Yukon Metals Exploration Update

0:03 Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from. I'm lucky enough today to be joined by Yukon Metals CEO and President, Rory Quinn. Rory, how are you today?

0:12 Very good. Thank you. Thank you, Romy. Awesome. So here's how today's going to work. First, I'll pass it to Rory to give some context for recent news. Then I'll pose a few questions, then we'll jump to any live questions directly from the chat. I'll say that if for whatever reason we don't get to your question today, I'll make sure that UConn Metals team gets it and get back to you as soon as possible. I'll say this event is being recorded and will be available this afternoon. But without further ado, I'll pass it to Rory for an overview. Thank you very much, Romain. Thanks for having us.

0:41 Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining to learn more about UConn Metals. We were excited to put out news yesterday morning on our AZ property. This is now our third

0:55 drill-ready target and drill-ready property. AZ is a massive property. It takes roughly 15 minutes to cross it by helicopter. The area we're focused on, called Chair Mountain, is real low-hanging fruit. For us, it's roughly 6 kilometers away from the Alaska Highway, so quite easily accessed. And also, the area is outcropping. I'll come down this race here a little bit and show you. So first of all, this is the 3.5% Copper rock there. You can see the green stained Malachite. That's exactly what we're looking for and we found a lot of that type of material.

1:41 That one is obviously highlighted the higher grade, but we've seen others run to 2% copper type material as well. Here is on top here, that's Chair Mountain. So you can see a lot of exposed rock. And in fact, it really represents a kill zone where vegetation just won't grow because there's too much metal in the ground. So that's obviously quite interesting. And again, this is a huge property. This is in a corner of the property that is, again, quite close to the Alaska Highway. And this is the area here. I'm gonna use my cursor here to show roughly just over a kilometer of continuous outcropping and we found copper at surface along this whole kilometre.

2:39 So, and I can show further down here too. So this is an example of the 1.2 kilometre long Dawson zone and you can see substantial amounts of mineralisation up here and then down here at the most clearly outcropping areas. And then further, there's a zone called Nutsodden up here, which is on trend as well to Chair Mountain. I think what the opportunity will be, we've seen very interesting historical data out of Nutz-Oden, representing upwards of 10% Copper, really, really high figures. And so we'll be focused on testing the continuity between Chair Mountain and Nutz-Oden. And I think there's certainly the potential there for a 2km plus long corridor there that we'll want to focus on. So really just kind of providing a primer there.

3:47 AZ is certainly in our top few assets as far as our priorities go. I've taken the market through how we'll be approaching Star River, likely earliest in May here, as soon as the weather and the temperature allows, as soon as we have flowing water, essentially we'll be able to drill, taking the market through our drilling of Scar and Horizon at Birch, looking for

4:24 Copper Gold mineralisation there and appropriate depth. And now AZ represents the third asset that we're advanced drilling on this upcoming season. AZ is quite different relative to the others, where Star has turned out to be very much gold silver primary asset.

4:48 And Birch is, we're poaching it, as mentioned, an intact copper porphyry with epithermal gold. The A to Z, it was named A to Z by Ron Berdahl, who obviously prospected the area back in the 90s with Miranda, and then staked it and actually staked the extension here as well, AZ, the Chair Mountain, prior to us doing the acquisition of the properties with the burn-off. He named the property AZ because he felt it had every metal on the property from A to Z. Here, I think we've got copper potential, certainly.

5:33 I think we see the potential for gold, zinc.

