Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Headwater Gold (CSE: HWG)(OTC: HWAUF) CEO Caleb Stroup on Adding Value with the Drill Bit

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Headwater Gold, Mr. Caleb Stroup. Caleb, great to have you back on. How are you today, sir?

Caleb Stroup: I'm doing great, Gerardo. Thanks for having me.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's get right into it. We had a brief conversation off-air. I talked about how excited I am for the second half of the year. We've had a first half where the commodity prices have been very, very firm, and yet the market and a lot of the equities, especially the explorers, haven't really been rewarded for a lot of the work that it takes before you make that discovery that the market always, always rewards. And I think Headwater did a lot of good work in the first half of the year. The market clearly hasn't acknowledged the quality of the work, but I think it'll pay off in the second half. So I thought it a good time to have you on.

Caleb Stroup: Yeah, no, it's a really great setup. If you step back and look at the bigger picture with metal prices pretty strong and the majors making a lot of money. And the thing for us juniors to do is keep doing quality work and advancing the story and things always do come around and that's just what we're doing. We've got a big program underway and we're about to start drilling here in the next couple of weeks, and we'll be very active this last half of the year.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, I've gone on the record several times and I'm a high risk, high reward resource speculator. I love adding value via discoveries and the drill bit. You have, I believe, an up to 7,000 meter program planned at Spring Peak. It's a multi rig program. Can we speak to the targets there and what you're hoping to find?

Caleb Stroup: Yeah, so this will be kicking off pretty shortly here the next couple of weeks, about 7,000 meters at Spring Peak, following up on a comparable program last year. And this program will be two-pronged where we still have wide open mineralization in all directions, really at the disco target zone where the bulk of our drilling last year was. And we're also going to expand out throughout the property a little bit farther this year, take some big step out holes, test some new targets, go into the western portion of the property, which was private lands that we acquired late last year and haven't had a chance to drill yet. So it'll be about half-and-half, chasing known mineralization along strike and down dip and half testing new targets. So it's very exciting.

Gerardo Del Real: It's an aggressive program and again, because I'm wired that way, it really catches my eye. When do you anticipate the rigs to start turning? You mentioned a couple of weeks from now, is that to actually get the first hole in the ground or a building of the pads?

Caleb Stroup: Well, we'll be drilling off existing pads under an existing permit, and the rigs are scheduled to roll out sometime in the very beginning of July. So pending everything coming on schedule, we should be up and running the first half of July.

Gerardo Del Real: You have a heck of a partner in Newmont. You just expanded the land position at Spring Peak and Lodestar pretty significantly, I think, to the tune of some 97%. Can you speak to that strategy right before the drilling?

Caleb Stroup: Yeah, so we've basically doubled the land position out there, and there's a few reasons for the scale of this and the timing of it. We've been looking at this whole district as a district scale opportunity really since the beginning. And with the work that we've done with drilling and initial geophysics and groundwork, that thesis has proven to be accurate, at least with the new discovery we made off to the south side of the district at Spring Peak, and we're seeing a ton of potential along strike. This is a big belt of mineralization that probably isn't as well known as it should be, produced almost 4 million ounces of gold. The reason I think it's not as well known as it should be is because most of that production was before the year 1900, very high grade past production, much of it over an ounce per tonne in the old days, and really hasn't seen the sort of regional district scale exploration that the geology out here warrants. So we're putting this all together based on what we've learned with drilling and geophysics right at Spring Peak proper, and extending that knowledge now throughout the whole district. So a lot of exciting things to come. It's a big chunk of ground and we're just getting started working our way through it, collecting new data sets, but it's all looking very promising.

Gerardo Del Real: As far as Spring Peak and Lodestar go, can you explain to people that may be new to the Headwater story and just don't understand the partnerships that you have on your various projects because you do take a multi-pronged approach to your business, which I like. You retain the option to earn into 100% of some projects, and then with other projects, you bring in quality partners like Newmont to advance the drilling and do so without dilution to shareholders. Can you explain that a bit?

Caleb Stroup: Yeah. So within Headwater we have about a dozen projects throughout Nevada and a little bit up along the Oregon-Idaho border. Four of those projects are in earn-in agreements with Newmont. The remainder we're exploring ourselves on 100% funded basis. And the projects that we're mostly speaking about today that this news release addressed earlier today is our Spring Peak and Lodestar, which are two separate earn-in projects with Newmont that we have in this Aurora district. Spring Peak was the initial one. We formed an earn-in partnership there, made a new discovery with the first round of drilling back in 2022, and immediately we began on a Headwater basis looking farther field in the district, identified the Lodestar opportunity on the other side of the district, acquired that and brought it into a standalone earn-in agreement. So we have two separate earn-in in a very large land position in this greater Aurora district here, and Newmont is funding all the activity on both of those.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to getting the drill bit turning. Looking forward to having you back on. Thanks again for the update. Anything to add to that, Caleb?

Caleb Stroup: No, I'm ready to get to work. We're excited to get the drills turning and hope to accomplish a lot this year.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to it. Thanks again.

Caleb Stroup: All right, thank you.

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