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Dolly Varden Silver (TSX-V: DV)(OTC: DOLLF) CEO Shawn Khunkhun on Consolidating a Large, High-Grade Silver-Gold Mining Camp in British Columbia with Drills Set to Turn
Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Dolly Varden Silver — Mr. Shawn Khunkhun. Shawn, congratulations. How are you this morning?
Shawn Khunkhun: You know what, Gerardo, I'm very, very good today.
Gerardo Del Real: You just announced an agreement where Dolly Varden will acquire, from Fury, the 100% interest in the Homestake Ridge Gold-Silver Project. This is an absolute game-changer for Dolly Varden and its shareholders.
I am thrilled to see you really get into the exploration upside. But look, let's get into the details. A combined mineral resource base of 34.7 million ounces of silver; 166,000 ounces of gold. That's just in the Indicated category. You have nearly 30 million ounces of silver and 817,000 ounces of gold in the Inferred category.
And as I touched on a bit earlier, the exploration upside is fantastic. Give us an overview on the motivation behind the transaction, Shawn.
Shawn Khunkhun: Okay. Thank you so much, Gerardo. For the last hundred years, these two projects have sat next to each other, separated by about 5.5 kilometers. And the big question I asked myself was, what lies in between Dolly's most northern discovery and Fury's most southern discovery? There's five kilometers. And that's really what the big opportunity is here.
Whether you look at this through the lens of a 140 million ounce silver-equivalent project, or whether you look at this as a gold project of just under two million ounces… what we do have is we have a precious metals story in Canada where grade meets size.
If we look at it through the lens of a gold-equivalent, it's the only project in North America that has this size of endowment with an average grade of better than 5 grams per tonne gold-equivalent, or over 300 grams per tonne silver-equivalent.
So it's size-meets-grade in a safe jurisdiction. But as you mentioned, it's not what's there in these 2019 43-101-compliant reports… it’s the 5.5 kilometers that's never been explored in between that we now have 100% interest of this 15 km trend in the Golden Triangle.
Gerardo Del Real: Let's be absolutely clear; there was a previous stand-alone PEA on the Homestake Project, alone, that valued it at US$173 million; an IRR of 32%. That was at US$1,620 gold and US$14.40 silver.
Obviously, we're quite a bit higher, especially as it relates to the silver price. What's next? How do you tap into that exploration upside that everyone's so excited about, Shawn?
Shawn Khunkhun: Just to touch on that PEA, that's without the Dolly project.
Gerardo Del Real: Correct.
Shawn Khunkhun: And that's with conservative price assumptions. So one of the things that we'll look to do is to produce a PEA; one mill, two projects. And so that's one part of the plan.
The other part of the plan on the exploration side is, at Homestake Ridge, there's tremendous opportunities for growth. There's tremendous opportunities at-depth and along strike. So that's one part of the equation.
That's the same on the Dolly side of the property, not only at Torbrit, but there's two kilometers in between Torbrit and Wolf that we're looking to further delineate ounces along that trend. And now, we've got this new 5.5 kilometers in between Wolf, which is Dolly's most northern deposit, and South Reef, which is Homestake Ridge's most southern deposit.
Gerardo Del Real: Great work. I'm looking forward to drills turning. I'm looking forward to assays. Anything else to add to that, Shawn? I know there's a lot going on… a lot of moving parts.
Shawn Khunkhun: I just want to say that there's the obvious synergies… but what we're getting in Fury here is we're getting a partner. They're appointing two directors to our board. They've put a voluntary legend on their stock to show the world that they're partners. They're going to support myself and the rest of the management team for the next three years.
So we've gained a partner, and together we're going to go out. And when I was approaching major mining companies and I was introducing them to Dolly Varden, they would say, yeah, Shawn… come back to me when you have 100 million ounces of silver. Now I'm coming back to them with, we've exceeded those numbers… we've exceeded our internal goals.
But the big opportunity here is this positions Dolly as one of the premier companies not only in the Golden Triangle but in the world. And it brings gold into the story. But it also, from the uniqueness factor, it's the only company that has gold, that has silver, and has grade.
And Gerardo, for the last hundred years, these projects have sat next to one another, and we were the management team that consolidated them.
Gerardo Del Real: Great work, congrats! Looking forward to seeing you develop this project, these projects, I should say, in conjunction with each other. And yeah, can't say enough about how much sense this makes and how accretive it is. Great work, Shawn. Thank you.
Shawn Khunkhun: Thank you, Gerardo.
Gerardo Del Real: Alright, we'll chat soon.
Shawn Khunkhun: Okay, buddy. Take care.
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