Replay available

The Future to Come: 2021 Drill Plans Explained

Join us for a great event!

Tue, June 8, 2021 at 11:00 AMendedReplay
The Future to Come: 2021 Drill Plans Explained
Company
Dolly Varden Silver Corporation
Date
Tue, Jun 8, 2021, 11:00 AM ET
Replay
Watch the replay on this page · 39 min

On 6ix: 6ix.com/event/the-future-to-come-2021-drill-plans-explained

Replay

Transcript

Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.

0:08 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Dolly Varden Silberkorps Live Investment Summit today, hosted by 6. I'm pleased to introduce our speakers today. We have Sean Kunkun, CEO, President and Director, and Robert Van Egmond, Chief Geologist. Sean and Robert walk us through a company presentation, and then we will be accepting questions live. So as a reminder, you can submit your questions

0:32 at any time on the Q&A panel on the right hand side of the screen, and we'll get to them after the presentation. And as always, the summit is being recorded, and you can watch it afterwards on SIX.com. So without any further ado, I'll hand it over to you, Sean. Thank you, Dasha. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. It's a beautiful day here in sunny BC in June. The snow is melting and we're ready for a very, very exciting and aggressive exploration campaign at Dolly Varden Silver. As the title says here, we're on a quest for 100 million ounces of high-grade pure silver in BC's Golden Triangle. Our trading symbols are here on the left, both the Canadian and the US.

1:18 And throughout the presentation, both myself and our Chief Geologist, Rob Van Egmont, will be making some forward-looking statements.

1:27 High level, just to remind the audience here, We went through a presentation recently with a sixth audience, but just as a recap here, Dullivard & Silver is a pure play on silver. We have a past producing historic silver mine located in BC's Golden Triangle. The properties produced 20 million ounces of high-grade silver, predominantly from the Torbrett mine. This is exceptionally high-grade pure silver, close to 500 grams per ton coming out of Torbrett. What we have in a modern resource estimate that was published in 2019 is 44 million ounces in a resource estimate.

2:14 We've got the bulk of those ounces in the indicated category and at the Torbert mine. So we have 2 styles of mineralization on the property and exceptional high grades. High level here on the right hand side of the screen. We are in what is known as the Golden Triangle. So this is an area in Northwest British Columbia. It has a long history of some of the richest, highest grade gold and silver mines on the planet. And the 2 big producing mines right now are Predium's Bruce Jack mine, which is a very, very large high grade gold producer. And then in the northern part of the triangle, we've got the Red Crisp mine. So What we've seen here in recent years is we've seen a resurgence and a reawakening of some of the past treasures of the Golden Triangle. So some of the greatest gold mines and silver mines on the planet, including SK Creek and Premier, have now been reawakened by companies like Skeena and Ascot. So we've seen tremendous investor appreciation.

3:24 Companies like Skeena have gone from a $30 million valuation to an $800 million valuation. So what we're trying to do at Dolly Varden is very similar at what some of the northern companies have done here, which is reawaken past treasures. So if we zoom into the area, we're located here at the southern part of the Golden Triangle. Zooming in on the left hand side of the screen here, our silver endowment is wedged between it sandwiched between Furies Homestake Ridge deposit and Hecla's Kim's Kutch Holdings. So, there's this is a very perspective area. It's got tremendous infrastructure. We've got a road that comes down to Alice Arm. We've got access to power, access to a port. So tremendous infrastructure and tremendous endowment.

4:17 So we are on a path to reawakening the Dolly Barton Silver Project, and there's a tremendous amount of prospectivity. We're gonna get into our plans for the 2021 drill campaign. We've got ample treasury, We've got north of $21 million in the bank. So we're well, well financed to, to outline a very aggressive two-year program. So I will now pass on this part of the presentation to our chief geologist, Rob Van Egmont, and Rob will take you through our resource and where we're going to be drilling. Yeah, all right, thanks, Sean. Yeah, we're looking forward to getting started this year on our drilling. We do have crews getting camp ready right now for the arrival of the drill in a few weeks.