5:39 But really, this is, of the assets we've focused on so far, this has the most critical metal potential as well. Okay, with that, Romeo, I'll flip it over to you and we can advance to Q&A. I'm sure there's some good questions. Awesome, yeah, a couple good questions in the chat. I got a couple of my own to go through first, if you don't mind, Rory. I'll grill you for a bit before we get into the chat questions. Just a reminder for folks, especially those who popped in a bit late, chat button's about right, bottom right of your screen. Please feel free to enter questions at any time. So we'll start with, from my perspective, the copper grades at Chair Mountain, particularly the 3.49%

6:17 copper sample, are quite impressive. So I'm curious, how do you approach it from here? Yeah, so we'll look to test the structural corridor. So what we'll want to do is intersect mineralization. And it seems really a chair in particular. We're going to learn more, so much more by putting a couple of well-oriented drill holes in And we'll learn

6:48 so much about the structural controls there at CHER. But I mean, certainly finding the kind of high-grade copper right at surface is really interesting. And from here on in, it's understanding certainly the continuity of that 1.2 kilometre Dawson's zone that you see. The pictures actually don't do it justice. It really is kind of a reddish, rusty type colour.

7:17 It's really testing the continuity of that. And then, as I mentioned in the overview, I think, and then testing to see that that whole corridor running almost over 2 kilometers to Nutsworth and Woodley Gulch is also seeing high-grade gold. Well, we've seen gold and placer historically, but also high-grade copper out there in Nutsowden.

7:41 Oh great, I appreciate that extra context. I get a bit specific, I know you mentioned the property's proximity to Orange Hill and Bond Creek deposits across the border. I'm curious, given the similar geological setting within the Wrangelia terrain, what specific characteristics of AZ have you identified that might suggest that there's a comparable scale potential here? Right, well similar structural controls, I think

8:09 the structural controls I think there have been placed that have allowed mineralized liquid to be in place along big corridors there. I think we see similar geology here, similar large alteration and faulting. And I mean, this area of the Yukon is one that really under explored relative to a lot of other places. So yeah, I mean, I think, So very similar as far as structural controls, as far as in placement, and just really perspective. This area is very perspective, these large-scale, porphyry type systems.

9:02 As I said, we'll focus on Cherrymountain to begin with, that's the lowest hanging fruit there. But while we're drilling Cherrymountain, we'll be really testing the size of the opportunity in this area. I know, That's very helpful. And you mentioned talking about the historical netzoten showing with that 10.3% copper grades.

9:25 That's 2.5 kilometers northwest of Cherr Mountain. So it should be along the same fault structure. I'm curious, how do you plan to explore this potential structure corridor and what role are geophysics going to play in that exploration strategy?

9:38 Yeah, yeah, no, so the geophysics will play a large, we'll do some, we'll do airborne geophysics there, we'll do some IP and electromagnetic. And so that will help us understand structure better. I think it will help us understand buried mineralization and the extent to which we have continuity along that corridor. But yes, as mentioned, we'll start on the ground with drilling at Chair Mountain, but we'll be doing

10:10 a comprehensive geological survey along that whole trend there. So that 1.2 kilometer long gossam there that's visible from the air. And then continuing that on as well to 2 nuts built in about 2 and a half kilometers away. Great, no, that's helpful. One question I've got, this is just broadly looking

10:32 at Yukon Metals, 17 properties across 42,000 hectares. You've got drilling plans for 3 projects. Here's my question. How do you plan to allocate resources between the projects and what factors are going to influence the sequencing of those drill programs? What's going to come when and why, basically? Right, right. That's a good question. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, we've been fortunate to build a very good team and really I've got to give credit to our VP Exploration, Helena Kuika. She's built her team out and they got a tremendous amount done last season in a short amount of time to the extent now that we're ready to drill on 3 properties with a huge amount of data supporting that drilling. So

11:20 first of all, I'll say that each asset is quite independent, right? So just by geography

11:28 and access. So the folks that we have in the team are very experienced that we've got multiple individuals very experienced at running programs and running drill programs. So there will probably be some overlap. We'll likely run AZ and Birch from 1 area and have folks

11:53 traveling to the sites. So perhaps some overlapping staff, and then we'll have another pretty large camp at Star River as well. But yeah, I mean, I think generally, we're well staffed to manage 3 drill programs at the same time. And so I think that's it. So As far as sequence goes, Star will be the first.

