Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

AUX Resources (TSX-V: AUX)(OTC: AUXRF) CEO Ian Slater on High-Grade Gold Results, Georgia Project — British Columbia, Canada

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president & CEO of AUX Resources — Mr. Ian Slater. Ian, this is a new story to our audience… one I am excited to tell! How are you doing today?

Ian Slater: Well, I'm doing excellent! We're doing really well. I've got a great resource market and a great project. Times are good! 

Gerardo Del Real: Well, let's get right into it! I want to talk about the 103 grams per tonne gold over 2.74 meters and the 126 grams per tonne gold over 1.1 meters that you announced a week ago. 

It caught the attention of Eric Sprott who decided to write a check to the tune of C$2 million. And I want to get into both of those things. But before that, because this is a new story to our audience, I would love for you to give everyone a brief background of your success and your past and history.

Ian Slater: Sure. Well, I'm actually an accountant. I was the managing partner of, yeah, really, Arthur Anderson's mining practice in the Soviet Union in the 1990s and then Ernst and Young's Canadian mining practice after that. 

And then, about 12 years ago, I retired young and started buying mineral properties in the downturn. And it's been a lot of years of the downturn buying mineral properties. And now we're taking those public. 

And a good example, really, of what we're doing with AUX (which we took over management of last summer) would be Outcrop Gold. So that's another one of our group companies. 

It's a silver district in Colombia. And about this time last year, it was C$0.10. And Eric Sprott – we had a great drill result – Eric Sprott invested 20% of the company… just like what happened with AUX now. And then, Outcrop went on a great run and was one of the most successful junior stocks on the TSX-V last year.

Gerardo Del Real: You mentioned being an accountant and that being your background there, right, which explains, I think, the solid share structure… although you just stepped into the company here recently. 

The structure is something I always look at. It's literally the first thing; that and management. And I believe you have just over… what is it… 43 million shares outstanding, pre-financing with Mr. Sprott. And then, fully diluted, right around 55 million [shares]. Is that accurate?

Ian Slater: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's the first thing we do too. And when we take over management of a company… is we fix the share structure; we get the right shareholders in and get going drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent! Let's talk about the drilling. Let's talk about the project. I referenced the excellent results that caught Eric's attention here recently. It also caught the attention of the market. Can you tell us a bit about the project? And then we'll talk about the approach here moving forward. 

Ian Slater: Sure. So it was called the Georgia River Mine, and it was mined by the Guggenheim family in the 1930s. They were mining an ounce material there, and it's very close to Stuart. It's very accessible. It's about 10 kilometers down the Portland Canal. 

So you could barge down there. And then, they had a road going up to the mine. It's had exploration back in 1990. And interestingly, when they drilled it back then, they only sampled the obvious high-grade quartz veins, and they left the old core sitting at site. So there's a bonus we've got. 

We managed to salvage 5,000 meters out of the 12,000 meters that was left there, and we're going to be press releasing that soon. And it looks really interesting. It looks like – especially the shoulders of those areas – some of those were mineralized. And there are mineralized areas in that corner that wasn't sampled just because it wasn't, obviously, mineralized 30 years ago.

And then, the new drilling that we did was we stepped out hundreds of meters from the mine. And the press release we're working on now with the historic logging – we're actually going to show a series of cross sections as you step away from this mine and that these high grade results like this, if you combine it with our current results and the 1990 results and the relogging we've done of that – it'll be obvious to all of the readers as you step out hundreds of meters, these drill holes just keep continuing and that vein keeps continuing at these kind of grades.

Gerardo Del Real: There's gold and silver in the system, obviously. Can you walk me through how it's distributed thus far? And I know a lot of that's going to be updated once you get the historic diamond drill core assays verified, right?

Ian Slater: Yeah, sure. Right now, at the Georgia project, it's really around one-to-one. There is silver in it but it's not the economic driver of the Georgia Mine. One thing I wanted to tell your listeners about is we have another project (we have about a dozen projects in AUX) but one that we purchased last summer is called Silver Crown just north of Stewart a few kilometers. 

Last summer, we channel sampled every 40 meters over about a kilometer and a half. And it has outcropping high-grade silver veins by the looks of it. There's sphalerite and galena that we were channel sampling with a saw all along that. Those assays are just coming back from the lab now so we'll have another press release on that soon as well. 

But it looks like we've made a high-grade silver discovery there which we're going to drill next summer. But that's a separate project from the Georgia project that these drill results are on.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, Ian, you have a great team. You have the cash position here with the financing that was recently announced. You have assays pending from multiple programs. Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

Ian Slater: Yeah, I think the key part of it is, like you said — the team. We have three PhD geologists that are working on this project. But also, at a senior level, we have Thomas Mumford and Brad Rourke from Scottie Resources who are partners on this. 

And those guys are excellent operators in the Golden Triangle [of British Columbia]. They've been working there for many years, and Brad has lived for decades at Smithers. They know all of the contractors and exactly how to work in Northern BC in a short season. And it really is a skill that you need to have to be able to efficiently get in there and get these programs done. 

And they've got a great base in Stewart that they work out of that just made it so efficient for drilling AUX. Last summer, we were in and out on that 3,600 meter program in a month, and it was under budget; that never happens! So we were very lucky to have that team managing the operations on the day-to-day up there.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, I'm looking forward to results and I'll tell you why… because I know that the current land package was picked up over a 12 year period. This isn't a land package that you recognized was an area that was getting the flavor of the month treatment where you rushed in and just staked a bunch of land. 

It's a real project. It's a real land package. And I'm excited to get the assays back and start seeing how that story develops. Ian, I want to thank you for your time. Anything else there?

Ian Slater: No, that's it… it's exactly right. It's been acquired over 12 years. And then the two projects we acquired last summer – Independence and Silver Crown – those were in high demand. Lots of the other juniors in Stewart were trying to acquire those properties, which we managed to pull together.

Gerardo Del Real: Fantastic! Well, hopefully I can have you back on soon. And it sounds like you’ve got the news flow to justify it — so we'll be chatting!

Ian Slater: I'd love to… thank you!

Gerardo Del Real: Alright! Thanks a lot, Ian.

Ian Slater: Thanks.