5:08 We do barge everything in, so that's sort of our start date when the barge arrives on the property, and that should be near the end of the month. So we right now we have a announcing the start of our program but we'll be focusing on both upgrading our resource at Torbert which is which is what's shown here as well as exploration. I'll get into the details of what we'll be looking for in a moment here. But first we'll take a look at the resource that we do have. So this is a nice asset to have on top of the exploration potential on the rest of the property. We do have, like Sean said, about 44Moz.

5:57 33 of those are in the indicated, so We're well advanced on getting our confidence up on the resource. Most of the ounces of Silver are at Torbert. You can see here about 25Moz of that is in the indicated. We've spent the winter remodelling the Torbert deposit and going over different scenarios, high-level mining scenarios and possibilities. It's looking good for a bulk tonnage style mining method because of the thicknesses that we see at Torbert. It's a volcanogenic layered deposit and then it's cross cut by epithermal veins.

6:44 Our thicknesses are pretty good at Torbert and we're seeing that a lot of the resource is actually captured in large sort of stopes. So we're not going after narrow veins here. Yeah, so we announced a couple of days ago or yesterday that this program is commencing. It's a two-year or two-phase program. We'll be concentrating on upgrading Torbert, So that's moving what's in the inferred into the indicated and at the same time trying to expand out areas where the inferred and indicated sort of is up against the edge of the model. So it's still open to depth and off to the side.

7:34 So the drilling that we've planned there is a combination of upgrading, and then those holes will continue past the edge of the deposit. And quite often you'll get good surprises like we did last year when we drilled some areas that were highly inferred. The drill spacing is a lot wider in the inferred zone, so there's always room for expansion between those holes. In addition to advancing Torbert, on the exploration side of things, On the property scale, we have a large alteration belt associated with the Silver Zone that we'll be testing, as well as on the Western side, we're developing a Gold Copper system that we have a few holes in from last year and we'll be taking a look a little bit deeper down plunge and see if we can expand that out as well.

8:27 So right now our first phase is at 10,000 meters approximately And that will be getting us some more details to do for their planning on the infill and then expanding on any discoveries. So just from a bird's eye view here of the property, the main deposits are in red, little flags there, they're the 4 deposits that do make up our resource. And then in the green, The green outline is geological formation called the Hazelton Formation. That's a Jurassic package of rocks. In this case, it's mainly volcanics. We do have some sediments in the center of the valley, as you can see down the middle of the valley.

9:17 And that's probably 5 to 6 kilometers of strike length. And it's a large anticline. So we have 2 sides, 1 on the West and 1 on the East. That's sort of either side of the anticline that we can be testing. And as you can see, the black dots are all the different showings that we have outlined from historic work, and they're all confined mainly to that Hazelton package of rocks. And that's the same package of rocks that hosts all the precious metal deposits that Sean was mentioning earlier within the Golden Triangle. So it's a Jurassic basin fill, Eskay Rift period mineralization.

10:04 So The 4 deposits, the Dollyvard, Torbert, North Star and Wolf are mainly down in the southern end here. Starting with Torbert, We did some modelling this winter, high-level engineering, looking at possible mining methods. We isolated out areas where we have large zones of inferred resource. The confidence in that area is a little lower because of the drill hole spacing. This year we've planned out our holes to target those areas and hopefully be converting a lot of that to indicated. It's not always possible to convert 100%, but we've laid our holes out in such a manner that we're intercepting as much of the inferred as possible. So you can see in this diagram, the purple areas are large blocks of inferred resource within our block model. The block model is in blue here, that's our resource as stated before, and we'll be targeting these purple areas. So while we're drilling this, we'll be going through areas that don't have a lot of drilling within them. So, you know, inevitably you're going to be running into a mineralization between holes that you didn't know was there.

11:29 Such as, Like last year, we drilled a hole that went through a series of lenses and it turned out to be 1 large package. Again, this points towards lower cost, bulk, long-hole, open-stoked style mining, which is what you need in this area to get the ore out of the ground. Rob, before you move on, just one comment I'd like to make, and this is one of the big surprises from the off-season work. When you get high-grade systems like this, often they're potty. But one of the features here and one of the big surprises was just the wide nature of this ore body. Dolly's come up with drill intercepts that were going for 60m, returning half kilo grades consistently throughout. So, this is a really big, wide ore body and it's quite unique.

