Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Aben Resources (TSX-V: ABN)(OTC: ABNAF) CEO Jim Pettit on New Gold Project and Year Round Exploration

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Aben Resources. Mr. Jim Pettit. Jim, it's been a bit. It's great to have you back on. How are you?

Jim Pettit: Hey, it's great to be back on. I'm doing good. Yeah.

Gerardo Del Real: You've been very, very clear and forthcoming to shareholders and people that are following the Aben story that you've wanted to become a year-round explorer. We know about Forrest Kerr. We know that that is a project that's significant to the company. But you just optioned the Pringle North Project in Ontario. I would love for you to give a bit of context, and just some color to the thinking behind the optioning of that project, and what it looks like moving forward in combination with Forrest Kerr.

Jim Pettit: Oh, great. Yeah. I'd love to do that. Picking up another property is part of the processes. I want to be working year-round, right? And the Forrest Kerr, we get three good months. And if you don't have forest fires, and that potential's great right now. But we are going to have boots on the ground up there, and they're going to be doing a lot of field work, looking at areas we haven't been to yet. And in the meantime, here you go. We just announced a deal in Red Lake, Ontario, which is one of the most preeminent mining camps in the world, and has been for 50 plus years. 43 million ounces taken out of the ground there. It's huge. It's really big. And it's an area that I know well. I used to be involved there with a couple other companies, way back in the day. They're still here in our office. One was Skyharbour and one was Cyprus.

And back in those days, we used to joint venture our companies within the office just to, because it was a harder time raising money back then.

Gerardo Del Real: Right.

Jim Pettit: Red Lake is another very high-grade place to go look for gold, as is the Golden Triangle in British Columbia. And that's the kind of format I want to stick with. And it's also a fraction of the price to drill. For $150 to $170 a meter, as opposed to $500 to $600 a meter in the Golden Triangle. So, I like the area. It's really well-known for gold. The whole town of Red Lake is geared around the mining business. The mine center there was two mines. They operated for many, many, many years. GoldCorp ended up owning it all.

Now GoldCorp is out of it. And it's now Evolution Mining, I believe, that's taken it all over. And there's just a whole influx of juniors over there now, too. So in my world, it's nice to be back. I know a lot of people there, and my partner back in the day, and he's still a director of Aben, Don Houston. He has a house there. He was born and raised there. His dad was the Mining Exploration Manager, Surface Exploration Manager for the old Dickinson Mine, which was one of the original two big mills there.

And so he's got a long history, I'm going to need, once I finish the airborne in the next week or so. It should be flying, I think next week, if not the week after. Just waiting to hear. Once we get that done, he can assemble the guys on the ground to get in there and start doing the sampling and all the initial work that needs to be done. But believe it or not, we are going to be busy this year.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, that's obviously good news to shareholders. I think, at current levels, Aben presents a pretty compelling speculation if you like exploration stories. So it sounds like there's going to be exploration on multiple fronts. Is that accurate? At the very least fieldwork, right?

Jim Pettit: Yep. Oh yeah. And well, if it works out right, we'll be drilling later this fall. The one thing about Red Lake is the only time you don't drill, really, is at freeze up and thaw. The rest of the time you can drill. As long as you have the field work done ahead of time and through the summer. The project we've taken on has the potential to expand through joint venture options with our neighbors. You start with the airborne. There's an old sampling study that was done up through that whole region. It's just north of town, a road heading out of town at Red Lake. It's called the Nungesser Road. And this main structure that we're looking at now runs kind of aside it. Maybe a couple kilometers off the road, but beside it. And that's what's got us intrigued. The government put out a study. They've been doing some very deep-seated seismic work, and looking for that, the unconformity, which is between the Balmer assemblage. And the one next to it. And they're deep. Deep, deep-seated.

That's what the Mine Center's on. That's one seismic structure. And Great Bear is just to the south of the Mine Center. And Great Bear Resources, they're on a secondary one. And now they found a third one running north up the South Arm of Red Lake. It's called the South Arm. It's not really south. Anyways it's a big, beautiful-looking structure. And if you're between the Balmer and the Confederation, or if you're on that unconformity, then you've got really good chances. As it comes up towards the surface, as it heads north. You can start hitting it. And that is sort of the conduit in the region for the 50 years of gold mining.

And now in recent time, the Dixie Lake Project of Great Bear's. They've had tremendous success, and they're just following it. The one they're on, they're following it. It's just, they step out big step outs. They're big step outs, and they keep hitting. And so it's going to end up probably being like a string of pearls, but it's going to be big. And I think they're working on a resource, but, it's amazing to watch.

Gerardo Del Real: No, it's been incredible.

Jim Pettit: Now there's another one, right? Now there's another structure that the government's identified. And basically it was a major recommendation on the government's part that this needs to be explored. So here we are.

Gerardo Del Real: I'm glad that you brought up Great Bear and the deep-seated structures, because that was going to be my next question for you, was whether or not those structures were going to be the focus of exploration at Pringle North. Obviously, everybody wants the billion dollar analog. You happen to have it right up the street, right?

Jim Pettit: Yep. Oh yeah, yeah. This is going to be exciting. As it starts to build. But you don't just move a rig in. You've got to do the field work first. And that whole area along that structure has been previously sampled by Osisko. So that data is available to us, that we can go in, and once we finish the airborne, we'll get the boots on the ground and they'll be doing more surface sampling, looking for gold in till anomalies that start showing up. And there's good indications with the data that's already there. That's where you go to. That's where you start. And there's a lot of forestry there. So, we'll probably, secondly, we will do like a drone survey, so that you go in and the drone is going to be looking for outcrop. So you want to get to the outcrop first. And the rest of the time, it's boots on the ground, and they're going to be going through the forest and looking for outcrop and taking samples, wherever the previous data that we're looking at indicates we should be looking at.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, it's great to have you back on, Jim. It sounds like we're going to have plenty to talk about here the rest of the year. Thanks for the update. Anything else to add to that?

Jim Pettit: Right now? No. Things are good. Things are good. We're gearing up and I'm looking forward to it.

Gerardo Del Real: Me as well. We'll chat soon.

Jim Pettit: You bet.

Gerardo Del Real: Thanks Jim.

Jim Pettit: Thanks.