Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Aben Resources (TSX-V: ABN) CEO Jim Pettit: “Our Geos Are Liking What They're Seeing” as the Mineralized Footprint Expands at the North Boundary Zone of the Forrest Kerr Gold Project

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Aben Resources (TSX-V: ABN)(OTC: ABNAF), Mr. Jim Pettit. Jim, how are you this morning?

Jim Pettit: I'm good. Thanks for asking.

Gerardo Del Real: You had some news recently. Let's get right into it. The headline reads, "Aben Continues to Expand Mineralized Footprint at the North Boundary Zone at the Forrest Kerr Gold Project in BC'S Golden Triangle."

I believe that you released results from another five drill holes. And let me give you my interpretation of the way the market is taking it. You are finding lower grade mineralization all over the place. I believe you've hit in every hole, you found mineralization. But you haven't been able to vector in yet on that high-grade feeder zone that the market is waiting for. Would you take that as accurate?

Jim Pettit: Oh yeah. That's very accurate, actually. Yeah, we were very fortunate the last two years to start our drill seasons with some pretty spectacular results. That North Boundary Zone where we've been drilling the last couple of years had been very rewarding, very high grade. But we've drilled over 30 holes there now and we're starting to realize, "Okay, it's confined."

So everything we're doing this year is starting to just step away from it to the south. As following some historic results, like the Noranda hole from 30 years ago, 300 meters to the south of the North Boundary was very high grade. So, we've drilled around that and under it, et cetera, et cetera. And we're hitting a lot of mineralization in these new holes.

It's not the 300-gram material, but there's lots of it. There are higher grade intercepts within the holes we're drilling and lots of low grade. We've got one hole there I believe there's about a half a gram of, if you want to stretch it right out, it's 3 to 400 meters. If we were down in Arizona, that would be great.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely!

Jim Pettit: Up there where we are, we want higher grade, but as we move south we keep hitting it. We keep hitting it. So what our guys are really paying attention to in geologic terms, geology terms, and in geochem terms is alteration. We've hit this zone around that Noranda hole, what's called a sericite, quartz-sericite alteration, very intense. And now as we move south, we're hitting more what's called potassic alteration with the sericite and the quartz. And that's really indicative.

Potassic kind of let's you know that you're getting closer to a heat source. That's what we're looking for. So we're working on these longer holes, using our geophysics that show potential intrusives down below and that's what we're trying to find because when we take the geophysics and overlay it with what we've drilled in the North Boundary Zone, there are intrusions related there that you can see.

So we're drilling off the flanks of a lot of these intrusions and I think that's probably one of the reasons we're still into mineralization everywhere. But as we start seeing more potassic alteration along with the sericite. I think we're getting closer. That's what the guys think. So we've moved further south even and we've got lots, lots of core in for assay. We've now reported on 8 holes. We've drilled now 24 I believe it is. We're getting an update later today.

Gerardo Del Real: Okay.

Jim Pettit: We got lots more to go. And just because we didn't hit that high-grade zone right at the beginning, it doesn't mean it's not going to happen. If you look at our chart, you can see anytime through July or August, September, October, great results can come out. Our Geos are liking what we're seeing. We've got lots of low-grade mineralization that could end up turning into a bulk tonnage along with some of the higher grade hits that we hopefully will see as we go forward.

But you know we're not over the moon about not hitting these high grades. We'd love to hit it continually, but until we get a handle on where it's coming from in the structure, this is where we're at and it's a good thing. We are going to hit a lot of mineralization and we're going to also have a lot of guidance going forward. We're going to be able to really analyze. That's one thing the guys haven't really had, we just are waiting on the assay interpretation coming back, the analysis capability. So when we're finished and we'll be finished in the next week or 10 days. We've got to be able to take all that data and spend some time.

Gerardo Del Real: Sorry to cut you off there, Jim. Let's take the bird's eye view on this because it's very clear to me in looking at the maps and the targets and the holes that have been reported and the ones you've drilled that you've only tested a very, very small portion of the targets that you've defined thus far.

Speak to me about that and how – and you touched on it earlier, you said you're trying to vector into the heat source obviously – but speak to how you're prioritizing the holes that you're drilling now.

Jim Pettit: Well, where we're at right now is substantially further south. It's a target we've had in our PowerPoint for quite some time. It's 12 kilometers to the south because that's where we want to end the season. We have to spend another, I don't know, $150,000 to $200,000 down on this particular part of the property. Once we've done that, we've earned 100% of everything.

So our earn-in will be done and we've been looking at this target for quite a while. We've sampled all around it. There's great golden tills, soil and rock samples. And so we want to drill through that zone into this big intrusive that's sticking out. It's not even underground that we have to see with geophysics. It's sticking out of the ground. We want to know what that thing is and again, what you would normally do is drill off the flanks of these things.

You'd put a hole straight into it and see what it is. But we don't know and that's what we're doing right now. So there is a specific page in our PowerPoint that shows you the North Boundary Zone and then the Southern Forrest Zone, it's called. They're very tiny in relationship to the size of the property because it's 50 kilometers long, the whole property. We've had a crew out doing further field work in other parts of the property right now, following up on some of the original data compilations. So by the end of the winter, we'll have a pretty good idea of what to do and where to look next year. A little more intensive research.

Gerardo Del Real: It's called exploration for a reason. We have a lot more assays coming up. Jim, thank you for taking time today and of course, I'm looking forward to speaking with you here soon as the assays continue to trickle in.

Jim Pettit: Great. Excellent.

Gerardo Del Real: All right. Appreciate it, Jim. Thanks again.

Jim Pettit: Yep. Bye bye.