massive sulfides and have not been tested by drilling.
40:06 And there's several reefs within this area. The faults, there's this predominance of northwest, southeast orientation of these faults and they seem to be following the margins of some of these reefs. And it could be that lithological contrast between the reef rocks and the off-reef rocks that's allowing fluids to be concentrated along these faults and along these contacts and are the best places to go and look for zinc lead mineralization. And we have another target out in the Northwest here, this lead anomaly. This is about 4 kilometers long and the peak values are up to about 2.5% lead in soil. It was only tested by 2 drill holes by Rio Tinto, and they walked away.
40:56 This, I think, and all the other reefs you can see here, are ideal targets for borehole muon tomography. And so this search space has been generated and The technology that we're going to use to try and find it should be much more effective than past methods that have been tried to find it. So previous exploration used expensive grid drilling. Doing that approach in a remote location like this is prohibitively expensive. But these massive sulfide targets are very dense. So we're going to use this property to try and find them with both gravity and beyond tomography. We'll also do some mapping in 3D and bring these historic data into 3D to try and target some of those reef margin positions and confirm that with some ground truthing.
41:53 And we anticipate a three-year approach. In the first year, doing the ground gravity surveys, doing a LiDAR survey so that we can compute the correct terrain corrections, which is extremely important in topography this steep. Gravity has been tried on the property before, but in the early seventies, the level of the terrain corrections that you would have got could be very basic terrain corrections, which would be erroneous at best and misleading at worst. But the level of terrain corrections that we can do with the very high resolution LiDAR data, with computing power that we have now, we can produce very accurate terrain corrections. And this was the approach that led us to success at Boundary West. The second year would be drilling pilot holes and deploying these borehole muon tomography detectors, or muon detectors, in these boreholes and following that up in the third year by drilling the highest priority targets.
42:59 So what is muon tomography? It is a brand new piece of technology that's using decades-old science, science that's been around for a long time, and for the first time applying it to exploration, to mineral exploration in the subsurface. So the technology has been miniaturized to a level where we can fit down an HQ-sized drill hole. And the yellow lines on this slide are drill holes with detectors daisy-chained down those drill holes, deploying multiple detectors in each hole. The lines that you can see coming from space, those are muons. They pass through the rock, and they can go at least 500 meters through the rock.
43:44 They can go potentially up to 1,000 meters at the kind of length of time that you would want to survey in an exploration application. And the muons are slowed down or deflected by denser rock. And this means that when you deploy detectors in a daisy-chain fashion like this, you're going to get the arrival direction and the number of muons that are arriving throughout your survey time. And the muons travel in straight lines. So this is a straight line imaging technique, the only straight line imaging technique available to geophysics. And if you deploy enough detectors around the targets, these things look upwards, about 60 degrees either side of the drill hole. So a cone pointing about 120 degrees upwards like this.
44:33 And they surveyed that entire volume of rock, detecting muons from different arrival directions. And if you have enough detectors surveying from different locations, You can then triangulate where these sort of shadows are in your arrivals of muons. Where are you getting spots where fewer muons are arriving because there's a dense body of rock blocking them. And you can invert these data. It's also possible to combine it with the gravity data and provide a combined inversion that's greater than the sum of its parts to produce a subsurface model of the density. And these massive sulfide deposits that we're targeting have a very high density contrast with the carbonate host drop and would be ideal candidates for being found with this muon tomography. So this is a search space that we've opened up. We can look down 500 meters or more, But you might think, well, why isn't gravity good enough? Well, gravity, you're only likely to see these kind of deposits down to about 100 meters, maybe 200 meters if you're lucky, before you start just reading background kind of readings.
45:46 So it opens up that search space between, say, 500 meters and 200 meters that you could not normally see with any other method. And the really good thing about this method is that it's quite precise spatially. So the follow-up drilling can precisely target blocks that you've measured in the subsurface to be dense. Gravity is a potential field method, so it kind of gives you a reading of everything that's below your gravimeter and everything kind of around it, but it's not directional. It doesn't say, OK, your anomaly's in this direction and this far down. But with muon tomography, we should be able to achieve those kind of targets. So by employing this at Gainor River, we believe that we can test this search space that we've opened with the new ideas about the geology. So it's a technology that's going to facilitate this relatively low cost and effective exploration.