12:24 Star has obviously had tremendous success there at targeting

12:30 a huge amount of high-grade Gold up to over 100g per tonne Gold, almost 11,000g per tonne Silver in high-grade Gold and Silver in multiple locations. But we've got 1 specific target area that really everything aligned. The electromagnetic work that we did align. So we have electromagnetic high, we had gravity information in support of that. And then it was also in the same area with the densest amount of high grade sampling was done as well. So essentially just a big X of like drill here, right?

13:18 We couldn't have done any more to target there.

13:22 So Star is quite well protected. It's in, there's an all access, all weather road plowed by the government year round. And that goes through the property, bisects the starboard property. So that's what will help us. And there's running water going through it. So that's really the time factor there is as soon as that water is running, we can use that for drilling.

13:48 And so, and given its protected nature in a valley there and the road access, being able to bring in people, materials, drills that way. Star will be first, Birch is a little bit more exposed, that will be helicopter access there. But we're looking to build a meaningful camp there as well. AZ, I think will be quite easy to drill. Lots of water available, quite gentle hills there. So I think AZ, we're excited about being able to advance quite quickly as well. So you might be looking at Star, AZ, then Birch as far as a sequence goes. But yes, lots of very, very exciting. And we're going to be very busy

14:40 this year. That's great. I always appreciate the insight into why and when. I imagine investors appreciate that too. One question is the presence of plaster gold operations in nearby creeks historically suggests a gold component to the system. So I'm curious, how does this fit into the geological model for the property, particularly given the polymetallic nature of some of the samples so far? Yeah, well, I think it's a good sign.

15:08 I think that will point towards a hard rock source for that gold. And then often in these areas, the concentrated areas of Gold can be part of these big, complex systems, polymetallic as you mentioned. I think that's how we consider that. The Gold as part of a larger system, and then doing more work, IP, electromagnetic, as mentioned, to try to understand more about the structure and areas of mineralization and continuity between these areas, right, between these areas of Placer Gold and some of the base metal showings that we've been saying. But really, as I mentioned before, getting our first drill holes in, right, getting some well-oriented drill holes there, intersecting the mineralization appropriately is gonna tell us so much about structural controls there and so much about the geology at ASEAN.

16:26 Great, that's helpful context. Now I know that previous exploration efforts were challenged by limited outcrop exposure, permafrost, volcanic ash cover. I'm curious, what exploration techniques do you plan to employ to kind of overcome those historical challenges?

16:43 Yeah, we'll use the same technologies we used at Birch. That was really successful. Our Executive Vice President Jim Coates led that effort in part with Helena. He's got quite a bit of experience in that area of the world up in the Yukon. We used this soil sampling drill that drills down, in this case of Birch, drilled up to a metre into the permafrost and collected very high quality samples from a metre deep. So we're avoiding the smearing that can happen at surface with the soils. And so that provided us the confidence that we have at Birch, given the successful program we had there. And so we'll do this, we'll utilize the same tools at AZ.

17:35 Also at AZ, what we'll do is we'll fly an airborne geophysics program as over as much of the property as we can. So while we're focused again, our energy on drilling chair, Chair Mountain, and then doing more sampling, mapping, geophysics in that concentrated area between

17:58 that corridor of about a couple of kilometres long between Cher and Nutsodden. We'll also then sort of look at it from 30,000 feet as well, I guess, literally in the case of perhaps airborne. And yet, take a look at the entire property as well. As mentioned earlier on, AZ is, if we've got 42 and a half thousand hectares in the portfolio, right across

18:30 a large portfolio. And AZ is almost 12,000 hectares of that. So it is a really large property. It's I know 1 that's close to Ron Burdell's heart. And I know this is just another one of the assets that we're really excited about. Awesome. I appreciate that. Now, there's 1 fun question from the chat from TB. What did the market notice about this in early January? So just curious your perspective on what you think lit a fire under you

19:01 guys and coming out of the Christmas break?

