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Gold Mountain Resources (TSX-V: GMTN) CEO Kevin Smith on Getting One Step Closer to Becoming B.C.'s Next Gold Miner
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, good morning to you. How are you?
Kevin Smith: Gerardo, good morning. Thanks for having us back so soon.
Gerardo Del Real: Well, you delivered. We chatted a few days ago and I outlined that I thought that the year would be an eventful one that we would be chatting often, and a large part of that, of course, was due to your aggressive, as I described it, and ambitious plan on getting the Elk Project into production. You checked a major milestone today, so congratulations. I'll let you provide the context.
Kevin Smith: Yeah, this is the first of our three main pillars of getting the mine into production. So we've signed a definitive agreement with Nhwelmen-Lake, which is a 51% owned First Nation Limited Partnership. The other half of the partnership is a group called Lake Excavating. They operate over 110 pieces of equipment all over the province. Big in mining, infrastructure, and the oil sense. So it's a huge boost to the company to be bringing on not only an indigenous partner to help us navigate moving the permit forward, but also an extremely strong group of operators.
Gerardo Del Real: Now, the mining contract is for the life of the mine, but it does have a fixed price schedule for, what is it three years? Is that correct?
Kevin Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the pieces of feedback that we got from the institutions on our last financing was small-scale mining can be expensive. It can be full of pitfalls as far as cost overruns go. So that drove us to go out and get these contracts with cost certainty built into them. We think we're going to have a really positive response from the market in that there's a lot of predictability here.
Gerardo Del Real: I got to believe that local stakeholders are happy in the sense that you're creating some full-time, quality full-time employment opportunities.
Kevin Smith: Absolutely, absolutely. We're really excited to be bringing 30 full-time jobs to the Merritt, Kelowna region with us being around 50 kilometers from both of those communities. It gives people an opportunity to have a great paying job and be able to drive home at night and sleep in their own beds.
Gerardo Del Real: This news is going to attract, and we see it in the market today with the positive response, it's going to attract a lot of attention. For those that aren't familiar with the Elk Gold Project and the mine plan, can you give us a brief overview of the plan for Elk and what that looks like moving forward?
Kevin Smith: Yeah, the Elk Project is a past producing already permitted mine, which was one of the things that attracted us to it. It's got 127,000 meters of drilling, which has allowed us to go out with a very targeted drill program designed at putting ounces into the resource. And in parallel with our exploration program, we're driving really hard at getting this thing back into production. We put our permit in May 16th of this year. We're through the screening phase. We're through the first round of questions and comments with the province. And based on feedback, we've got one more round of Q&A to go through, and then this will be getting pushed up for a permit. So, very aggressive timeline. A lot of people told us we couldn't do it, and this first piece of news here is just to show you how hard we've been working in the background to get this pushed forward.
Gerardo Del Real: It's a great box to check. Congratulations. And again, I believe we'll be chatting soon. You take care and thank you for the time, Kevin. I appreciate it.
Kevin Smith: Thank you so much, Gerardo.