46:50 So to sum that up, the search space we've identified, we think it's quite robust. There's clearly a very large zinc system up on the McKenzie platform on the edge of the Selwyn Basin. And this cutting edge technology has facilitated this precise, low-cost exploration plan that we anticipate carrying out at Gainor River. We think there's very good potential for high-grade massive sulfide deposits. And we want to take what we've done at Boundary Zone West and making a discovery there and try and replicate that by making a discovery at Gaynor River. Okay, thanks for listening everyone. I think we'll hand it back to you there, Dasha, for some questions. Yeah, we've got a bunch of questions here and if you have any questions feel free to submit them.
47:38 But our first question is, is FireMeanSyncs focused still on the Macmillan Pass? Yes, you know, we think about the quantum of money we'll spend at McMillan Pass here versus Ghana, where it would be, you know, probably 50 times just about being spent at McMillan Pass. So that is, you know, it's a, although a tremendous amount of exploration potential, it is a mature project, you know, in a study phase that, that's, you know, entering pre-permitting. So it absolutely remains the focus, but, you know, opportunistically, you know, when you're looking at acquisitions, you have to consider how much does this cost me? And is it dilutive or accretive? Gainer River was so cheap to acquire, it is absolutely accretive, and it was totally the right move to pick up.
48:28 Great, thank you. Yeah, Andrew's asking, As Macmillan Pass project is huge, is there a risk that you will not get approval on the basis of environmental regulations? Look, you know, as as a project gets larger and larger, of course, it gets more complicated to permit. But you look within the context of Yukon, you know, the pit at Boundary conceptually is not as big as Victoria Gold's pit at Eagle. You know, given it is certainly not within an order of magnitude of the pit that Western copper is intending to pit permit at Casino. So we'll certainly have our own unique issues as every project does, but I don't feel like we're at the sort of mega project stage. I think Howard's Pass, the nearby Howard's Pass, which was envisaging a pretty massive project with a lot of pits, was going to run into problems potentially.
49:24 I don't think we're there. So I, you know, permitting is never simple, but I think we can do it. Thank you. Is there a work plan for Gana River this summer? Yes, yeah. So at minimum, I think it will likely be a ground gravity survey and some mapping. Anything else, Jack, that's? Yeah, it'd be a minimum of that and perhaps a study on some of the controls and mineralization that will help us further target some of these systems. And how much of the Ghana River data do you have access to? We have a bunch of assessment reports, which will be laboriously digitized.
50:13 But I think, you know, the hope is that the various groups that have operated here might still have some data, and we might be able to find some of it. Is there anything else we have other than those assessment reports, Jack? Yeah, there's quite a lot of data available in assessment reports, but with any of these kind of historic projects, there's always this kind of loss of data over time. So sure, we don't have all of it, but our focus is going to be on acquiring new, high quality data that's going to inform the eventual Muon tomography survey. So that will be the LiDAR data, the ground gravity data, that you know even if we had that old ground gravity data it's going to be of limited use compared to the high-quality data, the new data that we'll be collecting.
51:06 Okay. Yeah, this question might have come in a bit earlier in the webinar, but Jim's asking, is there an update on the potential use of the sorting technology and move on data? So we have run an updated sorting study at Boundary Zone, and that hopefully is not too long. You know, a metallurgical report on Boundary from last year coming out. We did not successfully deploy the Muon sensors last year. As it turns out, the raw conditions in our project don't really allow for the deployment of the sensors down an uncased hole. So we're gonna try it with cased holes this year, but we expect to get some data this year.
51:54 Thank you. Raymond's asking, are you essaying mineralization for deleterious mineral materials such as mercury, selenium, and arsenic? Yes, absolutely. In fact, in May 2018, when we published the metallurgy at Tom & Jason prior to our PEA, you'll notice that that news release has an appendix that has a breakdown of the entire mineral content or elemental content of the expected concentrates. So you know with our project very high grade concentrate likely at Tom and Jason and very low iron you know the things that we watch out for are silica and mercury. The mercury being probably inching into the penalty level at Tom and Jason and likely to also be a low penalty level but still penalty level at boundary zone.