19:04 Yeah, no, it's been, I mean, yesterday, the market really liked this release, and we were up 10 cents yesterday. But I think sometimes it can take a lot of work to become an overnight success. I think we put out a lot of geophysics on Star River that internally we thought were incredibly compelling, the targeting work we did there on top of all the assays. But there you're getting a lot into the end of the year and perhaps folks are concerned about some tax loss selling and that type of thing. I think based on when the market doesn't see that and they see a good rally and we do have just an outstanding shareholder base, really, you couldn't ask for any more of a company of this size to have the shareholders that we do.

20:00 And so, and there's really, there's not that many shares available. So when you get folks that really like the story, we're marketing now and we'll be, we're in Roundup and BRIC coming up here in Vancouver, we'll be at PDAC. And so when folks do get it and they understand the potential here, they understand the quality of the assets and who's involved.

20:24 When folks try to buy a meaningful amount out of the market, the shares are only going to go one way. And I think that's what we've seen. I think we've seen some motivated buyers in the space that really understand this area of the world and understand mining. And I think that's really helped us to rally. And then I think really the market likes assay numbers. When we put out assays, when we put out the 100g per tonne Gold material at Star, when we put out the almost 11,000g per tonne Silver at Star, we saw a share price rise considerably then. And then with with Birch putting out the 1400m long of up to almost a grand per tonne gold in soils, and 14 grand per tonne Gold and rocks and 2.4% Copper, multiple samples.

21:24 What I've sensed is the market responds more to assays than geophysics, no matter how much We love seeing everything line up and we might high 5 and fist bump and pat ourselves on the back. The market, I think, likes assays and seeing the big picture news like we see at AZ and just so much potential there. I Appreciate that. Tony in the chat asked how many drill rigs you're gonna have on sites this season? Yeah, well, we'll start, we'll start at Star River with, with 1 on that target, and then look to advance for 2, we've got, we've got, as I mentioned, the road there bisects the property. So there's the potential there to have 2 rigs, I think, and we can bring those both in on skids when the weather is amenable.

22:15 So 2 at Starr, I think early on, you can have one at AZ and then potentially move that between AZ and Birch. So I would say early on, you're looking at 3 rigs. And then look, I think there's the potential to get more aggressive here, right? And have a rig at Birch and at AZ separately. And then early on, we're going to know what kind of rocks we're in, right? We're going to know if we're in smoke, if we're in fire, and we're going to know how aggressive we want to get. And then also, we're in the fortunate situation where we've got this wonderful shareholder group that has capitalized us very well.

23:04 We currently, as I sit here now, have $8M in the bank. That even in the Yukon can buy you a lot of drilling. So we're fortunate not to be in a position where we need to access the capital markets. I think that's what folks have seen here is that we can afford to be patient here. And look, if there's the want by the market to really want us to get aggressive here and have 5 rigs going. Yeah, we this I think the certainly the assets that we have, warrant that type of aggression, we obviously feel very, very bullish on the 3 assets that we talked about here. And so, yeah, we've been very good stewards of shareholder capital here, but look, I said, So we can get as aggressive as the market dictates really. So 3 to start, 4 to 5, certainly a scenario folks could see. Great. And I think you've actually just answered the next question, but I'll put it to you in simple terms just so we can get through it again. Christian asks, do you have enough cash to get through the season?

24:21 Yes, we do. Definitely, like I said, we probably spent, last season I think we spent about 2 and a half million in the field. We have made 8 million, so yeah, that's very good place to be where we can afford to be very choosy about the capital we raise. When you have, obviously, the Burdolls, the biggest shareholder that we have, 25 million shares. Keith Neumeier, just under 10%, Mark Woolverton, just under 10%. Peter Brown, former chairman of the Canaccord, obviously accumulating and having a meaningful amount of commodity capital. I mean, these are the folks that we will bring along and I'm sure we'll, to the extent that there's a capital requirement going forward, We'll do it at a time where we're doing it from a position of strength, right? And where we believe that shareholders are gonna create the most value and be able to drive these projects forward.

