Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
0:36 Thank you for joining us, everyone. We'll be walking through Ashley Gold Corp. In particular, our main focus, which is currently the TAC patents, which is abutting the Goliath Gold Complex. Before I begin, forward-looking statements apply. Investors are asked to look at this or pause the video if you're viewing this after it's been recorded. It's also available on our website under the corporate presentation on the second slide. So we'll jump right into what we were working on. It's sort of been our main focus for the last 6 months and it will continue to be our focus into the majority of the 2026 year. The TAC patents sit abutting the NexGold Goliath Gold Complex, which is seen here in purple.
1:22 NexGold is the most advanced operator in the region, and they're currently doing 25,000 meters of info drilling on the Gold Lund deposit. They're probably advancing that into a feasibility stage asset and then looking to finalize permits for a build-out. We're in a very niche spot here. We'll talk a little bit more about the Taq patents. Patents basically gave the crown, it was basically a crown patent, so it was both the mineral and the surface rights were packaged together by the crown and given to the title holder, which is now Ashley Gold Corp. This would have happened in the time of the Dominion, so the late 1800s, and the patents were held throughout their lifespan by various operators, including some private individuals, which is how I ended up with the patents. I bought these patents for $190,000 from a private individual and vended them back to Ashley Gold Corp at cost, which was about 3.5 million shares at the time the deal was done.
2:31 Interestingly enough, I'll just sort of highlight this very quickly. The difference between a patent and a mining claim is a mining claim is still technically crown lend, but you have to maintain the mining claim with work credits per year. So a mining claim typically runs you about 400 bucks of reserve credits a year to keep pushing it forward, which means you have to consistently work the mining claims to keep them in good standing. Tax patents, the patents in general are different in that you just pay a low yearly maintenance tax to keep the patents in good standing. And this whole area costs us about 2 grand to keep in good standing and to keep title on. What was interesting was when we looked at when our geology team looked at this in the MLASP, there was actually $30,000 of reserve credits still on the patents.
3:19 So patents don't take, they don't require credits to be pushed forward. But those credits were sitting there from the last work program in 2002. So when you look at the acquisition price of 190,000, It also came with a certain level of work credits, which is nice to have. Patents are typically held by major mining companies, and we're very lucky and fortunate to have this in our portfolio. When we talk about the Dryden Gold District, in particular the Eagle-Wabagoon Belt in a future slide, we are the smallest operator by far in the district, but we do have a lot of upside built into our own portfolio. You can see here in terms of who's operating in the district. Obviously, Ashley Gold is there.
4:05 Next Gold, the most advanced, as I said when I opened this slide, Canora Land actually staked up against our southern flank when we were doing this deal to acquire the TAC patents. We've also got Dryden Gold, which is a huge player in the belt. They're doing more regional exploration work. And we also have a smaller player down south by one of our other projects, Dynasty Gold, and We'll get into that in a future slide. This map here was actually put out this morning in a press release highlighting TAC 2607 that was just submit for assays. We do also have 39 grab samples pending, 31 along strike of our newly identified and newly discovered Northern Trench Zone, which assayed up to 398g per ton in grab sample.
4:54 That is not only the highest grade grab sample in company history, but also in the whole history of the patents. We're incredibly excited to see where that leads us. It's also a little bit of a different mineralization style than what we've been drilling. You see both historically and where we did our first phase 1 and phase 2 drilling, it was centered on a resistive body, which is this light blue blob here. This actually sits within a Kurzfeldspar periphery unit, which is almost fully encapsulated by the tack patents. So the reason that this ground was patented back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, is because early explorers recognized the geological significance of this unit and were actually doing large-scale trench programs along the chargeability, really following up on what they probably saw as visible gold.
5:47 Since then, in terms of follow-up exploration by other companies, examples being in the 1940s where some other trenches were done by Lac Minerals, which became Barrick, as well as in the 1980s by Cominco. Cominco didn't really expand any of those trenches in the zones, but they did some of the best detailed mapping that exists on the property and that we still have today. So they didn't follow up on any of these zones that we've now sort of rediscovered and it leaves a lot of exploration upside for us on the table. There's some highlights here. Last drilled in 2002, only 11 historic holes were put down. 10 out of the 11 had really strong Gold mineralization, wide intervals of this low-grade Gold you can see here in the right. And that's the trend that you'd see in a resistive body. It's more of a large-scale tonnage target.
