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

ALX Resources (TSX: AL)(OTC: ALXEF) CEO Warren Stanyer on Visible Gold & Exploring for Nickel

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the chairman and CEO of ALX Resources, Mr. Warren Stanyer. Warren, how are you this morning?

Warren Stanyer: Doing well, Gerardo, thanks for the call. How are you?

Gerardo Del Real: I am fantastic, thank you so much for asking. You are a busy, busy man. The past several weeks have yielded visible gold in the drill core at the Alligator Lake Gold Project, a week or so later, you acquired additional claims at the Vixen Gold Project, and just yesterday ALX and Rio Tinto confirmed drilling plans for the Firebird Nickel Project in Saskatchewan. A lot going on, let's start with the visible gold in the drill core at Alligator Lake.

Warren Stanyer: Okay, so the visible gold came as a surprise on a weekend and the geologist was very excited and said, "Hey, look, what we found", sent us pictures. What we realized as they went through hole number five, that there was three different places in the hole where flecks of gold were seen, and this was on the outside of the core, it's even before it split. So, that was exciting. And then in hole six, as they continued logging through the weekend of March 20th, 21st, they found some more in the top of hole six. So, that became a material change according to our legal counsel. So we busied ourselves and worked on a news release and put it out that week. And it caused a little excitement. I think we traded 14 million shares that day and, and had a price appreciation of over 50%. It's probably more like 70%. So it's settled back again, but it's a good problem to have that visible gold, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, it's a great problem to have when it's at shallow depths as well, right?

Warren Stanyer: Well, it is, that's the thing about this property. I mean, we knew from the 1995 drilling that had... It was about a quarter of an ounce over a meter and a half, drilling at different angles on the shear zone. And we thought that there was a better way to do this, that they had kind of over cut the system and missed the main part of it. And I think that, that might've been what's happened. We're still waiting for results, but we should get them soon.

Gerardo Del Real: You're waiting for results on six diamond drill holes, right?

Warren Stanyer: That's right. So, and getting back to the shallow nature of it. I mean, none of them were over 110 meters. I think that was the longest hole, the visible gold in number five, the last instance was at 62 meters. So it's very exciting but we do have to wait for the results. What I do like, is that when we sampled there on surface and we had that 500 gram gold sample back in October, this was when we were doing due diligence, it had no visible gold. There's a picture of it on our website. You can see the sample, someone holding it in their hand or part of the sample, but it was bigger than what they're holding, but you can see the silvery sulfides and no visible gold. So when I read in the drill logs from this drilling that there were sulfides in these quartz veins, we don't know what they're going to run, but darn I hope they run high.

Gerardo Del Real: When do you anticipate receiving initial assays back?

Warren Stanyer: You know, it could be later this week, it's already Wednesday. Like lawyers, you tend to get things from labs at, you know, four o'clock on a Friday. So we'll see. And then it's going to take us some time. And once you get the results, you have to compile them and figure out what the intersections are. If there are reportable intersections, and these are all the things that we have to quickly do so that we can get the news out as soon as possible.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Excellent. Well, obviously I'm looking forward to the results, looking forward to having you back on to report on those. Pivoting a bit, you added additional claims at the Vixen Gold Project in Red Lake Mining District and Ontario, of course. Tell me a bit about that and the strategy behind it.

Warren Stanyer: So at Vixen, we have three different blocks that were staked in late 2019, actually September 2019. Vixen North, we have concentrated on the most and probably like a magnet, you're drawn to where there was production and where there's a large nearby deposit, which is called Springpole, which is over four million ounces. I think it's 4.7, all categories put together. There was a mine right on our doorstep at Vixen North, called the Argosy mine. It produced about a 100,000 ounces back in the day. I think it closed in 1942, like so many other Canadian gold mines at the time, they were trying to restrict the gold supply, I guess that was the political theory, World War II was on and why put gold into the system, if you've already got a lot of it.

Anyway, Vixen South is where we added these claims. There was eight units that were, kind of a cutout, say in our claim block. And we haven't done as much work at Vixen South, but when this person approached us, the vendor, in January, I took a very hard look at Vixen South and started finding things in the literature about that particular area. And it was fascinating. There's a major fault that runs through Vixen South that no one has ever properly explored. And by that, I mean, what Great Bear has done with their fault systems, these deep crustal features that go through their property that they've exploited so magically so wonderfully, no one has applied those theories at all to this area of Vixen South. And this is a major fault that runs from Springpole Lake to the Southwest, bisects the Vixen South property, and meanwhile, at Vixen South, there was a small high grade gold mine that closed in 1942, I believe.