12:24 You look at a lot of counterparts at this grade and they're tiny pods and they lack continuity and they're difficult to mine. That is not a feature of this deposit. So we're highly encouraged and that's why we're moving Torbert ahead. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also with this bulk style of mining, your grade control is easier because you're taking out larger packages of rocks. So, you know, you might have pods of sulfides or a higher grade, but if you're mining a large block that all gets blended to an average grade closer to what your resource is, as opposed to an up and down trade going into the mill.

13:13 Part of the Torbert work is also starting to drill down plunge. We do have holes north of Torbert and south of Torbert that have indications that that horizon continues. But our main exploration vector here is an alteration zone that we have from airborne radiometrics. So we've taken out the potassium spectrum from the radiometrics and that's what's shown in purple here. This is a side view so we're looking across the valley and we have the radiometrics draped on the hillside. Then underneath you can see the Torbert deposit to the right, the larger ice cream scoop shaped deposits dipping at about 38 degrees to the north.

14:06 And then Wolf is off to the left or north on this photo. That's more of an epithermal style, but it's sitting at the southern end of another one of these potassium alteration zones. And the potassium alteration also is logged in our drill holes, so we have a three-dimensional picture of this alteration zone, and it's indicative of heat flow or, you know, volcanogenic sort of seafloor, happy thermal type layers that get put out. So instead of a vein, it's being put down on a semi-consolidated sort of seafloor with volcanic ash being piled on top of it. And those alteration heat cells keep going and give you that potassium alteration zone which here is the surface showing and it's a coincidence with sodium depletion which is another indicator for the volcanogenic style mineralization. So we'll be working our way along that stratigraphic horizon that hosts Torbert. We call it the Torbert horizon.

15:12 And it plunges down underneath the valley. And From our work this winter, we've modeled it underneath these sediments that lay in the bottom of the valley. Even though on surface our exploration of that alteration zone ends at the bottom of the valley, We've modeled it now that it dips underneath the sediments, and we'll be checking that out this summer. So here we've just zoomed in on Torbert a little bit, just to take another look at where we'll be infilling. You can see here the historic mining, the little black horizontal lines are the different levels. This mined out area in sort of a lighter pink colour was from 1949 to 1959.

16:01 And like Sean said, about 18 million ounces were taken out at this time. You can see the drilling has expanded that out quite a bit. We've found offsets that were close to the workings just by doing some structural work in past seasons, and we'll be expanding those this year, and as well as working down the plunge. And you know, Rob, what's exciting for me here is, you know, if you look at Torbritt, you've got a 50 million ounce high-grade silver system, right? That's silver deposit. That's 1 of 4 mines that make up the resource. You know, Wolf, Dullivard, Norstar are others. And the exploration potential to reproduce another Torbrett on the property is the real prize and the real upside for shareholders.

16:53 We believe there's a lot of growth at Torbert, but finding another Torbert, and along this Torbert horizon, there's several potential Torbert-like opportunities. Just finding 1 would take us through 100Moz. Exactly. That exploration on that alteration belt, we have 4 and a half kilometers of strike length where that alteration goes up the valley. So yeah, the potential for finding another torrent is still out there. And now that we've sort of opened up the whole area underneath the sediments, that adds another kilometer width.

17:41 And this drill hole that you highlighted here, Rob, 244, almost 50 meters and over 300 grams of silver, This was a surprise. We were relying on some 1960s drilling in the resource estimate that was really understating both the grade and the thickness. As we go through this exercise to upgrade Torbritt and bring more of those ounces into the measured indicated category, we're seeing grades that are higher than what we have represented in our 43-101. So, in addition to growing, expanding, and extending, we're also seeing those grades go higher. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's an inevitable result of infill drilling, that you get more information and some pleasant surprises quite often.