6:42 But now where we're seeing some added upside is this chargeability trend on the north of the resistive body that has the potential to host higher-grade Gold. It's more of a brecciated quartz vein, which is both rare and extremely exciting from an exploration perspective. Some historic drill hole highlights as well on the left there. In the D99Z zone, the top intercept was over 30 grams of 2-gram material. In the 1990s, this wasn't considered exceptional. By today's standards, it would be. That actually wasn't enough for them to continue exploration on this package. Whereas by today's standards, it certainly would be. In the 6 7 zone, which is 350 meters west of the D99Z, Southern Rio did 2 holes in 2002 and intercepted the highest grade intervals ever encountered on the tack patterns.
7:38 So we have 3 holes pending from our phase 2 drill program. 2 of them are already in the lab. And the third is being logged as we speak. There's a fourth hole that was designed to test under 2 historic trenches here, and this hole will also be logged, but it's going to be logged last.
8:01 When we acquired this property in early 2026, we moved very fast on exploration efforts. We deployed Abitibi Geophysics in early February for their 3D or Vision IP survey. You can see here in the top left, we have to cut the IP survey lines a little short because the overall resolution gets lower as the IP lines get shorter. So we can't extend the grid west onto NexGold's claims, but we can extend the grid east onto the Bernhardt claims once they're permitted. So that's something that we're going to be looking at doing. We've also received the finalized IP report, which highlights a secondary high-priority resistivity trend moving east onto our mining claims.
8:50 So Abitibi Geophysics actually prioritized that above where we found the 398 grab sample and the chargeability. That was detailed as a 3rd or 4th priority, so a lower priority. However, we have our equipment in this region and obviously based on the magnitude of gold found in those grab samples, it's going to be a near-term priority. What's interesting though about the northeast section here, where the IP has now highlighted a secondary resistivity trend, not only has there never been any historic trenches, there's never been any historic sampling or mapping either. In those old logs, both mainly in the 2002, although I believe a little bit earlier, when they went in to do any mapping, there was, they've mapped it as deadfall. So there was forestry that had blown over onto the ground and they couldn't get in to do any mapping.
9:45 So that will eventually become a high priority for us to get in there and to try and discover what old operators weren't able to do, weren't able to look at. Something that's also very important is While our focus is currently really zoned in on the TAC patents, which you can see here, it's on the southwest extension of the burnt hut project. There is also a lot of upside built into our mining claims, which extend to the northeast of those patents. Now you can see here from, so I should also clarify that the TAC patents themselves cover a 1.4 kilometer stretch of strike and about a 500 meter wide unit overall within the patents. When we start talking about extending to the Northeast, we have an additional 11 kilometers of strike that remains unexplored.
10:38 And between the edge of the TAC patents to where Ashley drilled in early 2025, there's a 5.5 kilometer strike that exists. And that's labeled on the map there. Where it gets interesting is 5.5km away, we hit 65m of 0.16g per tonne gold in a two-hole program in early 2025. It's not an exceptional number but that's a lot of smoke for a two-hole program. And it indicates that there is a high level of fluid flow, you know, throughout our mining claims, which will require eventual follow-up. We're still permitted for drill pad construction in that area, although it's not a priority as I alluded to already. To draw your attention to this here, so this is where those 2 drill holes went down, and we followed up in the spring of 2025 as well, and we actually extended, it's not labeled here, but there's a width of the zone that was extended by surface grab samples. It's about 300m wide.
11:41 You can see here that we extended the known gold mineralization on surface by about 650 meters. So again, this is on mining claims, it's not a priority for us. Our focus is on the TAC, but additional exploration upside is built in to this project. And I should also clarify, when we're doing work on the TAC patents, we're able to apply work credits and then push them to the mining claims. So, we're doing work in the TAC patents, that work will be credited to our mining claims. So, while it's not a priority, it will stay in our portfolio. And this property is good for multi-year. It has a multi-year credit reserve on it. So now that we went through what's really exciting us, we'll talk a little bit more about the cap structure, additional projects and management.
