Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Dolly Varden Silver (TSX-V: DV)(OTC: DOLLF) CEO Shawn Khunkhun and VP of Exploration Rob Van Egmund on Advancing the High-Grade Kitsault Valley Silver Project in British Columbia’s Golden Triangle by way of the Drill

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real live from the Beaver Creek Precious Metals Summit. Joining me today is the CEO of Dolly Varden Silver, Mr. Shawn Khunkhun, and the VP of Exploration, the newly-appointed VP of Exploration for Dolly Varden Silver, Mr. Rob Van Egmund.

Gerardo Del Real: Gentlemen, how's it going? It's great to catch up in person.

Shawn Khunkhun: Excellent. Thanks for having us on, Gerardo.

Rob Van Egmund: Yes, thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Great… the last time we spoke, you and I chatted, Rob, and you were excited about what you were seeing with the drill bit and in the core.

Rob Van Egmund: Yes, that was in Zurich and so our program was just starting up, and we're now 30,000 meters into that. We've added another 5,000 meters just due to the success of the early part of the program.

Now, results are starting to come in from the first part of the program, and we're getting a way better understanding of the project as a whole now since we've acquired Homestake Ridge. We now see it as one big system.

Gerardo Del Real: Tell me more about that because you had some phenomenal news this morning that I want to get into, and I think that the news release was very technical in nature and we'll make sure to put a link up to it. 

But I love providing the context to people that maybe aren't as well-versed as you are with the geology and the model and the geometry of a deposit and what you look for when you're growing it.

Rob Van Egmund: Yeah, right now the resource on the project is made up of several deposits, and that's the way we're looking at it. There's going to be different veins, different deposits, that'll make up our full global resource. 

And we're remodeling a lot of them… doing new modeling. And with this idea that the whole valley is one system, it's a large fold, and in the axis of that fold, we believe that that's where the higher grade mineralization is — the larger bodies are.

What we're seeing in our deposits are sort of the edge effects… so it's coming out from underneath the sediment cap that we have, and we're following that down structurally towards the center of the valley. That's what these step-outs that we did at Wolf and at Kitsault are pointing towards. As we get closer to the center of the valley, we're getting wider intercepts and with higher grade.

Gerardo Del Real: If that holds up… that's one large system!

Rob Van Egmund: We're hoping, yeah. We still have 5.5 km. Because the results today were between Wolf and Torbrit — within that 1.4 kilometers — but we still have 5.5 km between Wolf and Homestake Ridge of cover that we have to check underneath.

Gerardo Del Real: Shawn, we've talked off-air and I know how excited you are about taking this to being a significant player in the silver space. I personally don't think you get to the finish line without being bought out… but let's have that conversation another day at another time. Talk to me about the vision because I love how clear you are about how you want to position Dolly Varden.

Shawn Khunkhun: Thanks, Gerardo. For me — and we’ve got to go back two and a half years to when I took over and when we populated Dolly with a new board, a new team, new shareholders — we've accomplished a lot. We've grown the resource. We've gone from 44 million ounces in all categories on the silver side. We've brought in Homestake Ridge so we've got a total, in all categories, of about 138 million ounces of silver equivalent.

But the key is we've got four deposits in the south; three in the north. Three are clustered together. You go back one month, we stepped out of the Torbrit deposit and we hit one of the best drill holes ever hit on the property: 50 meters of 414 grams of silver outside of this resource area. 

And then, today's announcement was a 55 meter step-out from a 100 meter step-out last season. So we've doubled the strike length of Wolf. So Wolf looks like it's rivaling Torbrit. 

And the big news today is that this was hole No. 300. We've got a hole 207 meters away — hole No. 316 — and it visually looks just as good as these other holes that we're putting out. So we're holding our breath for that.

But half of the drilling this year has been up at Homestake. So we've got results coming from all over the place. We've got C$14 million in the bank. We have no debt. We've got supportive shareholders like Hecla and Eric Sprott. So we're building a company that's grown six, seven times in terms of the total market capitalization of the company at a time where our peers are flat or down.

So we're in the right location… we've got the right grade… we've got the right size… we've got the right team. And I think if we just keep doing what we're doing, this company is going to continue on that trajectory.

Gerardo Del Real: What's the endgame in your mind?

Shawn Khunkhun: Make my shareholders money, period. And if that means a 50%-100% premium through a bid to a larger entity that we ride in the bull market — so be it. If that means continuing to do what we do regionally — consolidate and grow the company through discovery — it’s just… make our shareholders money, period.

Gerardo Del Real: I love it. Gentlemen, exciting times! It's been a pleasure catching up and I look forward to doing it again soon.

Shawn Khunkhun: Thanks so much.

Rob Van Egmund: Thanks. 

 

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