18:35 So outside of Torbert, and that horizon which is on the western side of the valley that we'll be following and underneath those sediments in the bottom of the valley, We'll also be going towards the west where we had some good intercepts of gold and copper mineralization. This is more of a premier style deposit with multiple phases of veins and breccia quartz-cerosite-pyrite alteration. It's a higher temperature system and there's lower Silver volumes or amounts on the Western side, but the gold and the copper picks up. I just want to reiterate here because, you know, a lot of the audience may not know this, but there is a high grade million ounce gold deposit on our Western border. So that home straight ridge trend is coming on to the Western side of our property. And that's, that's what we're looking to, you know, we focused a lot on the, on the silver trend here, but there will be an emphasis. And we did make, we did make a discovery, a copper gold discovery last season that we want to build upon this year.

19:52 There is tremendous Gold potential on this Western belt. Oh yeah, exactly. Like you pointed out on those first location slides, this isn't just a single property. This is a whole trend where you know a lot of these properties are all part of the same system. It's it's sort of a mini little SK system offset from sort of the Northern larger areas, but all the rocks, the ages and styles of mineralization are the same. So, you know, besides our property, we have a fury to the North, and then we do have a porphyry systems off to the east, which all tie into it. It's the heat source for all of this. It's not just the Dolly Varden property, but the whole neighborhood has a whole series of deposits and mineralization over a 25-kilometer stretch.

20:52 We have a few areas that we haven't had any drilling yet. We're calling that the Southern Gold Belt. That's off the end of the main gold belt where we made some discoveries last year and it's something that has some surface showings. A few grams, I think it's up to 8 grams gold and 3% copper. That's more of an epithermal style, similar to what we would see at premier with sort of multi phases of brecciation and veining so we're excited to go pop some holes into that for the first time and see what's that depth. Like I said, we've done a lot of work this winter on modeling and part of that is taking some geophysics airborne that was flown in 2012 and that's being remodeled given new geological constraints.

21:49 So we've remodeled the geology and then applied that to the geophysics and the new inversions have pointed us in directions and pleasantly enough at depth below the gold showings that we have, there's large resistivity which is indicative of silicification, so you know that veining and brecciation and quartz, ceracite, pyrite flooding would show up as resistivity. You can see on the left side or western side, the large red semi-circle, that would be our target at depth. We'll see if that veining that we hit on surface expands out towards the depth.

22:39 Rob, have you ever had a busier off-season than 2021? I think all the engineering studies, you've got a larger team to work with this year. All the geological work that was done generating all these targets. I just want to let all the viewers know and our shareholders, we've had one of the most intense off-seasons. We are going into this drill program not only equipped with the Treasury, but we've got a target-rich environment here and a lot of tremendous science. And we've got a great team that have produced some tremendous, tremendous drill holes, locations.

23:25 And I'm very, very excited to see what we're gonna be able to come up with this year. Yeah, no, it's really, really stepped up the game. And the exciting thing about this year is that these targets are all, you know, that had multiple people looking at it from all different angles, geophysics, engineering, geology, structural, and putting them together and coming up with areas that are highly prospective. That's what's pretty exciting about this year. So, I look forward to getting those drills turning. You know, we're pretty blessed. We've got a world-class team that Rob heads as our Chief Geologist, but in addition, we've got some very, very great advisors.

24:10 We've had people like Jody Gibson and Ryan Waymark and Rob McLeod as a director, Don Byrack. It's been all hands on deck and you know it's great methodology into generating targets both around Torbritt but also on the exploration side. You know in terms of big bulk, when, yeah go ahead Rob. Oh sorry yeah just to add to bulk, another thing about this season that's quite exciting is last year we were the only company drilling in the area. This year, there's 5 other companies, including Heckler, Libero, Fury, Goliath. So in the case here, we'll talk about Big Bulk. Those are the porphyries off to the east that we were talking about. We'll have people in the neighbourhood drilling nearby and we'll be getting more information from that as well.

25:09 You wanted to mention Big Bulk? Yes, Big Bulk is a porphyry target that we own half the target and Libero has option the other half and they're going to be drilling. So, we've got just as Rob mentioned with Fury, with Hecla, with Goliath and literally on our property border, we've got a carried option here with Libero's drilling. We'll stay focused on the high-grade silver and we'll look at the Western Gold belt, but we've got a free carry here with Libero's drilling. Exactly. It just adds to having a little bit of every style of mineralization in this belt.

