Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Mawson Gold (TSX: MAW)(OTC: MWSNF) CEO Ivan Fairhill on 546 g/t High Grade Boulders Over 20kms in Finland

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Mawson Gold, Mr. Ivan Fairhall. Ivan, how are you today?

Ivan Fairhall: Very good Gerardo. Very good. How are you?

Gerardo Del Real: I am well, a great day in the gold space. You had some news today that the market is reacting very positively to. Let me read the headline and then I'll let you provide a bit of context there. The headline reads:

Mawson Discovers 8 New Prospects with High Grade Boulders up to 546 g/t gold over 20 kms in Finland

It's pretty, pretty impressive because of the fact that you already have just over a million gold equivalent ounces outlined across all categories. And these boulders are over a pretty vast area. Can you provide some context and just kind of what this means as far as exploration moving forward? Because obviously the market's pretty excited by the news.

Ivan Fairhall: Yeah sure. Absolutely. Well, we're obviously very, very pleased to announce these boulder results and it's really bringing investors into the picture of what the exploration story is. You mentioned a million ounce and I think that's what we're known for. We've got a high quality resource, three grams a tonne, thick resource body and it's wide open at depth and all of the resource bodies that go in to make up the million ounces are open at depth. And Palokas, for example, has a 31 meter intersection of five grams a tonne open at the bottom of the resource.

So we all know that we can and we will add ounces to those resource bodies through more drilling. But we believe there's a bigger story here and that we're onto a multimillion ounce gold camp of scale and a system here. And we have an 18,000 hectare tenement package and the resource really just sits on a fraction of that. We really only explored five to 10% of it and that's where we've gone on to find that million ounces.

What will be real value creating in a compounding effect will be to find repeats of these ore bodies. Not just extend the ones we know, but define more of them. And so that's why we're so pleased to give investors a bit of a flavor of what that upside looks like with these super high grade boulder results. You know, 545, 546, 290, 120 grams a tonne, they're kind of Bonanza level numbers and in total we have 30 boulders that run over sort of .1 grams a tonne, which sort of indicates we've got a really big gold system spread over a wide area and a lot of opportunities to target additional resource bodies.

Gerardo Del Real: These boulders and outcrops aren't typical in Finland, right? I have to believe that your neighbors, which include Rio Tinto and First Quantum and Latitude 66 Cobalt, have to be paying attention to the scale of this, given that you're already at a million gold equivalent ounces and clearly in a district that's going to end up providing a lot more than what's been discovered thus far. Any thoughts there?

Ivan Fairhall: Yeah, look absolutely. The system, as people know, most of Finland or 99% of Finland is covered in till and so these ore bodies are a little bit hard to find and when you get onto things like outcrops and boulders like we have here, you're really getting a lot of additional information into the system. And the fact that we've had ours now spread, our kind of boulder field, now spreads over 20 kilometers. That's actually, seeing that it is why groups like First Quantum, Rio Tinto, Latitude 66 have sort of tenement packages around us, because they know that this is a big gold system that extends over a long area. And the potential for it to repeat is huge. And that's what we're all looking for is where to find more, where to find the next million ounces and the two, three, four, five after that.

Gerardo Del Real: The current resource has a footprint of approximately two by three kilometers. These prospects cover an area of 14 kilometers by 15 kilometers. Obviously that's a considerable extension, right? How do you plan to follow up on the exploration side? You mentioned that it is early stage, but clearly you've proven and the team has proven very adept at following these boulders up and converting that into gold and gold to cobalt equivalent ounces. How do you follow that up, Ivan?

Ivan Fairhall: Yeah sure. Well the boulders already played a big part in the million ounce discovery that we've made. In 2017, we announced that we had nine identified boulder fields at the time and five of those, we went on to go and do drilling and the next exploration steps, and five of those went on to be coincident with the million ounce resource that we found. So that's just good old fashioned prospecting that we are doing again, to expand the search radius over a much large or area.

The next steps really is to go and that's what we're doing at the moment is to add this information into our sort of prospect targeting and prioritization system, I guess you'd say that we have. And where we're out there at the moment, filling in any data gaps with geophysical surveys, electromagnetic and to just make sure that we've got all of the information we need before we go and drill them. And the intention this year is our upcoming winter drill season will be to, in addition to adding ounces to those known ore bodies that we spoke about at the start, to drill more of these earlier stage targets, to start to build a pipeline of exploration sort of prospects and build that ounce pipeline into the system, as opposed to just focusing on the million ounces.

Gerardo Del Real: I think Mawson is undervalued, given the $54 million market cap Canadian that the market is assigning to the company right now, just based on what you have in Finland alone. I haven't even touched on Australia. How are things coming along there?

Ivan Fairhall: They're going very well. We've continued drilling at our discovery down at Sunday Creek and that drill rig continues to turn and a news release is coming out. So that's shaping up to be one of the best discoveries down in Victoria, out of the $200 million that have flooded in there off the back of Fosterville's Kirkland Lake, Fosterville discovery. I'm sure your viewers know, all your listeners know that the highest great gold mine in the world, it ran 40 grams a tonne last year and knocked out 600,000 ounces. So there's a lot of gold down there yet to be discovered and we've got one of the best discoveries. And that's why we're so excited about what's going on down in Australia.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, it's called buy low sell high. I got to believe this is the low part of that equation. I'm excited for the rest of 2021. I think the gold price heads higher. I think 2022 is going to be a blockbuster year. And I can't wait to get assays from Australia and see the work that you do here in Finland. Ivan, thank you so much for your time. Anything else to add to that?

Ivan Fairhall: No, that's a lot for now. Thanks a lot, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Appreciate your time. Thanks again, Ivan.

Click here to see more from Mawson Gold Ltd.