Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Cross River Ventures (CSE: CRVC) CEO Alex Klenman on High-Grade Gold Targets on Dent-Jackson Property in Ontario

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Cross River Ventures, Mr. Alex Klenman. Alex, how are you today?

Alex Klenman: I'm good, sir. Gerardo, how are you doing?

Gerardo Del Real: I am well, I am well. Cross River Ventures has a 52-week high, right around the 50 cent level. You're trading at half of that. You're at 25 cents today and put out some pretty impressive news today, that I think underscores the opportunity. I'll read the headline and then we can get into the details of it. “Cross River identifies high-grade gold targets on Dent-Jackson Property in Northwest Ontario.” There were historical surface samples, up to 232 grams per tonne gold, historical trenching assay of 26.8 grams per tonne gold over eight meters. We know the caliber of the technical team. I know I'm asking you to talk your own book, so this'll be easy, but I got to believe that you feel the pullback is a gift for people looking for a quality team and a quality gold speculation.

Alex Klenman: Yeah, absolutely. Well said. I think you're right on target the way that you categorized that it. What we're doing here is we're applying a very systematic, methodical approach to exploration. Unfortunately, what it isn't doing is happening overnight but fortunately, like you say, the pullback in the share price and gold where it's at right now, it is a great buying opportunity. I mean, this was the price we financed last fall just after our IPO. What the news release did was illustrate how this systematic approach is working for us.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's talk about that approach. The sampling, the surface samples, excellent, but of course there's a lot more that goes into it, and a lot more that you're going to be doing to get the multiple properties and projects you have to drill ready status, right?

Alex Klenman: That's correct. What we're doing right now, the technical team... I'm not sure how comfortable they are, but I'm calling them a world-class technical team. Dr. Rob Carpenter leads the team. He's famous for being CEO of Kaminak when it sold for half a billion dollars to Goldcorp. He made the Coffee discovery of the Yukon, became a 5 million ounce deposit. This is a team that knows how to get it done and their approach is simple. We've acquired multiple projects in Northwestern Ontario and well-known greenstone belts. They are now doing what we're calling deep dives on the projects and getting as much information from historical sources as possible. What we put out on the Dent-Jackson Property, which is located on the Birch-Uchi belt, which is just east of the Red Lake belt. There was a historic mine there. 27,000 ounces of gold was mined back in the 30s.

So we know there’s gold on the property, but it's been relatively ignored over time. They've gone in and dug deep. They've come up with these historical samples and some trenching that was done, and really paints a great picture. The data that you can get out of these projects is the first step on the path toward quality drill targets. When I say quality drill targets, because we're not going to poke holes just anywhere. We're going to make sure that we've exhausted every bit of data to give us the best chance for early discovery on this project. The Dent-Jackson information that we put out, I think, is just illustrative of the approach that we're taking on all of the projects.

Gerardo Del Real: For people that are newer to the space or newer to the Cross River Ventures story, can you provide a brief overview of the multiple projects that excellent team that you mentioned is working on?

Alex Klenman: Yeah, well, we've got, I guess, almost 28,000 hectares worth of ground in Northwestern Ontario, in the major well-known greenstone belts. Our flagship project is called McVicar. It's a recently consolidated package of almost 12,000 hectares total. We control all of the main structural elements of the Lang Lake Greenstone belt, so we have almost an entire belt to ourselves with dozens of historical gold occurrences on it. That's really our flagship. We believe that something special will take place there, but we're also working several other projects at the same time.

Our Shabu project, for example, is just north of Dent-Jackson. Recently, a well-known junior explorer, or almost mid-tier by now, Great Bear Resources picked up the ground and just to the east of us, contiguous to our project. We're in good company and we're headed in that direction in terms of, look, we want to be a discovery in 2021, that's going to be impactful and meaningful. This is the way we feel we're going to do it, a methodical approach. Through Q1, Q2 is data compilation. We're going to fly LiDAR surveys in Q2, which are airborne geophysical surveys that are going to show us where the faults and breaks and possible gold deposition alleys will occur. Then we're going to get on the ground in the warmer months, do some ground recon, confirm our targets. Towards the later summer, we're going to start drilling. That's a methodical approach. We're funded to do that and we hope we bring something special to the market later in 2021.

Gerardo Del Real: Despite that, the market cap is currently sub $10 million Canadian, correct?

Alex Klenman: That is true. We IPO'd last July, so we're still really early in the public company life cycle. We've got about 27 million shares out. The structure is still pretty tight. We trade well for an earlier stage deal, but at 25 cents, it looks like a great buy. I mean, I'm biased. I've been a buyer in the market. You got to look at those things that you need to tick off on the list for an explorer. That's location, size of the projects. If you have postage stamp properties, it's pretty tough to get the upside out of those. We're consolidating large packages. Again, we have a world-class team with success under their belt. These are the types of deals you look for because as you know and we all know, upon discovery, these types of deals is where the real money is made in the market.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. How's the treasury looking Alex?

Alex Klenman: We're good. We just recently did a large flow-through financing, about $1.5 million, so we're going to be able to do most of the work to get us into the third quarter. We'll have to raise more money as we go along, but if the share price is strong, the dilution is minimal. We have a lot of institutional interest so funding, I don't think, will be an issue for us. As long as gold remains strong and the market's healthy, we'll be able to do what we want to do, but we're all pretty well connected with Cross River. We've got robust Rolodexes, as they say. We'll be able to get the job done, but we're in no hurry. This isn't a two week trade. This is a top-tier exploration deal that when you buy the shares, you put them in the bottom drawer and you let the technical team do what they're going to do.

I say this to other people all the time, if you took a hundred CEOs of junior mining companies, and you lined them up and you said, "We will deliver you district scale opportunities in well-known Greenstone belts in Northwestern Ontario with a world-class technical team led by Dr. Rob Carpenter, would you take the deal?" I guarantee you a hundred out of a hundred would say yes. We're in a unique position and we think that differentiates us from a lot of other deals out there today.

Gerardo Del Real: I agree, Alex, and you should be biased. I am biased anytime and I say it all the time. If I'm speaking with someone, or highlighting a company, or featuring a company, it's because I like the team and I like the company. We know that exploration is high-risk, high reward, but man, you sure mitigate that risk when you have the caliber of team and the right structure in place, right?

Alex Klenman: You do. I think what mitigates is also a perfect example on the Dent-Jackson release. We had a bit of information on the project, but that project, just with this deep data dive, just got a little bit more valuable with their ability to dig up this historical work. That was the reason these projects were picked in the first place. They had just enough historical work to tell you that there's something there, but not enough of it to make you question how it's been missed, or how could there possibly be something there? We're in that little unique sweet spot, if you will.

Gerardo Del Real: Well said. Alex, thank you for your time. Looking forward to a busy second half of drilling, and a busy first half of technical data and processing data sets.

Alex Klenman: You got it. Appreciate it, Gerardo, as always. Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you.