Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Cross River Ventures (CSE: CRVC)(OTC: CSRVF) CEO Alex Klenman on Hunting for a Major Discovery In 2022

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, Gerardo. It's always good to be with you.

Gerardo Del Real: It's great to have you back. You just closed an oversubscribed financing. You just announced that you are getting set to drill the McVicar Gold Project in early 2022. It will be a 5,000 meter diamond drilling program. It's 100% owned, McVicar is, and I know that you and the technical team have done a lot of work behind the scenes preparing the targets that you're going to test, because there's plenty of targets on the property to test. I will let you provide the context on the drilling program and what you're hoping.

Alex Klenman: Yeah, great setup. Obviously the tech team has been working diligently for... and what's the old saying? "Fortune favors the diligent," right, so people are wondering why we're putting out news on December 22nd. Because the diligent among us will catch it and read it and I'm glad you're bringing some eyeballs to it. So yeah, they've done a ton of work over the last 12 months, and here we are where we are with our market cap and the argument today is I think much, much stronger. We're cheaper, we're closer to drilling, and we've got great data that the team has put together over the last 12 months. It's a good time to get people involved, to introduce the story if they don't know about it, or to reiterate what we're doing, and it's just right around the corner. Q1 is weeks away, and we're going to be drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: Walk me through the targets. You're looking for these high grade gold targets, right, that you've been able to identify through that diligent fieldwork, and you have multiple targets that it looks like you're going to test here in this initial program. Can you speak to that a bit?

Alex Klenman: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've known... we knew early on that there were plenty of targets, but obviously getting the data compiled and reviewed has opened up different views on what's happening. I guess the main thing, the most exciting thing, is the discovery of this Bear Head Trend, which is below the Chellow Vein. Chellow Vein has always been a ground zero because of the numbers BHP generated there. There's 500 gram, 800 gram samples, that were picked up in this ground near the Vein and then there's been... they did, I guess BHP did, a chip sample program, a trenching program, and the average grade of the 34 samples taken at the Vein was 28 grams.

We always knew that the Chellow Vein was priority target, but beneath it, about 500 meters, 600 meters south of and parallel to the Vein is this Bear Head Trend, and it appears to be about 700 meters in length and is open in all directions. We're going to drill test it. There's been some interesting sampling and other information done and accumulated across this strike length at Bear Head, so we're eager to drill it. These will be the first real holes popped down there. There was some minor drilling done many moons ago, but certainly the great thing about McVicar is there's just the right amount of historic work that wets the lips, but at the same time there hasn't been enough of it where you question where a deposit might be. Deposits could be hidden all over this project, which is why we're excited about it.

Gerardo Del Real: The second target is the Altered Zone, and on this zone here we've actually had intercepts, historic ones, of 10.09 meters of 6.46 grams per tonne gold, including 33 grams per tonne gold over 1.86 meters. Talk to me about that target there.

Alex Klenman: Yeah. Well, this is one area again, which is funny because we've got half a dozen really good solid target zones. When we're talking about a target, we're not talking about one specific drill pad. We're talking about an area, and sometimes these areas are larger, sometimes they're smaller, but we're talking about a zone which would have multiple drill points contained within it. We really like this area. Obviously it has had a little bit of drilling success, but we think there's a structure, the AZ Structure, that is basically our inferred target. It's had high grade intercepts. We see it as being a viable target, again, one of many. The great thing about McVicar is there's multiple takeoff points, whether it's this Bear Head Zone or it's the AZ Structure or the Altered Zone, all these other areas that look so promising. It's going to be exciting in 2022, because we're going to try to get to drilling most, if not all of them.

Gerardo Del Real: Exciting times. For those that are new to the story or participated in the recent financing, can you speak to Dr. Rob Carpenter's experience and the technical team's experience, because that's really what's attracted me to this story and why I reached out to subscribers and felt it was a compelling speculation for a significant gold discovery in 2022. Can you speak to his background a bit?

Alex Klenman: Yeah, absolutely. One thing that was apparent in the early... my early days with this company, I got involved just after the IPO and was introduced to Rob Carpenter, because we acquired a private company called Northern Dominion Metals in which he was one of the shareholders, and the projects that were in Northern Dominion Metals, which are all ours now, were handpicked by Rob and his team. The team, we've got two PhDs and two Masters. Academically speaking that's a lot of muscle, but more importantly, they've all had, everybody in the team has had major success on the discovery and development side, and obviously everyone knows Carpenter's involvement with Kaminak. He was the CEO from inception to buyout by Goldcorp. They developed the Coffee deposit in the Yukon. They were bought out for half a billion dollars. That's obviously one incidence of success among many with the tech team.

But that's where really, as you mentioned, ground zero is, is having a technical team behind the exploration side of it, and so it's not just the... it's not the corporate guys, it's not the marketing, finance guys trying to determine drill targets and pushing the project forward. It's coming from the best possible place, which is a fully invested technical team that are excited about the targets and excited to develop them, and patient and methodical too. Look at 2021. We've stuck to our guns. It's been 12 months. It hasn't been a great market, but we haven't been caught trying to do things we shouldn't be doing. We've been following the methodical approach, which is data compilation and then groundwork, reconnaissance, sampling, geophysics, all of that going into the generation of drill targets, and here we are basically a year later, right around the corner from drilling. Can't say enough about the quality of the tech team and what they bring to the deal.

Gerardo Del Real: Alex, where's the market cap today?

Alex Klenman: Oh God. 35 million out at 12 cents Canadian, so do the math.

Gerardo Del Real: There you go. A lot of runway between the hundreds of millions of dollars that Kaminak was taken out at, and four, four and a half million dollars here for Cross River Ventures. That's what we're in it for, a discovery. I am looking forward to drilling in 2022.

Have a great Christmas, have a great holiday, have a great New Year's. Thank you for your time. Anything to add to that today?

Alex Klenman: Yeah, no, well obviously happy holidays to you and your listeners, but the other side of it is patience. I was an early shareholder in a very big company and I got bored early and I sold and I could have seen ridiculous gains had I remained patient. My only advice to people is let the process play out. Let the technical team do its thing. Let us explore and develop, not only McVicar, but the other projects in our portfolio, and I think it's going to end quite nicely.

Gerardo Del Real: Well said. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

Alex Klenman: Thank you. Have a good one. Bye-bye.