25:32 So look, I think we've got an amazing amount of, amazing group of folks following us now and supporting us now. And going forward, we're just gonna be talking to more and more people, more folks, and convincing them that this is a place where they're going to want to park their mind. Awesome. I appreciate it. Peter Epstein in the chat, thanks for joining us, Peter, asks why there's no historical drilling on your top 3 prospects? Well, there has been a little bit of, there was a bit of shallow drilling at Birch. And so Birch was advanced before. It's really an epithermal, epithermal Gold prospect. And so there was some rab drilling down there, but far too shallow to approach it the way we are, like an intact copper porphyry with scar and scar horizons closer to surface that we can test. So we'll be drilling at Birch 300 to 350 metres down diamond drill. So yeah, That hasn't been done before.

26:39 I think part of it is considering just how vast the Yukon is, how underexplored it is relative to other places. I've worked in this space for 20-years. I've mentioned it to people before, I've never seen the level of prospectivity that I've seen in the Yukon where you take a helicopter ride, you put the helicopter down, you walk 10 meters and you're hacking metal out of the ground. I've seen that with my own eyes, that the amount of outcropping I've never seen before. I mean, just that type of stuff, generally, in other really good jurisdictions like Nevada, some points, Arizona, lots of very high quality jurisdictions, the easy stuff, the stuff that our crops and is close to surface is gone.

27:38 And it isn't in the Yukon, there's just an embarrassment of riches. And folks have gone where the low hanging fruit is probably like what's close to the road, right? What's perhaps within the shadow of a head frame somewhere else, right? There's just been so much to choose from. But I think that's a huge part of it, right? Why you see something like Snowline, right there, their Valley project, that's only 3 and a half years old. That looks like world-class. That gets thrown around world-class, But I think if you don't consider that world class, then it has no meaning. Because you look at the grade, the continuity that they have there. And like I said, that wasn't found until 3 and a half years ago. And there's been plenty of work done in UConn, plenty of good companies.

28:34 So that just shows you, you can have like a district scale project like that, that's just been developed in the last 3 and a half years. And that didn't have a drill hole in it either until 3 and a half years ago. What I will say that Star, that was mined, real mining before some of the old timers were kind of drifting into the hill there and mining the gold really almost by hand. The gold there is in highly oxidized or cyano pirate. So it's quite crumbly. And yeah, the silver and galena there is largely preserved. There really wasn't any attempt to mine that. But so we had seen there historical mining, my old time was there accessing the gold.

29:25 And then just AZ is vast. And so as I mentioned there, it was explored for, even from the 90s onwards, and it was Ron, they were working on his day job there at the time, that grew to understand and appreciate the potential of AZ, and then subsequently went around, went about, yeah, doing, staking it, and consolidating that whole area, and was consolidating it right up until April of last year. And we, when we consummated this transaction with the Burdell family and then listed June 3rd.

30:16 So, and then I think finally what I would say is that is the reason to float these types of asset portfolios. These things were advanced by the Berdahl families for a long time and across different markets. There's times where the market's very bullish and there's all sorts of money, like where Sean Ryan had to do ground truthing and then suddenly that dries up and you might wait 5, 10 years until the market's bullish again to provide lots of capital to do this kind of early stage exploration. But That's why you take a portfolio like this, a high quality portfolio like this.

31:06 And just like they did with Snowline, where they floated the primary gold assets in the Berdell family portfolio. That's the reason that You float this and you get it on an exchange and you raise money. And rather than the patriarch of the family, Ron Burdell funding it himself, right, and bootstrapping all of these assets himself, right, You float them on an exchange and you get out and you raise capital and you can systematically go about exploring them as we have. Oh, no, makes sense. 1 from the chat, somebody notes that many juniors with promising assets can sometimes farm out some properties to a larger company. He's curious what your thoughts on that strategy are generally.