25:58 Porphyry, gold and silver, volcanogenic, epithermal. The best geology in the world and the best endowment in the world means nothing if you don't have a social license. And the one thing that we need to highlight here is we are a founding member of the BCT Regional Mining Alliance. We've got strong relations with the Nishka. A third of our workforce is from Nishka Nation and we're looking, continuing to look at ways to bring the Nishka in, you know, as partners and really make this a win-win for the province, for the Nishka, for the local communities around the property and for our shareholders.

26:45 And summarizing, this is, Dolly Varden is the vehicle for silver investors. You know, this is maximum leverage to rising silver prices. You know, I mentioned silver was up 44% last year. Dolly Varden shares were up over 300%. So this is, it's truly acting as it should, which is a strong leverage to a rising silver price and with the opportunity of discovery. So where we can enhance that performance is by adding more ounces with the drill bit. We've got a great management team. What makes us very unique, there were some election results coming out of Peru recently highlighting the importance here of safe jurisdiction, silver, and we've got high institutional ownership. We didn't really get into the ownership, but we've got between Eric Sprott and Hecla and other notable precious metals owners, we've got about 85% of the stock in a few long hands.

27:54 And so that really makes the share price very torquey as we have success or as the silver price rises. So we've got, you know, what really struck me in terms of the Dolly Varden opportunity is despite being a hundred year old camp, there's new discoveries almost on an annual basis. So lots of opportunity, only 3% of the property has been explored. So, tremendous upside. I see some questions coming in on the right hand side. Elmer asked you know, how much money we have coming into this this season. We've got about $22 million in the bank and so we're you know, we're we're we're cashed up. We have no debt and just summarizing, you know, we're we are we've got the cornerstone resource, which pivots a value.

28:43 But the real opportunity here is the prospectivity, the upside. Dully has been in play before in terms of M&A. There has been takeover bids on the table in previous years by multiple companies. So that is also you know, in a rising metal price environment, M&A activities heating up. We're seeing that in the triangle. Newmont took over GT Gold for almost 500 million in an all cash bid. So you've seen Yamana come into the area through participation in an Ascot financing. So the majors are here. And the golden triangle, I've never seen it this active and this hot.

29:33 So we're quite unique in that we're pure silver. We're in BC and we've got tremendous shareholders and we've got treasury, we've got team, you know, it really encompasses everything you need. So I think with that maybe Dasha. Great, thanks so much. Yeah, I think this is a good time to jump into Q&A. So if you do have a question, feel free to submit them now. To kick things off, what has you most excited about this for this year's drill program? I think for me, it's twofold. It's the drilling at Torbrett, it's advancing Torbrett, but What sort of gives me trouble sleeping at night is the excitement or the anticipation of a new discovery.

30:22 And that's really, I think the targets that we've got going into the 2021 program, it's gotten me really, really excited. So I'm holding my breath that this is the year that Dolly Varden really performs in terms of on the discovery side. But you know, I just think that with that resource with the cash position, where we are, where with the silver prices today, You know, there's a lot of things that have us really excited. Great, thank you. How do you keep down the cost of exploration and how do you maximize the return of exploration per meter drilled? Well, for us, it is a helicopter supported program still.

31:10 And so that usually puts it a step up in costs per meter. But the way we kind of mitigate that is that we have that access road into the property. So we can stage things just across the valley from Torobritt. And so instead of flying everything all the way from the base camp, we just drive everything up the road, have a staging area set up, and then it's just a quick hop across the valley. So if you can get your helicopter hours down, then that really saves you money there. And then also this year, especially with the targeting, if we can use a hole to test multiple targets, as opposed to 2 holes for 2 targets, if we can align it to intercept in terms of torbit, or we can use a hole for infill as well as extending it to try and expand out the edge. So if you can get multiple uses out of the same hole, that brings your cost per meter down because you don't have to drill as many meters.

32:22 Well thank you. Now Simon is asking about the road up to Kitsa river. What are your plans for that road? He believes that it is washed out? Yeah, yeah, last year there was some heavy rains in October and it washed out a few little sections. So we were planning on repairing those. And so the road infrastructure is still there. It's just some repairs that we have to do to get around those washouts. And that's all, we need to get a permit to be able to put some riprap along the edge of the river there.

