Categories: Base Metals / Precious Metals
Topics: General Base Metals / General Precious Metals

Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF) CEO Morgan Poliquin on Drilling the Best Projects in a Copper & Gold Portfolio

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Almadex Minerals, Mr. Morgan Poliquin. Morgan, how are you today?

Morgan Poliquin: I'm excellent, thank you. And you?

Gerardo Del Real: I'm well, I'm well. Thank you for asking.

Listen, let's get right into it. Last time we chatted, which was a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the busy, busy 2024 that Almadex has in store, looking at new projects, advancing new projects, and getting projects to the drill-ready stage. We talked about the emphasis in really, really top-notch jurisdictions, and you just had some news here the last few weeks where you've provided an update on three epithermal gold-silver prospects in Nevada. Obviously, as far as jurisdiction goes, it doesn't get much better than Nevada. I wanted to have you on just to have a brief conversation about those projects and kind of set the table, because I know it's going to be a busy, busy 2024.

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, thank you very much. Well, we have been generating a whole bunch of new ideas and going back to some old ideas really and focusing on fleshing those out a little further. And so as we've announced, we've staked some new areas that we think are pretty prospective for epithermal gold-silver systems. There are alteration zones, which basically is indicative of the environment that you want to be exploring. We think we have the techniques to differentiate alteration zones and define them into what they're most likely to be prospective for. And what I mean by that is hot fluids that bring up potentially gold, silver, and other metals alter and affect the rock and leave behind these, what we call alteration zones, but they're really almost scab-like areas where they're intensely full of clay. And so we interpret those and seek out to find metal deposits that could be underneath them.

And because the idea really is that there are many areas where you can find gold and silver right at surface, but typically those areas have been heavily explored in the past. And if you can interpret where things are close to surface, hopefully, but beneath something that wouldn't historically have been considered prospective, that is to say if you're using these kinds of tools to find hidden deposits, then you're increasing your potential. I mean, obviously the odds are long that any one of these things is going to yield what we're looking for, but that's our job and we've done it before. We've found things in other parts of North America, we found blind mineral deposits in our group beneath clay alteration zones. So we're sort of a specialist in this, and we just wanted to let people know that we're out there actively looking and exploring, and so the next steps are to basically do additional work to help see if we can elevate it to the drill stage. Maybe not all of these will make it to that stage, but they're pretty exciting prospects to be able just to pick up through staking.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, and let's talk about staking. I mean, you have a total of, I believe, 14 new prospects that have been staked since early 2023?

Morgan Poliquin: That's right, yeah. And some of them we've managed to advance where we feel that we've defined targets that are worthy of drilling and other ones, we’ll be basically working through that new portfolio, early stage portfolio this year, and hoping that a number of them will be worthwhile to drill with readily definable targets or a clear path forward to how we're going to do the next steps on them. And so it's kind of exciting.

In the meantime, we're also putting our mind to generating new things. So we consider this to be a real pipeline operation, we think that there are still things to find, otherwise we wouldn't be doing this. And we also think that there are things to stake in areas where new ideas, new concepts, or even old concepts can be applied. For example, we think in the Western United States, there are areas that were not heavily explored for porphyries even though there's the indications of the alteration that can form above porphyries. So maybe people were looking at these things for shallow, heap-leachable gold deposits in the past, these areas in general, but maybe people didn't quite understand that underneath that can be hidden porphyry systems.

So those are some of the ideas that we're employing, and we feel there's real opportunities left to make discoveries.

Gerardo Del Real: Which are the projects, Morgan? Because you have, I mean, just a stable of robust early-stage and more advanced projects. Which are the ones that are most likely to see drilling here in 2024?

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, I think one that we've talked about for a couple of years is our Paradise Project, and that project is in south-central Nevada. It's a historic area generally around there where there's been significant gold production. I think it's five kilometers away from Paradise Peak, which produced around 2 million ounces if I recall, and it's a high sulfidation alteration zone as is what we staked at Paradise nearby. And those environments are the outward expression, the upward expression, of porphyry copper-gold systems. So we think what we've done at Paradise is define the alteration that you would expect to see above a porphyry, and we also think that we've got, using our techniques to analyze mineralogy, that we've defined a high-temperature vector to where we might drill to find that porphyry. So it is a readily defined target, and that is one that we're considering drilling here in the near term.

We have another project that's more copper, and it's in Arizona and it's in sort of elephant country you might say, where there's significant past or existing producers actively producing copper mines within, say, 50 miles. And there we've again found an alteration zone that we feel is representative of the upper levels of a copper porphyry system. We also feel like, with our mapping and mineral mapping, we've defined a potential center underneath which we think is a vector to that potential deeper porphyry.

So we've got two that have moved from initial targeting right into, this is where you'd want to drill. And there are others that we hope to elevate to that level this year, so we hope this will be an ongoing process.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, I'm excited for you to get back out to doing what you do best, that's looking to make discoveries. I love the jurisdictions that you're in. I love that you own your own drills, and I really love the cash position. I think you're positioned perfectly here for this bull cycle. Anything to add to that, Morgan?

Morgan Poliquin: No, I think we look forward to updating people on the advances of these projects. We expect crews to be basically working on all aspects of this, the early stage prospecting. And we're really pleased, it has been a number of years that we've been putting together this portfolio, a couple of years, and readjusting to a new focus, which is kind of an old focus on the Western USA, and it's nice to get back to it. And I think that investment in time that we've done the last couple of years in terms of the regional concept-level planning and exploration, now I expect there to be a lot more updates and news on the actual field work. So that's really exciting.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, absolutely looking forward to it. Thanks again for the update, Morgan.

Morgan Poliquin: Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: All right, cheers now.

Morgan Poliquin: Bye.

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