Categories: Base Metals
Topics: General Base Metals

Gladiator Metals (TSX-V: GLAD)(OTC: GDTRF) President Marcus Harden on Delineating More High-Grade Copper-Dominant Mineralization Ahead of Drilling at Flagship Whitehorse Copper Project, Yukon, Canada

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president of Gladiator Metals — Mr. Marcus Harden. Marcus, how are you today?

Marcus Harden: I’m doing great. Thank you very much, Gerardo. We have a lot going on and we’re very busy.

Gerardo Del Real: You do have a lot going on… so let's get right into it. The last time we spoke, I made it a point to emphasize the potential scale; not just what's there but the potential scale on the exploration side of things. And right on cue, you had a release a couple of days ago highlighting the large-scale copper magnetic anomaly. 

So I wanted to have you on to talk about the potential extensions to the known mineralization and the undrilled targets that you have because there's a lot of runway despite the fact that you already have your hands full with the targets that you're drilling out.

Marcus Harden: Yes, thanks, Gerardo. The plan for the summer for Gladiator is to start stepping away from our advanced target areas. The Cowley Park and Chiefs trends have been drilled to fairly close spacing in that we feel they're pretty much ready for advancing to resource definition. 

But the big push for the summer has been exploring through extensions to those deposits and also starting to explore for analogs under cover. Most of the historical exploration was pretty much driven by outcrops. So outcroppings of copper magnetite skarns were found, and then essentially stepped drilling away from those outcrops to define the size of the body. 

But with much of the area under thin glacial tills, that meant that there was a lot of real estate that hadn't really been explored. So we made the decision to do a very closely-spaced drone mag survey over the whole of the tenements. And there were a couple of reasons for that. 

Mainly for the magnetite skarns, it's pretty much a direct detection tool. The magnetite skarns sit amongst granite diorite or limestone so very much low magnetic signature country rocks. And so there's a high gradient between the resource areas and those country rocks. And that's what we are seeing in the data. 

We're seeing that the areas where we have good drill definition are standing out pretty proudly in the mag dataset. But obviously, what's exciting to us is all of those magnetities, those coherent magnetites, which sit underneath the till that haven't been drilled in the past or explored.

And that's the real upside of this project is getting out there and starting to test those with first-pass drilling. We're also planning to do some ground-based EM surveys as well because there are massive sulfide components to our main resources. And if we can start to define conductors within those magnetic anomalies, obviously, that's going to help us prioritize which targets we hit first.

But yes, the summer months are very much about putting multiples on the resource potential for the area ahead of pulling triggers on the drill-outs planned for next year.

Gerardo Del Real: It's really notable to me, Marcus, that you've already identified more than 30 drill-ready, high-grade regional targets associated with the copper-rich skarns that you mentioned. But what's even more fascinating to me is that there are more than 35 km of underexplored strike on the contact. And obviously, that's going to be highly prospective for high-grade copper, molybdenum, silver, gold, etc. Can you speak to that 35 km of underexplored strike?

Marcus Harden: Yes, and actually the mag has highlighted quite a few areas where anomalies were starting to trend off of tenements as well. So we've been adding to that over the past couple of weeks with some regional projects and contiguous claim groups as well. 

In terms of the 35 km of strike, the main targeting vector for these deposits, like I mentioned, these are skarn deposits, is that most of the deposits covered to date are within 150 meters of that contact between the Cretaceous intrusions and the Triassic limestones.

Obviously, having definition on where that contact is will really help drive exploration. And that's the 35 km of strike. But it will also add areas of complexity into that contact. It's not just a straight line through that 35 km; most of the deposits occur with either flank pendants or roof pendants or just complexities in the contact's margin. 

And those are the sort of things we'll be picking out from the mag data. And again, that'll help us prioritize the more than 35 targets that we've got along that trend at the moment.

Gerardo Del Real: Fascinating times and a busy time. I'm excited to have you back on here shortly. I imagine given the fact that there's so much work going on that results keep coming in and keep being positive. So definitely looking forward to having you back on. Anything to add to that, Marcus?

Marcus Harden: No, that's great. Thanks, Gerardo. We should have a drill rig going back out in the next couple of weeks, which is going to be focused at first on extensions and then starting to move on to testing these additional targets. 

We've got field crews out. And, as I mentioned, we're staking new ground and putting together historical datasets. And we'll be running further geophysics up and down the trend as well. So plenty of news to come in the next couple of months.

Gerardo Del Real: Good stuff. Always a pleasure. Thank you, sir.

Marcus Harden: Thanks, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.