12:34 So that's my quote up on the screen there, but really I'm heavily aligned to the shareholders best interests holding just under 20% of the float. All of those shares were purchased either in the open market through every private placement, except for the last one, due to how high my ownership got and through the property vend of the TAC patents. Really what this quote summarizes is, I want our company, Ashley, to be as transparent with shareholders as possible. And obviously a big consideration when we're in this industry in particular is dilution. And so when we dilute, I'm also very mindful to try and add as much value as possible with those dollars so that the dilution can be offset by some type of work that's value add.
13:22 And obviously the management team shares this perspective. We'll talk briefly about the cap structure now. So we talked about management. I'm not the only one who owns shares. Darcy has numerous shares as well and the other directors do as well. So it's about a 22% management position, which is quite nice. Excuse me. A lot of the additional shares lie with high net worth investors, so about 33% is captured there. We do have a little percentage of the float, it's about 2 million now, tied up with Manu, which is a uranium company. And that's sort of, it was from a property VEM that I'm gonna speak about in a future slide. The rest of it's with retail. So we've got about 42% of the float with retail.
14:13 Now, when you look at our Cap table here, you know, outstanding shares, 94 million, fairly sizable warrant count of 33 million with an average strike price of 12. So there is a lot of, you could say, runway between our current stock price and where those warrants would come into play. Considerable average daily volume on the three-month
14:35 horizon at just over 400,000 shares. We have a strong treasury position, you know, over 300,000 in cash, as well as roughly over 300,000 in equity of a company that we fund a project out to. Really important here, debt position of 0, liabilities is also 0. We keep our accounts payable extremely tight. There's about 10,000 in there that's aging from 3 years ago that we'll look at eventually paying out. But other than that, there is 0 liability and 0 in accounts payable. And I want to highlight this to anyone listening on the call, who's, you know, an active investor, it's important to look at debt loads because at the end of the day, you can essentially convert debt to shares, number 1, or you have to raise enough money in terms of shares to cover the debt, number 2.
15:26 Ashley has neither of those to play with. So our value in terms of our shares is what it is. And we don't have to account for future dilution to cover debt loads. So that's something very strong. It's a very strong point to make when we look at how strong our balance sheet is. I annotated this chart a little bit and really it's just to summarize what's been getting the market excited with the Ashley Gold story. Quite frankly it's it's often involves work. People like to see that we're working and they like to see results And I also highlighted when we closed our last, or previous financing, which was a life, which ended up getting fed back to the market. So I will say quite confidently that life financings will be off the table moving forward.
16:16 I have annotated here when I purchased 4 million shares, which was some overhang, but I also didn't annotate purchasing just over 1 million as well from the life financing. So we'll talk a little bit about the portfolio and then we'll talk about where some of the why that Uranium company had some of those shares. On the left you can see our Ontario portfolio which is heavily centered on the Eagle, Wabagoon, Greenstone belt. You can see that we're one of the smallest players within this belt, even though we hold highly prospective ground. So the burn hut with the tack, budding the next gold, Goliath gold complex, Dalton Gardner, sitting sort of nestled into the Dryden Gold, and then our Howie project, which borders Dynasty's Pelham deposit, or Thundercloud deposit, which is a fairly advanced project.
17:09 On the right, you'll see a BC portfolio that we acquired from a uranium company. That's also how I got started with Ashley Gold. We've since put it out under option for, I believe, either a 250 or 300% gain on what we acquired it for. So this will be $1.3M in equity of that $1.475M, and the rest will be cash. The optioner is working on putting together a 43-101 tech report to bring this property into, to use it as a listing property. And they're also on the hook for all expedentiaries up until that point. So they're actually mobilizing a crew within a week to do some work on Vertebrae Ridge. And the work amount is probably about 70 to 100 grand to keep those claims in good standing that we didn't need to spend when our focus is heavily on the Dryden area.
18:04 And In terms of assets, this is something that I forget quite often. I forget to mention all of our mining claims patents, they're 100% owned. So we don't have to make any option payments. There's no option share issuances occurring. It's all 100% owned. And why that's important is because there's not gonna be any shares being fed back to us over time. There's also not a need to raise a large amount of hard dollars to make option payments. So when you consider that in the context of our market cap, again, it makes us quite attractive. I'll quickly run through some of the project specifics here. The Howey project borders the Dynasty Pelham deposit to the east, shares very similar geology. We've done a lot of, you know, previously last summer, this was our project of focus, we were doing a lot of work on this. We did 2 channel sampling programs on 2 different zones.
