Categories: Base Metals
Topics: General Base Metals

Gladiator Metals (TSX-V: GLAD)(OTC: GDTRF) President Marcus Harden on Drilling at the Arctic Chief Trend

 

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, great to have you on. We got a chance to catch up briefly at the New Orleans Investment Conference. Good reception there. How are you today?

Marcus Harden: Good, thanks very much, Gerardo. Yeah.

Gerardo Del Real: Well listen, let's get right to it. It's go time for Gladiator Metals. Exploration will be commencing shortly at the Arctic Chief Trend, a lot of shallow high grade historic copper mineralization. Tell me a bit about the approach.

Marcus Harden: Yeah, that's right, Gerardo. So we've just finished up our 4,000 meter diamond drill program at the Cowley Park prospect, and we are sort of waiting on results coming through from that. But in the meantime, we're going to be jumping onto another one of our priority areas, so Arctic Chief and the Little Chief area. And like you mentioned, we've just put together the data from that. So we inherited a lot of old paper data of the drill intervals for that area and we've just digitized them, starting putting some of the results together, and we've been finding some really great high grade, near surface copper results, which have never been followed up since drilling in the 1970s. And they include results like 15.9 at 3.2% copper from 29 meters down the hole, or 46 meters at 1% copper from 24 meters down the hole. But I think what we are really excited about is that all of that drilling is very much centered around historic outcrops.

So within a two and a half kilometer trend of rock chipping and mapping continuity in the skarn mineralization and high grade rock chips, there's only really been two areas that drilling was focused on within that two and a half Ks. So I think what we are really looking forward to is taking this back to first principles somewhat and starting to tie together those isolated outcrops with more systematic mapping, drilling. We've also got an airborne magnetic program as well, and seeing as these are magnetite scans, they should stick out quite nicely in that program too. And obviously, if we can define continuity in that mineralization with those grades over the full two and a half kilometers that we've identified so far, then we are looking at something with some significant near surface resource potential.

Gerardo Del Real: Very little drilling has been done outside of the past production area, correct?

Marcus Harden: That's right. So the Arctic Chief area itself, which is two small production pits and literally I think 160,000 tonnes came out of them, so very small areas of production. But even around those within 50 meters of the pit, there's unmined intervals such as 13 and a half meters at 1.4 from 20 meters down the hole, or 17 meters at 1.5 from 26 meters down the hole. And they're unmined and there's been no drilling in between them and the pit either. So there's a lot of promise within the prospects, but I think we are also very excited about the promise of the whole trend, the whole two and a half kilometers.

Gerardo Del Real: A lot to like, a lot of news coming, obviously catalyst rich Q4 and Q1 of 2024. Anything else to add to that, Marcus?

Marcus Harden: Yeah, I think that's the key point, Gerardo, is that we've got a lot of news coming. As of the 8th of October, we had over $8 million to spend, so we are still working on that. We've just drilled 4,000 meters at Cowley Park, so all of the results are going to be coming from that drilling. We've also got about 8,000 meters of unlogged and unsampled diamond drill core that we've inherited from the project vendors, which we're going to be working our way through as well. And then we are also hoping we're going to be putting out the compilation that we've just done for the Little Chief and Middle Chief project areas, which are the areas of most significant historical production and they've never really been seen in 3D before. So we're quite excited about showing the market what we've been finding there, and we also hope to be drilling there as well within the next couple of months too.

So we're going to be hitting three main target areas pretty hard, and the idea for that drilling is essentially we're looking to demonstrate the resource potential for each one of those and determine which areas we really want to get our teeth stuck into.

Gerardo Del Real: Sounds like you and I will be chatting often and soon. Thank you so much, Marcus.

Marcus Harden: Thank you very much, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

Marcus Harden: Cheers.