Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals / Gold Stocks

Headwater Gold (CSE: HWG)(OTC: HWAUF) CEO Caleb Stroup on Aggressive Drilling for Gold Discoveries in 2024

 

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, it's great to have you back on. How are you today, sir?

Caleb Stroup: Doing great, Gerardo. Good to be back.

Gerardo Del Real: It's great to have you back. We chatted a bit off air briefly, a lot going on. You announced results from initial drilling on the Midas North project. You also just announced additional high grade gold drill results from the Spring Peak project also in Nevada, of course. I thought it was timely to have you back on and just get an overview on the results, thoughts there and next steps obviously.

Caleb Stroup: Yeah, these two news releases are the final batches of results from our big year of drilling in 2023. We drilled four projects, about 17,000 meters all the way up through December or so, and now finally have all the results back in, including some really good ones. It's a great end to a great year, and now we're getting back to the drawing board and looking ahead to 2024. But we've definitely got a lot of good results to follow up on. Some of the holes in this most recent Spring Peak news release are among the better holes in that zone that we've drilled so far. Some broader zones of one and a half to two gram mineralization over 40 meters or so, plus some higher grade cores as well to these things, 10 to 12 meters of four and a half, five grams with even yet some higher grade material in there, individual samples in the 15 plus gram per tonne range. It's exactly what we were looking for. We're learning a lot about this epithermal system here at Spring Peak.

And yeah, we are expecting another big year as we continue to drill this thing in all directions really. We accomplished a lot going from, I think at the beginning of the year we had four holes in this new discovery and now we have something like 21 and it's still open in all directions. We're looking ahead to another big year of drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: You mentioned having a really, really big year of drilling in 2023. And look, we know the exploration game. You're not going to hit at every property, and you're certainly not going to hit on every hole. For those that aren't familiar with Headwater, can you just provide a brief overview of everything that was accomplished this year... This past year I should say, and then let's talk about what we have to look forward to here in 2024.

Caleb Stroup: Yeah, Headwater’s an exploration company. We're focused on early stage exploration, exploring for high grade epithermal veins, epithermal gold veins, and we've got a big portfolio of projects and are very active exploring them. And one of the things that makes this whole thing possible to explore at such a high pace and a small exploration company is a partnership we have in place with Newmont, the biggest gold mining company in the world, and they fund exploration on a subset of our portfolio, and we do some hundred percent funded exploration ourselves. This year we drilled four projects in total, three funded by Newmont, one funded by ourselves, and as I said, these are the last results out of those. But we had put out previously over the course of Q4, 2023, the results from several other projects, and we haven't even talked today about the Midas North results, which was one of the Newmont funded programs that we did in 2023, and these are the full batch of drilling from that program.

That was a little bit different. That's a very early stage program. These were just the initial scout drill holes into that. And while we didn't hit a big ore grade intercept, what we did hit is some really interesting proof of concept drilling that showed our exploration model seems to be accurate. And we're also seeing the sorts of things that we want to see to be able to begin to vector from a big property scale scout drilling program into a more detailed program where we're focused on some of the higher potential target areas. That's really what we designed that program to do as an early scout program. And then ultimately, we're looking to bring that more towards the direction of a spring peak type program where this is the third round of drilling, and clearly we've already factored into the high grade material there.

Gerardo Del Real: How much drilling? How active do you plan on being in 2024? For anyone that's looking at 2023 and the recent pullback in the price of gold and then frankly, the recent pullback in most of the gold related equities, how busy is Headwater planning to be this year?

Caleb Stroup: Well, it's still emerging. We've just got all the results in, so that's what we really needed to see to begin to formulate the final plans and big picture budgets, some of which we're working on in consultation with our partners over at Newmont. And so we still have probably a few weeks to square away all of the details, but in aggregate, I think we're set up for another pretty busy year, broadly comparable to what we did last year, which was a historic year for us for sure.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, a lot to look forward to. I think that it's going to be a pivotal year for Headwater. The exposure to quality projects in quality top-notch jurisdictions is impressive. I like the hybrid business model. I've complimented you on that in the past, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Mother Nature left behind for you to discover here in 2024, Caleb.

Caleb Stroup: All right. We're working on finding it.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to it. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

Caleb Stroup: All right. Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Chat soon.

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