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Topics: Copper Stocks

Gladiator Metals (TSX-V: GLAD)(OTC: GDTRF) CEO Jason Bontempo on Receiving a Key Class 3 Exploration Permit, Launching a 40,000m Drill Campaign, and Advancing Multiple High-Grade Copper Targets at the Flagship Whitehorse Copper Project, Yukon

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Gladiator Metals (TSX-V: GLAD)(OTC: GDTRF) — Mr. Jason Bontempo. 

How are you, sir? It has been a bit. We're overdue for a catch-up, and congratulations are in order. We'll get to that in just a second, but first and foremost, how are you doing, Jason?

Jason Bontempo: Very well, Gerardo. Looking very much forward to 2026 for Gladiator… and we're off to a good start.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, let's get to the news of the day. You just received a really important permit — the Class 3 exploration permit — for your past-producing Whitehorse Copper Project. 

When you and I met several years back and we were looking at the project, the thing that really stuck out to me — obviously it was past-producing, obviously the grades were good — but it was the potential for massive scale. And you've done, and the team has done, a brilliant job over the past several years proving out that scale.

So I want to start by talking about what this Class 3 exploration permit means for Gladiator because the timing couldn't be better. I mean, gold is sitting there at $4,500/oz. Copper is sitting there at $5.50/lb. 

There are structural deficits materializing in the copper space that I think are going to be here for many, many years. And you're going to hit that sweet spot in a way that not a lot of exploration companies get to, I believe.

So can you tell me about this permit and why it's so important for you?

Jason Bontempo: It's quite a significant milestone, Gerardo. From a pragmatic perspective, there are two very important reasons.

Number one is that it allows us to drill from more pads per mineral claim. So under our previous permit of Class 1, we could drill a maximum of eight drill pads per mineral claim. We no longer have that restriction. So that's the first component.

The second component, which is just as important — maybe if not more important — is it allows us to create the access that we need to high-priority targets and areas that we couldn't access before. Because under our previous permit, we were not able to build trails or roads. Whereas with the Class 3, we can. And those are the two critical items. They don't sound like much, but they certainly are very important.

There are other components to a Class 3, like building a camp and storage of infrastructure and fuel, but we don't need to worry about that because we run down the western margin of Whitehorse City, and we just hop on the Alaska Highway and can get back to a nice, comfy bed in a house, or the kitchen, or our partner's industrial area where we store everything. It is one of the great advantages of this project — its proximity to Whitehorse.

And I think that probably leads me into the next point, which for us is a very significant milestone, not just for those two very important, critical, pragmatic items that I mentioned. This was a nine-month process — probably longer, in fact — and it involved a significant amount of public consultation.

It was managed by the Yukon Environmental and Social Economic Assessment Board, also known as YESAB. And for us, that was a very important component because of our proximity to Whitehorse. For us, this was also a very good indicator of our social license.

And I'm pleased to say, obviously, that we got a very positive recommendation off the back of it from YESAB. It included a lot of positive consultation from our First Nation partners, Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta'an Kwäch'än Council, which is very important.

And so I think it really puts a very positive shine on how we're going, not just on the technical front, but also on the social front, because it's a five-year term, Gerardo. So we can get a lot of work done here.

And I think finally, what it means now is that as and when we make discoveries, we can rapidly move them to resources, where that was a bit trickier under the old permit of Class 1. So I think that sums it up reasonably well for you, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: You also answered my next question, which was going to be how important it was to get the endorsement from the community and local stakeholders. Because I know that, obviously, with jurisdictional risk increasing around the world, social license and having the support of the local stakeholders is absolutely critical. So congrats on that front as well.

For those that may be new to the Gladiator story and are looking and going — it’s a past-producing, massive-potential, on-the-scale-side property with copper and gold and molybdenum — and maybe need an overview as to what is so exciting about 2026 with Gladiator, what would you tell them?

I know you have 40,000 meters of drilling planned for this year, so I would likely start there, but how would you explain to someone that may be new to the story what Gladiator is going to be able to provide over the next several quarters?

Jason Bontempo: Well, it's fairly straightforward, Gerardo. We have been working the belt and the project and systematically exploring different priority areas. When you look at our map, initially we had highlighted four to five outcropping prospects along the belt, which is high-grade copper skarn mineralization. And over the past couple of years, we have focused on Cowley.

Now, Cowley is our most advanced area. We see the ability to deliver a resource this year — that’s our target. It’s in the very southern portion of the belt, and that’s where we will be immediately drilling. We will be setting up a rig there from the 15th of April.

And the focus for Cowley really is to get into the areas we couldn’t get to before, coming back to the Class 3 permit advantage. And so what we’re going to be doing there is approximately 10,000 meters of drilling — infilling very large gaps and drilling into troughs from surface that we couldn’t get to before — where we believe we’re going to be delivering a systematic drill hole database that you can very much see that 30 to 40 million tonnes of 1%+ copper, including some very high-grade moly, silver, and gold in areas. And that’s where you can underpin the value of Gladiator right now — is at Cowley.

So we’ll have one rig there. We’ve got 10,000 meters planned. And at the end of the year, depending on prospect number two and three near Cowley, we’ll think about whether we’re putting out a resource or not. But right now, we can’t really determine the size because, to us, it’s open along strike, it’s open at depth, and we wouldn’t want to wrap any boundaries around it.

But what you will be able to do — or what others will be able to do — is grab that drill hole database and very firmly calculate what they think is there already. What’s exciting is that two kilometers to the southwest, we made a discovery last year called Cub East. It was a very significant discovery because it was a combination of geophysical exploration techniques that led us to that discovery.