52:52 Thank you. James is asking what range might the payback period draw to assuming assuming a starter pit at boundary? I don't know. You know, I think that that would be a dangerous prediction for me to make anyways. But it was around 4 years after tax in the last study and a lot of that was driven by the fact that, yeah, look, I didn't need the upfront capital for the underground development, but that capital for the underground development had to come out of the first few years of cash flow because we only had a 2.5 year pit life. So, if you're able to build out the pit life further, and hopefully, you know, the ambition and fingers crossed we can make it happen is you've paid for the project, you paid it back before you're now sinking, you know, your free cash flow into underground development.
53:40 So that's what we're targeting. TBD if we hit it. You know, There's a lot of studies between that and how to figure that out. Right. A question for each of you from Tom. The first one for Brandon is why the capuchin analog? He says he understands the sulfide and reef themes, yet thinks that some will think that Fireweed is parallel, is being made because Ivanhoe Mines capuche is high profile. And the second question is for you, Jack, have you been to Rainier River? So I guess the first, you know, the capuche Gainer River comparison, that came from Elizabeth Turner and Dave Broughton, Dr. Dave Broughton of famously of Ivanhoe, right? So That is Ivanhoe scientists, geologists making that analog. You know, we didn't pluck it out of the air.
54:39 We understand the cynicism around companies saying, oh, we've got a zinc deposit. It must be like Red Dog or, you know, it must be like Capuchy. We have no idea if there's anything like Capuchy here. If there is, we hope to be able to find it, but that was not our comparison. And Jack, have you been to Raina River? So I have been there. I was there in early April this year staking it. But you know, in early April at Gaynor River, you're looking at several feet of snow on the ground. So in terms of the geology, I didn't get the chance to look at the geology of that. I've seen some of the drill core from the deposit. But, you know, I'd add to the Kapuski analog that you know, these are these are strong analogs that, as Brandon pointed out, the Ivanhoe geologists have made.
55:35 But the why question is still a big question. But I think it's good to think of these systems as a large mineral system approach and say, okay, instead of not just taking capuchy wholesale as a model and blindly applying that to a completely different place, is saying, OK, well, there's obviously a large amount of fluid flow across this area. There's hundreds of zinc-lead showings across the Mackenzie Mountains. Which areas should you focus on? Where should you target and follow up be? Gainer River really stands out amongst all those showings. Virtually all of them are hosted by Paleozoic rocks. These are hosted by Neoperozoic rocks along the margins of these reefs. And there's something special about the margins of those reefs and whether it's because they focus fluids because of some fundamental porosity or permeability characteristics of the rocks.
56:31 It could be a lithological contrast between the reef and the off-reef rocks that are making these zones more susceptible to forming faults and fluids flowing along those faults. But we still don't fundamentally know why the zinc is dropping out of these fluids. We know that there's pyrobitumin in some of these showings. And that suggests that hydrocarbons might have been involved in dropping out the zinc from the fluids. So do these things make good hydrocarbon traps, or is it purely a structural play? And some of these questions, I think that, you know, over the course of doing exploration at Kangaroo River, we'll start to try and address and answer and back up with some studies of our own.
57:18 We're just in the last minute here. How many meters do you expect to drill this summer? I think our estimate is 8,000-ish. You know, we could end up a little bit less. We couldn't end up with significantly more. You know, there's a lot of the luck of the bit in terms of, progress on each hole and, and how often do you run into the inevitable tricky situations, right? So, I, I'm not going to stake my reputation on it, but I think we'll get 8,000 meters done and hopefully more. All right, well, that is all the time we have for today. Thank you so much, Brandon and Jack, for taking us through the presentation and obviously this live Q&A. Thank you so much for everyone who joined in today and asked questions. If you do think of any following up questions after this webinar, Brandon's contact information is on the slide here.
58:13 So feel free to reach out directly to Brandon. I'm sure he'll be happy to follow up with you. Of course, there's also more information on their website, fireweedsinc.com. But before I just close things out, Brandon, do you have any final remarks? No, you know, please reach out If you have any questions, if they're geological, better emailing jack at fireweedsinc.com than me because you're not going to get a good answer from me. But keep following the company, it's going to be a huge 12 to 18 months for us.
