Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Alianza Minerals (TSX-V: ANZ) CEO Jason Weber on Drill Results from Horsethief Gold Property & Kickoff of Phase One Drilling at Haldane Silver Project

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Alianza Minerals (TSX-V: ANZ)(OTC: TARSF), Mr. Jason Weber. Jason, how are you?

Jason Weber: I'm doing very well, Gerardo. Thanks for having me on.

Gerardo Del Real: Thanks for coming back on. You and I talked a bit off-air and let me set it up by saying, let's cover the last couple of releases. The first piece of news out of Nevada was obviously a miss as far as drilling and mineralization and what you hoped for. I thought the quote that you had in that release was what it should be for everyone, but in our business often is not the case. It was honest. Your quote was, "Although clearly not the discovery we were hoping for, the size and distribution of altered carbonate rocks, along with widespread" dah da, dah da, dah da, dah da. Bottom line is, not what we wanted. Let's see what the rest of the data says. Yeah, we missed on this one. Let's start there before we talk about next steps.

Jason Weber: Yeah. Honestly, it was disappointing. We take on every project hoping to make a discovery and you start every drill program hoping to make a discovery. When you don't, it's disappointing. To be honest, this is the way of our business. It's very difficult to make discoveries. Horsethief was a great target, some excellent work done in the field and in the office to set up the program, generate the targets and test them. Unfortunately they didn't work out like we'd hoped. That said, we don't have all the data back. We have only the gold. We don't have any of the 32 element ICP, which has a lot of the trace elements that could act as vectors to point us into different areas of the property.

As I sort of said in the quote, there is fairly widespread alteration and there is anomalous gold over a wide area. The indication would be that it could be a big system. The challenge is finding if there is some high-grade mineralization there, where is it? To be honest, it may not be there. There's 7 holes basically of ICP data that we're waiting on. We'll get that, we'll analyze it, see if there's any vectoring we can take out of that. If there is, we'll discuss that with our partner Hochschild, who funded that program 100%. It will be up to them whether they have targets that they want to chase with another round of work.

Gerardo Del Real: Like any good hitter in baseball you keep swinging, or any good shooter in basketball you keep shooting if you know what you're doing. Obviously, you're good at what you do. You know what you're doing and you're off to the races again with the new high-grade silver drilling program, the Phase One program from the wholly-owned Haldane high-grade silver property. Can we talk about that? I know that's an exciting property as well. Again, in our business the norm is to miss, but this looks particularly compelling.

Jason Weber: Yeah. This really is an exciting project for us. If we go back to last year in 2019, we drilled four holes and one of those was on a brand-new target at Bighorn, where we discovered new silver-bearing veins, which was really a proof of concept for us. When we took Haldane on, we really wanted to look at the property as a whole to investigate the potential for new vein systems on the project. We made the discovery at Bighorn. We also were back at Middlecoff which is sort of the central area of the property, which is where really the old timers had spent most of their time. That dates back to sort of 1918, 1919 when they had been extracting some really high-grade mineralization. Over 3,000 grams per tonne silver.

We know the project has potential to host more vein. We know that it holds high-grade mineralization. To get on with this next phase of work was really important for us. For this sort of fall-slash-winter program, we're going to focus in back in that Middlecoff area, what we call the Mount Haldane Vein System, the central core of the property, just from a logistics sake. We'll drill six holes here. We'll drill three at what we call the West Fault, a discovery that was made in 2009 by a previous operator, never been followed up. That was a 320 gram per tonne silver intersection with 1.1 grams per tonne gold over 2.2 meters. We'll drill three holes to test that down dip and along strike. Then we'll come back about a kilometer away back to the Middlecoff where we drilled last year.

It's kind of a neat approach we're taking here. There's about a 150 meters of vein strike length between where we drilled last year and hit 996 grams silver and 1.5 gram gold over 0.35 meters. And then another intersection that was almost 500 grams silver over 1 meter. From that point, going south about a 150 meters, there's an old hole from the 1960s that averaged about 1 meter of almost 2,800 grams per tonne silver. We're going to test that area with three drill holes as well. Just see if we can follow this to the south and get a better handle on some of this really high-grade mineralization that the old timers had found.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, those grades are what makes it compelling, right?

Jason Weber: Absolutely. What's really neat here and I think I probably say this every time you and I chat, Gerardo, is that for a property with 100 years of exploration history, there's only been 17 holes drilled on surface. With over 12 kilometers of vein strike, cumulative vein strike to explore, it really is underexplored. There's lots of room for us to build on some of these intersections and zones that the old timers found. Plus when you add in we found new vein systems, it's really exciting. We're really looking forward to getting this program underway.

Gerardo Del Real: When do you anticipate initial results starting to come back? I know several, several companies are experiencing pretty significant delays with the labs because of everything going on. What does that look like, Jason?

Jason Weber: My best guess right now, Gerardo, is probably sometime around Christmas. It depends on when we get the samples shipped out from the project down to Whitehorse in facilities there. If you figure it's probably a week to 10 days for the first hole or two and then you ship it out, it's another two weeks. We're looking at mid-November before it even gets to the lab and you're looking at five or six weeks anyways. We're looking at latest December or January is my best guess for results.

Gerardo Del Real: Try to have those in by Christmas. How's that, Jason? Only if they're good.

Jason Weber: We'll be looking for a Christmas present from the labs for sure.

Gerardo Del Real: Sounds good. Jason, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else that you'd like to add? I know the cash position is robust. You're well funded through early to mid-2021, if I'm not mistaken.

Jason Weber: Yeah. I think that's a good segue. This first phase program at Haldane, essentially we'll just pick up as early as we can get going again in the new year, sometime in the spring, I'm going to guess at Haldane and we'll finish off by going back to places like Bighorn and doing some drilling there, but also following up at West Fault and Middlecoff with any good results we get there. It'll be at least till mid-2021 that we'll be active at drilling at Haldane.

Gerardo Del Real: Sounds good. Jason, thanks again.

Jason Weber: Thank you, Gerardo.