33:08 And part of the area is also the road was built 100 years ago. And a lot of the areas behind that are now sort of nature or salmon bearing estuaries hidden behind the roads so it's a two-fold thing that we'll be stabilizing those we're working with fisheries Nishika fisheries as well to to get the best option for that. So that's the plan is just to repair that and then it'll be back to normal. Great, thank you. What areas of the project, in your opinion, are most prospective for discovery? Well, a lot of the stuff we outlined, but there's the The obvious one is the surface expression of that alteration zone.

34:05 So below that, we do have holes near surface that have intercepted epithermal veining with silver numbers. So that would be the later cross-cutting panes, but the signatures are strong enough even in the downhole alteration. We do take XRF readings live as we're drilling. So we have a pretty good handle on the alteration strength just through the potassium and sodium depletion levels. So we do know that that alteration is still strong towards depth as we get deeper. So My favorite areas is sort of down that Torbert horizon at depth and as it dips underneath the sediments in the bottom of the valley.

34:58 Great, thank you. Farig is asking how deep the Torbert mineralization is and what is the typical depth of deposit in the area? Well, Torbent, the Southern end of it is actually right at surface. And so it goes in feet from the 1350 level down to the 750 level, that's what they mined, so, that's, you know, converting to metric, on that, that cross section shows about 150 meters vertical, but it's stepping down at 30 degrees, which is a good angle to be collapsing things down.

35:44 Any shower and your rock wouldn't collapse to the bottom of the stove. But yeah, in terms of depth, Torbert North, which was an offset, that's 200 meters vertical down from Torbert Main. So, you know, So far we have it down to 250 meters depth sort of from surface to 250. So it's not very deep. In terms of mines in the area, it varies, but you can go anywhere from surface to a thousand meters depth, there's still mineralization. Great, thank you. Has the Southern Gold Belt ever been drilled before and what type of mineralization can be found there?

36:35 No, that hasn't been drilled before. There's historic trenching, which gives us an indication that the mineralization is of that premier style that I was mentioning where you have multiple stages of epithermal activities, so stock work and then regurgitation. So no, it hasn't been drilled before. That's also an exciting area, but until we get that first drill hole in there, we don't know whether it goes to depth or not from the trenches. So that'll be exciting to see if it does go to depth because the surface numbers are quite outstanding. Great, thank you. I know you briefly went over it, but can you explain some of the other benefits of infill and upgrading drilling?

37:27 Well, yeah, I mean, the main one is, yeah, like you said, I have mentioned it. The main one is the added benefit of getting a better understanding of the deposit. When you remodel it, you can quite often come up with new areas to go to. It increases your understanding, but the main thing is that you're getting a better model to build your mining scenarios on you. You have more confidence once you've upgraded. So you know, after I indicated there's also measured, which is even closer to space drilling. Can I chime in for just 1 sec? The other thing is the best place to look for a mine is next to a mine. And I just think that in my experience, you get surprised with discoveries, and that's where we're trying to come up with a percentage that we anticipate of growing as we drill in and around Torbritt.

38:28 And you know, wouldn't surprise me if we, you know, if we saw 30% growth in this process of being surprised to the upside. If you look at historic companies that have drilled around or went through an upgrading exercise, that's typically what you're going to see. So I think it's around and extending and that exercise has not been taking place here. That's right. You

Follow Dolly Varden Silver Corporation into a list and get an email when it puts out news.

Latest news releases

Companies on this call

Speakers

Speaker profile Shawn Khunkhun

Shawn Khunkhun

CEO, President & Director at Dolly Varden Silver

Mr. Khunkhun has over 15 years of experience in the capital markets, mineral exploration and development sector with a focus on enhancing shareholder value. He has served in a variety of strategic roles including investor relations, corporate development, chief executive officer and director. Mr. Khunkhun has been instrumental in creating a new awareness for undervalued companies including grass roots explorers, developers and producers. Mr. Khunkhuns experience in incubating and growing early stage companies through capital raises, acquisitions, joint ventures and spinouts, and his long-standing relationships with an extensive global network of high-net-worth investors, private equity and institutional investors, analysts, brokers, and investment bankers have been a valuable asset to growing mineral exploration companies.

More from Dolly Varden Silver Corporation