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K2 Gold (TSX-V: KTO) CEO Stephen Swatton on the Discovery of a New Gold Zone and Additional Targets at the Mojave Gold Project in California
Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today, once again, is the President and CEO of K2 Gold (TSX-V: KTO)(OTC: KTGDF), Mr. Stephen Swatton. Steve, how are you?
Stephen Swatton: Thanks very much, Gerardo. I'm fine, very good.
Gerardo Del Real: Thank you for coming on. Pretty significant news you announced this morning, K2 has identified a new gold zone and five new targets at the Mojave Project. Now this comes on the heels, I think a month or a month and a half ago you and I spoke and you had some phenomenal trench results, right? And then I think that included 3.78 grams per tonne gold over 43 meters in the East Zone. Then there were other zones, the Newmont Zone at 34 meters of 2.46 grams per tonne gold.
But now I read the release this morning and you have a new gold zone and you have five new targets. This is starting to become a pretty significant gold play. Can you provide some context to that?
Stephen Swatton: Sure. Yeah, this is one of our most significant news releases actually, because a lot of what we're reporting before had been reported to some extent by Newmont and by BHP and Great Bear in the past. But what we've actually done here is we've extended the known mineralization into areas that were previously unknown.
With this WorldView-3 high-resolution remote sensing platform that we have used to look for new areas, we completely surprised ourselves. Particularly with the two alteration areas that I mentioned, the linear ones that are over a kilometer long. They are in the most – as it would be in an exploration property – the most remote part of the property. We've spoken to the vendors, we've spoken to other geologists, and I haven't spoken to anybody who's actually ever been into this area yet.
But we had noticed in the past that there was an old-timer footpath into that area and nobody for the life of them could think why. Well, the two theories are they were collecting wood to take it over the hill, or maybe they knew something that we didn't. This is really exciting for us. Also, particularly with the area to the north of Dragonfly, the soil anomaly is right on strike with where we expected to be. Obviously, we don't know there's mineralization beneath the cover, but we're highly encouraged and yes, it is significant that now we've extended the mineralization at Dragonfly for one to maybe two kilometers. And this, if you recall, was the location where we had some of the best drill intersections from BHP when they drilled in 1994.
Gerardo Del Real: It's important to mention that that mineralization at Dragonfly, I believe, was the strongest oxidized gold mineralization reported on the property. Is that accurate?
Stephen Swatton: That is accurate. Every hole that BHP intersected intersected mineralization, and one of the holes was 99 meters of close to 1 gram material. Of course, there's also an intersection there at higher grade. But yes, I would say Newmont is the most exciting area, but there's a concentration of knowledge there. The Dragonfly had the highest grade intersections individually. What we've seen here is we've seen the extension of it.
We're beginning to pull the whole thing together and with the WorldView image that we have now and the imagery that we've got under our belt, we can definitely understand now the mineralization, which seems to be more like Walker Lane than Carlin Style. Walker Lane is the Bullfrog deposit, it's two to three million ounces and you probably are aware that Corvus had some good news recently.
This whole Walker Lane belt goes from the northeast of where we are right down to Castle Mountain to the south and Briggs Mine in between. These are multimillion ounce deposits that we're talking about. It seems as if what we're dealing with is on the western side of that Walker Lane drain.
Now, we've done some research ourselves as well, Gerardo, and we have a young guy working for us, he's actually based out of Minneapolis. He has now identified over a hundred different adits and mines that are actually in the local area in the Inyo County. This is something we didn't know. We knew there were a certain number of old mines. There's one very famous one called Pine Creek, which is outside of Bishop, which actually was a tungsten mine. It was 40% of the world's tungsten. Sorry, not the world's, of America's supply, but tungsten to the war effort in the Second World War. That's a huge mining area, just north of Bishop. Well, it now turns out that there is a lot of adits wrapped the whole area, and it's no surprise to us that we'll find more on our property.
Gerardo Del Real: You identified a new gold zone. You have five new target areas. I'm looking at the project target areas, the map that was provided. And we'll put a link up with this interview. How are you going to prioritize exploration moving forward? Because, frankly, I recall John Robins calling this the best early-stage gold exploration camp he had ever seen, which was a pretty bold statement from someone that has seen a lot of very, very robust gold camps to say the least.
I'm now starting to understand why he was as enthusiastic as he was. But what do you do with this abundance of targets? How are you prioritizing that, Steve?
Stephen Swatton: Yeah, what we're doing is we're concentrating on the known and working to the unknown, but we are definitely going to go out and have a look at those two linear ones that I mentioned to you in probably the next few weeks. But what we're doing is, I don't know if you recall, in a previous conversation, we have the permission to drill at 7 locations on the property with a heliborne program.
With the current gold market, we're strongly considering re-invoking that. And more than that, we're also considering extending that program possibly. That will come with a future announcement maybe to the BLM, but obviously the world has changed somewhat in many ways. Therefore, we consider it opportune for us to take a real close look at the potential of this deposit in a way that we would like to advance it quicker than maybe we would have before.
We recognize that this is one of the best undeveloped mineral exploration plays in the Southwest US. It was found by a couple of majors and they both walked away for completely unrelated reasons. One, it was still in a wilderness study area. And for BHP, they decided to pull out of gold altogether as a company. They became a multi-billion dollar company. This was their last gold project that they ever owned.
So yes, how we're prioritizing working from the Newmont, from the Dragonfly and the East Zone. We will be working on that new zone that we talked about, we call it Gold Valley. And we're going to send some pretty seasoned exploration geologists out to this new areas. That's the order in which we're going to be doing it.
Gerardo Del Real: That's a lot to look forward to. What's the market cap look like right now?
Stephen Swatton: We're about $12 to $13 million. We're trading today, I see, around $0.25 so fairly healthy. Obviously, the news is good. Gerardo, we'll be talking again pretty soon. I can assure you of that.
Gerardo Del Real: Well, I look forward to it. It's starting to get exciting and I hope we chat sooner rather than later. I know you have to get going, please be safe and thanks again for the time, Steve.
Stephen Swatton: Thanks very much, Gerardo. Much appreciated.