Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: Gold Stocks

Headwater Gold (CSE: HWG)(OTC: HWAUF) CEO Caleb Stroup on Staking New District-Scale Epithermal Gold Project in Nevada

 

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

Caleb Stroup: I'm very good. Great to be here.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, the timing couldn't be better. You recently raised money, I believe, at the 55 cent level, and here we are a few weeks after, and then you're sitting right around the 40 cent level with the market cap roughly $35 million. Clearly right now, gold is in a sideways pattern. I suspect we see much higher gold prices here in the not too distant future. And so when I saw the headline this morning about you staking a new district scale epithermal gold project in Nevada, I thought it was a fantastic opportunity to reach out, have you on and talk about the project because, look, the bottom line is the better management teams are always going to add value, whether gold is up, gold is down, or gold is sideways like it is right now. Tell me about this project. Why now and why this specific one?

Caleb Stroup: So yeah, this is a very interesting opportunity and something we're really excited about. But you already mentioned the financing and our funding levels, which is kind of the jumping off point here. So we raised I think it was $5.75 million a little over a month ago. And a big part of the rationale for topping up the treasury at this point was to be able to capitalize on some opportunities that were coming out of our generative work across Nevada and even beyond, and ramp up that generative work because we're believers as well that were early on in a very exciting gold cycle where one of the hardest things to get your hands on will be high quality district scale gold targets in a jurisdiction like Nevada.

So now is the time with about $7 million in the bank on top of the big partner funded budgets that we have elsewhere in the portfolio. Now is the time, I think, to really get aggressive and start putting together big opportunities that really do have a potential to make a real high impact discovery in a place like Nevada. And Jupiter is one of these things in our view.

Gerardo Del Real: Look, the alteration footprint is five kilometers by eight kilometers. That's a large system. How do you prioritize targets and then what comes next for it?

Caleb Stroup: Yeah. So that is really one of the big opportunities in this district. It's so big that most of the previous work or all of the previous work had only really focused on one little component here and there within the greater context. And I think the big value add that we've brought to the table here with our early reconnaissance work is recognizing that this all occurs in the context of one really big fluid system that has never been consolidated all in one operator or explored as a whole. And so that's really what we set out to do here.

And we're still fairly early on in the exploration process, but have already proven that we can vector within this big footprint and see gradients where, okay, we're moving towards something that's potentially a core of a portion of this system, or it looks like we're moving out away from an intrusive related part of it to more of a zone that might have epithermal vein potential. So we're beginning to put the pieces together and generate some target concepts, but it's still very early on, and this is a really exciting part of a project's life right now where we're transitioning from that reconnaissance scale work down to the level where we're digging into the details of individual target areas.

And there's a whole lot of things that need to go into a prioritization program to determine where the very, very best shot is at a new discovery within something like this. But what we see now is that there are actually multiple different potential centers that need to be tested. And we need to work through the process with a little bit of additional geophysics, but most importantly, just old traditional boots on the ground geological work to make sure we fully understand the system. But it's already very clear there's a ton of potential here.

Gerardo Del Real: Headwater is interesting because although you're definitely one of the more active project generators with just substantial amounts of partner funded exploration going into multiple projects, you run a hybrid version of that model. So you do have these 100% owned projects elsewhere in the portfolio. What's up next for drilling, Caleb?

Caleb Stroup: Yeah. So we've got, as you said, a big portfolio, about a dozen projects right now, and half of those are in earn-in partnerships with big producers, Newmont, OceanaGold, Centerra, and then about half are 100% owned on the self-funded side of the equation. And that side is growing as well through the generative activities that are ongoing like Jupiter. And I'm not going to give you a clear answer to that for one reason, because we're growing the portfolio so quickly and we have so much interest from potential additional partners. This is a great time to have a big portfolio of projects. There's lots of companies who want to gain or increase their exploration footprint in a place like Nevada.

And so there's multiple projects that have multiple potential partners having a look at them. There's multiple projects that are pretty much at the drill stage that we could elect to drill ourselves at any given time, but it's all still a bit in flux here and there's a ton of opportunity to work through. So I'm not going to commit to what's going to be the next self-funded drill project under the Headwater banner, but yeah, do note that that's very much something that's always on the table for us, especially now that we have a strong treasury.

Gerardo Del Real: Sounds like it's going to be a busy rest of the year, looking forward to having you back on. Anything else to add to that, Caleb?

Caleb Stroup: No, I think that's a good point to leave this. We didn't talk about some recent results we put out from our TJ project funded by OceanaGold. Maybe just a quick teaser on that where we drilled the first four core holes into this project and already have hit multiple epithermal veins that have multi-gram gold in them. And we still think we're just scratching on the edge of a very big system. There's a ton of alteration that we didn't really expect the scale of at depth underneath this thing. And we're commissioning some more geophysics to fully understand the picture there and have also concurrently nearly doubled the land position that project with Oceana because everybody's pretty excited about what we see. So that's one to watch as well.

Gerardo Del Real: Listen, you have the treasury topped off, you have substantial, substantial projects in the portfolio. And I think as important, it's worth noting the jurisdiction, right? Jurisdiction matters more and more every day in the mining space. And being here in the U.S., I think definitely, definitely gives you a leg up. Caleb, thank you so much for your time. Looking forward to having you back on.

Caleb Stroup: Yeah, no, thank you. Have have a good day.

Gerardo Del Real: All right, chat soon. Cheers.

Caleb Stroup: Bye.

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