Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Gold Mountain Mining (TSX-V: GMTN) CEO Kevin Smith on Oversubscribed Financing, Exploration & Getting One Step Closer to Production

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?

Kevin Smith: I'm very well. Thank you for having me back, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Thanks for coming back on. It's been a busy couple of weeks. It's been a busy year, but just in the past few weeks, you announced a $5 million brokered private placement. You just closed that. It ended up being a $10 million oversubscribed placement. You also recently engaged JDS Mining for the pre-feasibility study on the Elk Gold Project. I would love to hear your take on the interest for the financing, and then let's talk about that pre-feasibility study and why JDS Mining.

Kevin Smith: Yeah, absolutely. You haven't had us back for a couple of weeks here, so we thought we'd better put some news out so we could talk to you again. We're thrilled with how the financing has gone. Obviously to have it double what we went out to raise is a huge show of progress as far as the institutional investors are concerned. They seem to like the progress that we're making.

We intended this just to be really a positioning round to bring in Prescott and the syndicate that they had put together of people who were interested in what we were doing. And then when the announcement went out, within a day, we were oversubscribed and there was a lot of demand from a lot of high-quality, long-term sticky money. And that caused us to take a step back and say, "Why don't we further de-risk the project and put ourselves in a position to really keep driving on this aggressive timeline that we have."

Gerardo Del Real: Well said. Talk to me a bit about the pre-feasibility study and JDS Mining who you've hired, JDS Energy & Mining, more appropriately said, to conduct a pre-feasibility study. Obviously you're moving at what I described as an aggressive timeline. So far so good. You've checked all the boxes very well thus far. How are things coming along there?

Kevin Smith: Things are going really well. I mean obviously JDS is a world-renowned company. They do some amazing things all over and to have them come in and not only vet our open pit scenario, but start taking a serious look at the underground potential of the Elk Project, I think it's extremely exciting. We've been approached by a number of groups who are interested in doing debt on the project and the feedback we were getting was that they'd like to see at least the pre-feasibility level. And we decided to go out and hire who we feel are the best in the business at this sort of thing. And it's right in their backyard. So to have the team at JDS supporting us on this is pretty incredible, and we're extremely pleased to see what they come up with on the pre-feasibility side of things.

Gerardo Del Real: Do you have a ballpark, an approximate timeline on completion of that pre-feasibility study?

Kevin Smith: Well, back to your aggressive timeline that you're always harping on. These guys know that I've made a commitment to the market to get this into production. And I communicated that early to them. So they said, "By the time you're starting to deliver ore, you can anticipate to have this pre-feasibility ready," that will again, not only vet the open pit scenario, which we're extremely confident going into without the pre-feasibility study, but also the longer term plan for this mine as to whether we go underground or not, or at what point we go underground.

So yeah, they're driving just as hard as we are. And that was one of the key negotiating factors was that it wouldn't hang up on our commitments to shareholders to get this project up off the ground and into cashflow.

Gerardo Del Real: It's good to have the multiple options in regards to production. Can you speak a bit to the exploration upside, because I think that's an under-appreciated aspect of the project. I think everybody's pretty clear on the production timeline, what the profile looks like, but the exploration upside is pretty substantial. Can you speak to that a bit, Kevin?

Kevin Smith: Yeah. So we're in phase one right now, which started in early December. We're intercepting everywhere that we're hoping to, and we're really looking forward to getting those results back from the lab. We've stepped out, we've infilled. The market told us that we needed more ounces and we're going out and attacking that.

When phase one is complete and while we're waiting for a breakup and the snow to thaw, we'll take a step back from drilling for about a month and collect all this data. And then with this $10 million raise, we can drive right back into phase two and keep the drills turning. And as we've been communicating to the market, we believe this is a million ounce plus resource, and we're driving just as hard on production as we are on exploration to make that goal happen.

Gerardo Del Real: Well said, Kevin. Good work. Anything else that you'd like to add?

Kevin Smith: No, I think that covers it for now. There's lots more news in the pipeline and we're going to continue driving this thing and look forward to coming back.

Gerardo Del Real: Look forward to having you back on. We'll have plenty to chat about. Thanks again, Kevin.

Kevin Smith: All right. Thank you, Gerardo.