18:57 In particular, the Twilight Zone returned a weighted average of 0.62 grams per ton over the 23 meters that we channeled. And actually when you add in the silver credits that moved up to like 0.75 grams per ton AU equivalent over 23 meters weighted average. So Decent numbers for bulk tonnage. The historic core that we also located further supported the bulk tonnage idea is that we re-assayed and averaged 0.33 over 25 meters on the edge of our IP target. Howie's got a multi-year reserve credits once we filed the drilling that we did in the winter, so it won't be a priority going forward, especially with the equipment parked on the tack. Dalto Gardiner is sort of a higher priority target versus the Howie, especially now that it's fully permitted.
19:49 It's a 7m wide quartz vein within a 20m plus wide deformation zone. This is actually what appears to be a splay off of the main Manitou fault, so it's quite interesting from that perspective. There's a really old historical non-compliant resource of about 20,000oz of Gold. This is no longer true, but it used to be our highest grade grab sample within the Dryden region of 106g per tonne Gold. We actually exceeded that when we did channel samples. We hit 130 grams per tonne over a metre and 71.3 grams per tonne over a metre, respectively. That's about a metre and a half away from each other in a test pit that we dug up when we were on site. So really good numbers from the Alto.
20:35 And then that's no longer true about the highest graded grab sample because we pulled 398 grams per ton in a grab off of the tack paddocks. So Like you saw on the prior slides, about 12 kilometers of perspective strike. We're really focusing in on the TAC patents. Our highest interval so far was 1.1 grams per ton over 28 meters from surface. And we also have 2 holes from the higher grade 6, 7 zone pending with a visual shown here, which is TAC 2608. This is a little bit more of a dive into the Alto Gardner project, where those high grade gold numbers were cut out of channels. So, you know, there's some historic IP here and historic VLF surveys overlaying on our mining claims. You can see that there are additional bodies along strike to the southwest and they will require follow-up when we're back on the ground.
21:31 There are also some VLF conductors which appear to be stacked, so that's also quite perspective. This is now fully permitted for drill pads and IP lines to be cut and IP generators to be run. So, you know, obviously pending funding and when we finish what we want to do on the TAC, this will become a high priority project for Ashley. In terms of management, we've got a very strong and dedicated team. We're led by CEO Darcy Christian, who has numerous years of exploration experience, typically in technical and advisory roles, as well as a lot of experience in the oil and gas side. He's also achieved his Master of Science in Geoscience from the University of London. I, myself, I have a lot of work and experience in the capital markets, credit collections industry as well as in the industrial engineering side in warehouse management and continuous improvement developments as well as software startup stuff there, but I don't really talk about that too much.
22:35 We added Chris Wolfenberg to our director list, a very talented lawyer and partner of Denton's, and he's been involved in a lot of small mining companies for many years. He's a valuable insight and he gives us a lot of legal guidance for free, which is, you know, always nice to have. Paul Rozek is our CFO. He's a CPA. It's great to have Paul on the team. And he does a lot of our, obviously, all of our financial statements, but also all of our flow-through documentation. So we save a lot of money by using Paul and we like that. Rounding out the discussion, we've got our field team, which is comprised of Shannon Barrett and William Curran. Shannon is a very talented PGO. He's credited with some discoveries as well as a lot of work in different Copper-Gold systems.
23:25 William Curran is a very driven individual. He's got over 40 years of experience in the exploration field. He also leads a lot of our operational initiatives including planning for drilling. So Will's a very valuable member of our team. We've got 2 advisors as well, Jody DeRouge, PGO. He runs the DeRouge Geological Consulting Firm, and he's also credited with several discoveries in Canada. Colin Christensen is another advisor, and he's been in the resource space for over 40 years, and he's worked in a variety of board positions and he's well connected from the financing side as well. So that sort of wraps up our presentation and I hope that gave some insight into who we are at Ashley Goldcorp.
24:15 Perfect, Thank you so much, Noah. Great presentation. We'll dive into the Q&A. And you just finished off with the team. But I do like to learn more about the individuals. I'll let you talk about yourself here a little more. Your background, you stated industrial engineering, software startups and capital markets. So what drew you to the junior gold exploration space and to building Ashley in particular? Well, I've always been very interested in junior exploration. I started investing when I was 18, actually, and I quickly moved from large caps, so blue chip companies, to micro caps, especially in the gold exploration space. It was a natural fit. I've stayed following the industry for the last 10 years.
