Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Aztec Minerals (TSX-V: AZT)(OTC: AZZTF) CEO Simon Dyakowski on Closing Out 2021 Drill Program at Flagship Tombstone Gold-Silver Project, Arizona, with a Bang!

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Aztec Minerals — Mr. Simon Dyakowski. Simon, how are you this morning?

Simon Dyakowski: Hey, good morning, Gerardo. Thanks for having me on. I am doing great today. How are you?

Gerardo Del Real: I'm sure you are with the assays you just announced this morning. I am well, thank you for asking. Let's get right to it. Let me read the headline and then I will let you provide the context. Congrats! I mean, phenomenal numbers. The headline reads: 

Aztec reports final Phase-2 RC drill results from Tombstone Project in Arizona including 2.44 g/t gold and 66.56 g/t silver or 3.39 g/t gold equivalent over 65.5 meters with 16.8 g/t gold and 374.36 g/t silver, 22.15 g/t gold equivalent, over 7.6 meters. 

Phenomenal numbers! Even with gold and silver down today, the market has responded very, very well. You're up over 11% on very good volume. Give us the context, Simon.

Simon Dyakowski: Yeah, so we have now finished our 2021 drilling. We released the final 5 holes today, and, as you pointed out, Hole-22 ended up being our best hole. This was drilled right in the bottom of the pit, in the center of the pit, and was drilled towards the east. And the highest grade gold and silver resided within the bottom of that hole. 

We actually only drilled it down to 86 meters before it caved in. So it bottomed in high-grade mineralization but it really does put a capstone to what has been an extremely successful 23-hole campaign where not only did we have Hole-22, which was over 220 gram meters of gold equivalent, we had a half dozen holes that were over 100 gram meters up and down the main area that we were drilling.

So it shows really encouraging continuity of the mineralized zones in the pit. Most of the drill holes were collared on the western pit wall with some of the final drill holes that we reported today being collared a little bit to the east with some of the budget that we had left over. 

We're looking at a very consistently mineralized zone well in excess of the typical heap leach gold and silver grade over a fairly tightly drilled area now of 500 meters north-south, 200 meters across, and up to 150 meters deep that resides within a much longer 900-meter strike length of the entire Contention Zone where we have yet to drill on that fence pattern. 

So really culminating in a successful campaign, and we're looking forward to plotting out our next steps at Tombstone and communicating those to the market over the next few weeks. But suffice to say, we'll have a lot more to talk about on the heels of these results today.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, you did save the best for last. The news release contemplates not only extending the near-surface oxidized gold-silver mineralization to 150 to 200 meters but you also talk about potentially drilling some much deeper 500 to 750 meter holes to test for Taylor-CRD polymetallic massive sulfide mineralization that you believe is underlying the near-surface epithermal mineralization. 

Can you speak to that Taylor-type mineralization that you reference in the release because I think it's important for people that may be new to the story and are just starting to get a grasp of what it is you're exploring for?

Simon Dyakowski: Yeah, certainly. So the background here is that the Tombstone silver district is the next nearest past-producing silver district in Arizona to the Hermosa silver district. And if we look back about six years, a company there called Arizona Mining was drilling-off a near-surface silver deposit before they decided to drill deeper beneath that deposit to test for massive sulfide-style polymetallic mineralization or a carbonate replacement deposit. 

Now, Arizona Mining, in 2015, ended up drilling over the next three years underneath their shallow silver deposit what is now one of the largest zinc primary deposits in the world at over 100 million tonnes of zinc equivalent. And that company was purchased in 2018 for almost C$2 billion in one of the biggest mining transactions in recent memory; very rapid share price appreciation after making that discovery.

So at Tombstone, we have been working on our shallow gold-silver deposit; drilling that off over the summer. And we now plan to integrate the mineralization that we've discovered in the top 150 meters of the silver district with these deeper CRD-style targets, of which we have three primary drill hole targets that we've discussed before; one in the north end of the pit and then two underneath the south end of the pit. And as you mentioned, these are deeper. They're about 600 meters beneath the surface. And we do already have an indication that this Taylor-style CRD mineralization might be there.

There's one historic drill hole drilled under the north end of our pit in 1989 that returned 7 meters of a combined 9.1% lead-zinc, 32 grams silver, and 0.6% copper, which would be indicative of a Taylor-style grade. Now, that deep intersection underneath the north end of our Contention open pit has never been followed up on. 

So our next steps will be to drill-test deeper under the southern portions of our pit where we have recent geophysical data that suggests there are conductive bodies lying beneath that pit. And again, they've never been drilled.

Now, what's really interesting here is that we've had good success in our shallow drilling that's still open at-depth. So we now have an opportunity to drill-test deeper under the shallow portions of our already made discovery and integrate that with the deeper model, or killing two birds with one stone, if you will. 

So we look forward to showing investors the details of that plan over the coming weeks and getting to work as soon as we can.

Gerardo Del Real: And we haven't even touched on Cervantes yet, right? Where is your market cap right now, Simon?

Simon Dyakowski: I think we're around C$18 million at C$0.30 a share. So yeah, it's quite small, which is good if you're a new investor coming in. It's definitely undervalued if you compare us to some peer comps. 

There's a number of companies that have drilled discoveries in the southwestern US over the past 18 months that are trading much higher; some in excess of $100 million. So every project is obviously unique in its own right but we feel that we're certainly representing a good value proposition here with the stage that we're at. 

We're post-discovery on both projects and really just starting to get into the fun news flow where we have consistent drill results with every program.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, I mentioned Cervantes. That's a property I also really like. Let's leave that for another time as I think the results today definitely merit a standalone interview. And then, let's catch up on Cervantes here soon. Anything else to add to that, Simon?

Simon Dyakowski: No, just really that we will have some further news out on Tombstone and it'll give investors another opportunity to understand what we've done over the summer and perhaps to tie it all together. 

We have had great results over three months, and we look to summarize and review the progress that we've made and then to show the opportunity going forward.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, congrats on a very, very successful 2021 drilling campaign!

Simon Dyakowski: Much appreciated. Thank you once again for having me on, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Alright, Simon, chat soon.

Simon Dyakowski: Bye-bye.