Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Ethos Gold (TSX-V: ECC) CEO Craig Roberts on Moving Forward with Permits in Hand for Trenching & Drilling at La Purisma Gold Project in Mexico

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is President and CEO of Ethos Gold (TSX-V: ECC)(OTC: ETHOF), Mr. Craig Roberts. Craig, how are you this afternoon?

Craig Roberts: I'm good thanks, Gerardo, really good. How are you doing?

Gerardo Del Real: I'm doing excellent. Thank you for asking.  I am excited. We have a gold market that appears to be making higher lows. I don't think that we're in break-out mode yet but it's definitely good to see it basing here at that $1,300 level.

That's good news for you because you just received your permits for trenching and drilling of the La Purisma gold project in Chihuahua State, Mexico. I would love to talk about the details and of course I'm excited for drilling because that's what we do this for. Right?

Craig Roberts: Exactly. Yeah, we're excited as well, Gerardo. This is a project that we acquired more than a year ago. We've done some initial sampling and mapping and other geological work on the property and we've had our drill application in for some time. We've now received it and we're actually trenching as we speak and plan to be drilling sometime in March. So in sort of four plus weeks.

Yeah, we're very excited by the project. It's a project that Mel Herdrick, who's one of our directors and very well-known geologist down in Northern Mexico, worked for Phelps Dodge for many years and then with Gary Freeman in Pediment, which was a great success.

This project is one that Mel's been interested in and going after for about 10 years and it finally came available and we picked it up. Now we've got to the point we're ready to drill. Yeah, we're pretty excited.

Gerardo Del Real: That's exciting because I know Mel's reputation in Mexico. He is picky with his projects. His track record of success obviously speaks to that. La Purisma is a near surface, bulk tonnage, oxide gold target. Is that correct?

Craig Roberts: That's correct. Yeah, it's a low sulfidation epithermal type deposit. It has very extensive mineralization alteration that we've mapped and we've traced it for at least 2 kilometers of strike. And the footprint of the alteration mineralization is at least 600 meters across strike, in other words width. And then within that we've got two sort of parallel zones that are roughly 200 meters in thickness that are more enhanced grade and really our primary targets. One of them strikes for about –to this point we've traced it for about 2 kilometers and the other for about 1 kilometer.

So, the mineralization historically on this project has been mined underground and surface on a small-scale basis and they’ve been mining epithermal veins, which the reports that we've reviewed indicate grades of sort of between 2 and up to plus 6 grams.

What Mel sees here though is that there's at least five of those veins trending northwest on the property. What's got Mel excited is that he also sees quite a bit of mineralization between the veins in more of a disseminated kind of type of mineralization. And that's in stockworks and sheeted veins.

So, there's a number of pieces of evidence that sort of indicate that we got a pretty good shot here at drilling quite long intervals of potentially surface mineable grade. So that's what we're going after here.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, I'm looking forward to visiting the project hopefully in the next month or two. It's interesting to me that the trenching and the drilling budget is a tiny, meager $350,000. There's places in Nevada where one hole will cost you half a million dollars, $300,000, $400,000. So to see you have an initial budget for both the trenching and the drilling totaling $350,000 I got to believe the infrastructure has to be excellent.

Craig Roberts: Yeah, that is correct. There's a number of factors that drive that. One is Mel's experience in Mexico. He's lived there I believe for about 20 years in Hermosillo and operated quite a lot of exploration and drill programs down there. So Mel really knows the ropes. He's super efficient at executing this type of program. So that helps, number one. And secondly, this project, the topography's relatively flat. It's road accessible. You couldn't design a sort of a better situation in terms of those factors and in terms of infrastructure. So, for both of those reasons our costs are very attractive on this project. Yeah, we're able to get the first set of holes into this for about, our current budget's about US $350,000.

Gerardo Del Real: How many meters initially do you plan on drilling? Obviously, if they're a success the programs get bigger, right? First past drilling, how many holes, how many meters are you anticipating?

Craig Roberts: Yeah, we're looking at around 3,000 meters and sort of 12 to 15 holes, somewhere in that range initially. But as you say, we can adjust the program as we execute it and get results. We've got quite a bit of flexibility built into that as well.

Gerardo Del Real: Part of that flexibility comes from the robust treasury. What does that look like right now for those not familiar with the story?

Craig Roberts: Yeah, we're at about $7.1 million Canadian currently.

Gerardo Del Real: And a market cap of sub-$11 million as of today's closing if I'm not mistaken, right?

Craig Roberts: That is correct, yeah.

Gerardo Del Real: That's a heck of an opportunity. You're far from a one-trick pony. You also have an exciting vanadium project that's going to get attention in the second half of this year, the Pine Pass Vanadium Project in Northern BC.

Can we talk a bit about that project? I know that's a story for likely the second half of this year but one that I also think is important for people to understand.

Craig Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. We're very excited by that project. We only acquired it actually in August of last year but we very rapidly went from sort of very early stage on it to having trenching done and some pretty spectacular results in the trenching, plus 200 meters of similar grades to a number of the other vanadium projects of this type and sort of plus 0.5% V2O5.

Those trenches indicated a thickness of at least 100 meters, a true thickness of kind of a stratigraphic unit. It's sedimentary hosted so one way to think of it is similar geometry to a colphene, where it's tabular target within sedimentary rocks. It's very extensive. We've traced it a number of kilometers of strike length. It looks like we got very good indications the thicknesses are at least 100 meters so the ability to build tonnage is very, very good. We are moving ahead with permitting. We've made a lot of progress with the permitting.

We are gearing up to mobilizing for the field in May and to start drilling in June. Based on the trenching we're very, very optimistic about what kind of results we're going to get in that drilling this summer. 

Gerardo Del Real: Good stuff. Again, a lot to like for a company that's trading at a market cap sub-$11 million Canadian, and a good chunk of that backed by cash.

Craig, thank you so much for the update. Again, I am looking forward to getting out to the project hopefully here in the next little bit. I can't wait to start getting those trench results and get the drill turning.

Craig Roberts: Yeah. Thanks, Gerardo. I'd love to have you out there. Look forward to that and thanks as well.

Gerardo Del Real: Thanks again, Craig.