25:04 Great. Now, on the June 30th release on Hole TAC 26.8, you described it as the best hole drilled on the property to date after viewing the core in person. So What stood out to you when you had it in your hands? It was just a very wide interval of perspective mineralization. You've got different types of alteration, a lot of sulfide content, and probably the nicest...well, There was also a really nice zone of really potassium-rich, bright pink, like Salmon Pink, which I think we did see in the D99Z zone. It wasn't necessarily new, but there was also a lot of sulfides riddled in that potassium-rich zone. What really made me most excited about that hole was it's like this buff beige zone and it was detailed in the historic logs from southern Rio in 2002.
25:58 That's where they intersected their best gold numbers. Fingers crossed that that could continue for us as well. Now jumping to the northern trench zone discovery came from prospecting old trenches that were dug by hand long before modern operators arrived. So Can you walk us through how your team decided to take a closer look at the ground there, where companies like Cominco had walked past? I don't think Cominco necessarily walked past them, but they might have just sampled the top of the trenches once they were slumped in from the 40s. They might have missed the higher-grade Gold that we managed to find, or will manage to find, by digging deeper in the trenches by hand. That's sort of how the discovery occurred on the ground. In terms of what led us to target that zone, it was lighting up on an IP cross-section.
26:51 So we were drilling in the 6-7 zone, but there was also a really strong Gold Anomaly Index on the North, which lined up with those trenches. And you have the finalized IP report now in hand and phase 2 assays pending. How are you thinking about prioritizing targets as you plan out phase 3? So one of our large priorities will be to step out on either side of the 6-7 zone, both to test for continuity and to get a better understanding of the structural environment. But we also will have additional meterage to poke around the NTZ zone for, you know, to test that high-grade gold grab sample. It will be nice to get the last 31 samples that are pending, sort of the extension that our prospector followed, a long trend, and should those be continually running gold, then that'll instill a lot more confidence of adding meterage to the Northern Program.
27:47 And sticking on that thread, an individual that registered for the event was wondering how many meters is each phase? So each phase, you know, based on the size of our team, it's good to keep each phase around 500 meters. It gives us time to properly log it, cut it and assay it before going back to commit more meterage. We can push based on our treasury, we can push deeper if we like what we're seeing, and we can do additional holes, but keeping it around that 500-meter mark is working well for us. What's your opinion on the prospectivity of the Wabagoon Greenstone Belt for gold and perhaps even copper? I think it's very high.
28:35 I think Base metals in particular have been underexplored in the belt. It's very highly prospective for Gold, as you've seen from Dryden Gold, which put out a really big regional district scale Golden Till survey. There's a lot of trends lighting up that line up with the Greenstone belt itself. Interestingly enough, I'm an advisor to Cascade Copper. I think they're one of the first companies since Naranda and Kaminko to be looking in the area for Copper. I do think that base metals will have a significant piece of the puzzle in terms of that greenstone belt.
29:22 And I think that some of the stuff that Cascade has put out has already started to suggest that. Great. We have a final question here before and we'll wrap up. So take this one as the closing remarks. So what are the catalysts that lie ahead as well? But you've spoken about running Ashley the way you would have wanted as a shareholder yourself. So how, and since you are one of the larger shareholders of the company, so how does that philosophically shape the day-to-day decisions you make, especially around how often and how openly you update the market? Yeah, so I think I did mention this briefly in the presentation when I was on my quote, but exactly what you said, like frequent updates. I think all shareholders appreciate that. They like to see what we're doing.
30:11 And then, you know, probably the biggest negative sentiment to any explorer is when you're diluting, but dilution is a part of the process. So when we get funds, ensuring that funds are used to drive value, which will hopefully negate the impact of dilution. And I think those 2 things in particular align me well with shareholders. Great Noah, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day. We look forward to hearing future updates from you. Great presentation, great story. For people that tuned in a little late, the replay will be available within a couple of hours here, so look out for that. And when I close off this tab here, it will request you for, or it will ask you if you want to have a meeting with the Ashley Gold team, just feel free to submit that if you would like to meet with Noah or the team and I'd be happy to pass that information along.
31:03 But thank you for joining us, Noah, thank you for the presentation and we look forward to future updates. Thanks Kyle, talk soon.