31:55 Yeah, no, that's another good question. Yeah, so we've thought about that in some cases because yeah, we just are, yeah, we are really endowed with some very high quality assets and we do have so many of them. It's interesting though, we've been working hard on putting data room together of all of the assets. So to the extent that there's some that whether it's, I don't know, whether it's the capital market side, whether it's an interested party, whether it's a large company that might want to consider investing under 10% in us, you want to make sure that you're prepared and organized for any opportunities like these. And so in doing some of this work, and we're looking particularly in the critical metal side and the tungsten side.

32:46 In doing that, in the desk review work we've done, we've really gotten excited about another asset called RISB. And so you'll be hearing more about that in the future. And so that critical metals asset, tungsten gold intrusion. Metals asset, tungsten, gold intrusion. That's very quickly almost coming to our top 5 as far as how excited we are about the potential of that one. Just doing that work internally, going through all of these things, going through all the historical data and work done on it. And for the purpose of thinking about, well, okay, are we prepared to part with any of these things or have someone else earn in?

33:34 So certainly that can be an option of creating value for these things is that you allow someone else to use their treasury to advance the assets and you keep the optionality on them. But yet as part of doing that exercise, we found RISB in particular, very interesting. I've had other folks externally interested in seeing if we would part with that one. And so the answer is no. But yeah, I mean, I think, look, we are also fortunate that the assets that we have, have very low holding costs. They're extraordinarily well organized by Ron and the Berdahl family. And so it costs us very, very little to hold on to these assets. And there's years in front of them as far as the work that's being done on them. So they're not they're not a drag on the Treasury whatsoever. So, look, I think we'll want to be very strategic there if there's groups there that want to partner with us on things that if we die on the road, decide that there might be a handful of assets that might not be core to us.

34:48 And there's the potential again, for for another company to to to advance it while our shareholders keep the optionality there and we can focus our capital on star, Birch, AZ and RISB and others, then certainly we'll look at that. Awesome. One question from the chat from Tony asks, any chance of Antimony as a by-product? Definitely. That would be the A in A to Z, or one of them. It's one of the A's. There's certainly potential for that at AZ and elsewhere. Perfect. My last question, and this is really a personal question I would say, is what are you most excited about in 2025?

35:34 What do you wake up jazzed about for the year? Oh, well, really excited to get drilling, right? I mean, we're all very excited about the work that we did last season. And I think some folks might've been, perhaps they might've been disappointed that we didn't get drilling last season, but we really wanted to do high quality work, do bring everything that we could, every tool that we could to bear, to really make sure that we, yeah, respectful of shareholders' money and just did all of the triangulating that we could. And so now, yeah, I think, look, it's partly it's looking forward to seeing the fruits of our efforts that now the truth machine, get like, we get to drill, we get to the assays and the truth machine will show the fruits of our labour today.

36:34 But yeah, so I think plenty, lots of optimism here and just excitement and the team's just raring to go. We've got a great group of people. That's where we invest our money here. It's right on the finance side, it's myself and there's industrial relations and CFO, but really our investments go to the technical side, investing into what we do in the ground, but also then just geological talent. Right. And I think that we've, we've invested a lot there and I think the fruits have begun to show here with the news to date. And I think, yeah, like I said, there's the excitement that all of that hard work and knowledge and expertise is going to come to fruition from sort of May onwards.

37:27 Awesome. Well, Rory, thank you so much. It's a great chat. Appreciate giving all this context and dealing with my technical questions. Everybody in the chat, thank you so much for joining us today. The recording should be available late this afternoon, but Roy, I'll throw it to you to send us off today. Well, no, thank you so much. They were actually, they were very good, very good questions. Definitely no softballs today. But no, I really appreciate that and I appreciate everyone for joining us. And yes, stay tuned. More to come. Awesome. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day. You