We’re very excited about it. The first five holes all intersected high-grade copper — and gold, actually. And so at Cub East, we now need to get back there. We need to test the size of it. Again, now the advantage of the Class 3 means we can move very quickly. We don’t have to tiptoe around where we can and can’t drill.

And this is a major advantage for Gladiator Metals and for your listeners to take advantage of, because now not only are we advancing Cowley, but not too far away — only two kilometers out — we’re advancing another discovery very quickly to the level of drilling for resources. 

We can see that it’s potentially shaping up to be the same size as Cowley. So that’s very exciting. There’ll be a rig that starts at Cub East at the same time as a rig starts at Cowley — that’s on April 15.

If you move southeast from Cub East, or directly south from Cowley — again, another two-kilometer shift… so if you can imagine a triangle with each side being around two kilometers, that is what we’re talking about. The target there is Great Southern. This is another target that’s come from our geophysical techniques. 

I’d love to show you a figure of it at the moment, but what it tells us is what we’ve been doing. The way Cub East was discovered, we can see gravity highs, which means it’s very dense — the rock is dense relative to the country rock — and that tells us that it’s normally copper skarn. Every time we’ve drilled a high-density or high-gravity target, it’s been mineralized copper.

What the range has been, though, is different grades of copper. So we then introduced IP geophysics, which gives us the chargeability. So what we’ll do is, where there’s high chargeability and high gravity, that’s the most likely area of potential copper skarn mineralization at a higher grade of copper. And that’s what happened at Cub East.

Now, at Great Southern, we see it again — but on a much, much larger scale. And so that’s going to be a very exciting target for us. We will have to build some trails out to get to Great Southern, so it will be about two weeks later — maybe towards the end of April or early May — that we’ll have another rig. So three rigs, pretty much kicking off from April 15.

If Great Southern is another high-grade copper discovery, not only will that be a structural shift in valuation for the company, because we’re now showing that we’re adding tonnes to what is a very small area, but also what it means is we will be two out of two on this geophysics exploration technique.

If that’s the case, then I can see a lot of speculation from a lot of onlookers of Gladiator as to how many more of these potential copper skarn deposits we are going to reveal along a 35-kilometer-long Whitehorse Copper Belt with this technique. It’s quite exciting. I can see the next two months from April 15 being quite transformational for Gladiator.

As I was saying earlier, Gerardo, we’ve been on a long runway — it’s been a taxi and then a long runway — but I feel like the Gladiator jet is about to take off. We certainly will be having everything we need to be able to take off. It’s the best position that the project and the company have been in over the last three years.

Gerardo Del Real: How’s the treasury looking? You have a lot of drilling planned. You have, frankly, champagne problems. I mean, your problem with putting out a resource is worries about disappointing the market — worries about limiting what the potential is in terms of scale, which we talked about earlier. 

Again, that’s a great problem to have. How is the treasury looking… and how are you going to fund all this?

Jason Bontempo: The treasury stands at C$20 million in cash. So we are certainly funded for the full year that we currently have planned, and it’s very exciting.

We will probably spend close to maybe C$5 million for the first three months, and we are going to tell the market a lot about what we’ve got in this southern area with just that amount of treasury. So a lot of bang for buck here, Gerardo. 

Gerardo Del Real: You’ve got the cash, you’ve got the targets. You seem to have a tiger by the tail with some of the geophysics and the other work that you’ve done.

And look, it’s going to be a 2026 full of drilling. I couldn’t be more excited to start getting results in, and really excited to see what the potential scale is going to be because if it’s anything close to the back-of-the-napkin estimates that I have, this has the potential to become a really important project for this part of the world.

Jason Bontempo: Just to sum it up, we were always targeting, to begin with, 100 million tonnes-plus of copper resource from surface at 1%+. We could see the beginnings of that at Cowley, and then it was about systematically working exploration up and down the belt.

It just so happens to be that it’s coming together down in the southern portion, and we still have three, four, five targets along the belt that we have been working on that will need focus as well.

What we’re seeing now is the potential for a lot more than 100 million tonnes because if it is that we can prove that this southern portion — this copper “love triangle,” as I like to call it down in the south — stacks up, then it means that the project can be showing a lot more potential for tonnes.

And I like to put it into perspective — our market cap is around C$140 million or so, and we are pre-resource. When you look at some of the copper companies that are a lot more grown up than us — they’re either permitted into construction or they’re at study stage, post-resource stage — whether it be Foran Mining Corp. being taken out for C$3.8 billion based on 40 million tonnes of reported resource at 2% equivalent underground, whether it be Arizona Sonoran from Hudbay; they were capped at C$1.5 billion in that development phase.

If you look at Marimaca, again, over C$1 billion, and I think their initial development phase is targeting around 40 million tonnes at 1% copper. They do have more than that.

What I’d like to be able to say to your listeners is that we are pre-resource but it’s looking very likely that we can move along. And when we grow up, we can be in that C$1 billion to C$2 billion range.

And it’s just being a little bit patient. I think we’ve been hitting every mark that we’ve said we would, Gerardo. So it’s a real opportunity to get to the next stage this year — a multiple of where we are now.

Gerardo Del Real: It’s a lot of runway from where you’re at now and some of those analogs and comps that are based on, I think, very reasonable and conservative assumptions.

Jason, it’s been a pleasure to catch up. I’m looking forward to having you back on. Thank you for your time.

Jason Bontempo: Thank you, Gerardo.

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