And nobody has ever gone back there. There's people that have it under claim right now, but you know, gold is tricky and that it's hard to use geophysics to find it. It's more difficult. It's not like looking for uranium or base metals. So, with gold people have to commit to drilling programs. What we see in that particular area, it's in the Red Lake mining district, but it's in a Greenstone belt, that probably, as the crow flies, say 50 miles from the town of Red Lake, where all the mines are and Great Bear is to the South of that. So we're in the bit of the hinterland there, but things are changing. I mean, there is a road right to the bottom corner of a Vixen South.

And again, finding out these new geological features and you know, you really have to look through a lot of reports. This was not really talked about until the late 1970s, and then nobody has really done any mapping there since. So, we need to do some exploration along that fault because what is responsible for the gold being there on surface, that we know of, at Vixen South? What brought it there? Why is there a little gold mine right on our outer boundary? So, being a little bit remote. And so these eight claims had had a smattering of gold. There was a few holes drilled. You know, there'd be a couple of meters of a gram, or half a gram or a gram and a half. There was eight holes drilled in 1985, and then nobody did any more work. Well that could be just like crumbs, the surface expression of a larger system. So we have a lot of work to do at Vixen. And I'm looking forward to it this summer, get our people back there.

Gerardo Del Real: Wonderful. Last but not least, you and partner, Rio Tinto confirmed drilling plans for the Firebird Nickel Project. You provided details of that exploration plan. I'd love for you to give us a bit of context there, Warren.

Warren Stanyer: Well, it's an exciting time for the company, in this regard, we have a little bit of waiting that we have to do. We're going on the ground in May. We are checking, ground-truthing some anomalies. Anyone that looks at the maps will say, "well, where are the anomalies?" It's Because we're not publishing where they are right now. But what we're trying to show is the fertility in the Northern part of the project, where we flew, we've got more than a dozen targets in the North that fit the model for a magmatic nickel sulfide target. They're discreet. In other words, they stand out from the host or the barren rocks, the country rocks, as we call them, that we know are barren. They stand out because that's how these things were deposited, in a magmatic, a volcanic eruption, interacting with the local rocks and then the nickel and all these sulfides were all deposited in these blobs.

We hope, we know there's nickel on the property. It's not like this is totally grassroots, but we have concentrated in an area that's never been drilled. Whereas, all the other explorers, they went to the low-hanging fruit, which was the Access Lake deposit, the Ray Lake deposit. And those two deposits. Yes, they have strike length. Yes, they have some tonnage, in non-compliant tonnage, but the grade and tonnage was never high enough, a 0.6% nickel. Okay, if you had 50 million tons of that, then maybe that has a chance, but it's less, it's way less than that. It's less than 5 million.

So, what we're after and what Rio tend to recognize, is a Voisey's Bay model, is a high grade blob model, call it that. And they're willing to take this chance. And this is a bold move by them. I mean, we're doing eight holes as the first phase. If we have success, then the lid is going to come off. And there will be a lot more drilling, is my prediction. Why would they sit on it? They want to find nickel. They want to find it now. And they're looking for new discoveries. Everyone is hungry for new discoveries, not some property that's been around and known for 50 years with people drilling new and longer holes into it. This is exploration at its finest. That's all I can say.

Gerardo Del Real: Voisey's Bay is a heck of an analog. It sounds like you have an exciting spring, summer in 2021, in store. Warren, thank you for your time. Anything else that you'd like to add to that?

Warren Stanyer: I just like to thank their shareholders for their support, and there's a lot of new interest in the company as well. And we're really making strides here. If the Alligator Lake looks like it's got legs, the visible gold is a great start and we'll see what the assays say. We're going to be drilling this summer. There's a lot of news to come here and I really look forward to this year. It's like, something's dawning, right now.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, I look forward to having you back on to talk about it and hopefully it's all positive. Right?

Warren Stanyer: Well, that would be great, yeah.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. I will take all the positives we can get. Thanks again.

Warren Stanyer: You're welcome, thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Bye now.

Warren Stanyer: Bye-bye.