Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Gold Mountain Mining (TSX-V: GMTN) CEO Kevin Smith on Expanding Resource at Elk & Appointment of Quinton Hennigh to Advisory Board

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Gold Mountain Mining. Mr. Kevin Smith. Kevin, how are you today?

Kevin Smith: I'm great, Gerardo, thank you so much for having us back.

Gerardo Del Real: No, thanks for coming back on. We've chatted I think two or three times in the past four weeks. It speaks to how busy you and the team have been. You've had a couple of important updates that I wanted to get into. You had some news yesterday that we'll touch on in a bit, but you had some news a few weeks back on the 11th, providing an exploration update and the appointment of Dr. Quinton Hennigh to the advisory board. You and I chatted before about the exploration upside at Elk and I think him coming on board obviously speaks to what could potentially be there. I would love for you to provide some context on the results from a few weeks ago.

Kevin Smith: Yeah. So, obviously we're extremely encouraged. This is all our shallow infill and step-out drilling with the goal of dragging more ounces into the resource feedback from the institutions as they want to see us scale this thing up. So we went out with our first shallow set of holes to do that specifically. Good intercepts, consistent with what we were expecting, and we feel we're going to add ounces for sure. And then also, that relogging of old core, there's 127,000 meters of drilling on this project. So we're going after some old core and starting to relog and digging up something that's over 200 grams a tonne is obviously very exciting.

And then to have Quinton come and join us on this project is obviously phenomenal. We're a young management team here and to bring more of that experience around and a guy with a storied career like his obviously is going to bring some great attention to our stock. He actually tried to purchase this five years ago with another group of people. And so, he's looking at this as his second crack at the project, and we're thrilled to have him on board.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Let me read off some of those intercepts. Hole four intersected 1.5 meters, averaging 7.3 grams per tonne gold. Hole one intercected 1.3 meters, averaging 7.2 grams per tonne gold. And hole 20 intercected 1.3 meters, averaging 5.1 grams per tonne gold. You also had some news yesterday. You went ahead and explained the potential of the underground mining at the Elk project. Can you go over that a bit for those that may not be as familiar with the project as you and I are?

Kevin Smith: Yeah. So, our PEA that we put out last August, it contemplated an open pit scenario. Super high grade and great economics came off of that, but there's over 118,000 ounces underneath that open pit scenario that got excluded because it's just not economic with the strip ratio. So when Quinton came on board, he really pushed us and said, "Guys, there's a great under the ground opportunity here. I think you need to take a closer look." We were in conversations with JDS. JDS is taking a look at it as well. They did multiple trade-off studies with different scenarios and having them come back and say, year three or four to start running an open pit underground hybrid scenario, again, it just shows that scale that the institutions communicated there.

They're looking for us to show them a path to, so we're extremely encouraged on that front. It's not going to eliminate the open pit. So we're still going to have all the economics of the open pit be able to bolt on this underground scenario. And, obviously reducing strip ratio reduces our costs. It reduces our environmental footprint, which is becoming more and more important in the mining world. All the ESG stuff is coming to the forefront. So yeah, we're extremely encouraged with this development to have underground as part of our mine plan moving forward.

Gerardo Del Real: How's the treasury looking? I know that late February, you closed an oversubscribed $10 million private placement. Got to feel good about the cash position, right?

Kevin Smith: Yeah. Cash position is very strong. Crescat was brought to us through Quinton Hennigh who advises them as well. They came in with a lead order. We originally asked for five, ended up closing on 10, just there was a lot of market response and what we felt was good quality money. So nice to have that in the bank and allows us to drive directly into phase two. So we're just finishing the final two holes of our phase one drill program. That's all the deep, juicy intercept stuff that we're expecting. We had some visible gold come out of a couple of those holes, so impatiently waiting here for those assay results to come back and then we'll take a month off while the snow thaws and we're in breakup. And then we'll be putting a plan together to get right back into it into phase two. We told the market, we wanted to add a couple of hundred thousand ounces in 2021, and we're going to continue driving on delivering that to our shareholders.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent work, Kevin, keep it up. Look forward to the assay results. Look forward to having you back on. Anything else that you'd like to add to that?

Kevin Smith: No, I think we covered everything, just when I first came on here, you said it was an aggressive timeline and we're moving quickly. We were very confident in our ability to meet all the timelines we outlined and hopefully your listeners see that we're serious about driving this project forward.

Gerardo Del Real: I'm a huge fan of aggressive timelines. Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin Smith: All right. Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Take care.

Kevin Smith: Bye.