Categories: Base Metals / Precious Metals
Topics: General Base Metals / General Precious Metals

Millrock Resources CEO Discusses How Project Generation Protects Shareholders' Capital

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is President and CEO of Millrock Resources, Greg Beischer. Greg has decades of experience with majors and junior companies. He previously held positions with Inco and the Bristol Bay Native Corporation. He is also past president of the Alaska Miners Association and serves on the Alaska Minerals Commission. Greg, thank you very much for joining me today.

Greg Beischer: It is my pleasure, Gerardo. Really glad to be speaking with you.

Gerardo Del Real: Wonderful. Now Greg, it appears we're finally coming out of what has been described as one of the most brutal bear markets for juniors, maybe ever, and Millrock has been able to not only survive that market but you were actually able to use that market to your advantage and position yourself in the company very well.

For those that are not familiar with Millrock Resources, can you please tell us a little bit about the company and share with us how you were able to add value at a time where a lot of companies simply went away?

Greg Beischer: Yeah. It has been a really tough 5 years, Gerardo, but that's a time of great opportunity. Millrock's a generative exploration company, a project generator company, where we have 3 jurisdictions that we pursue: my home state of Alaska, the Golden Triangle area in BC, and the state of Sonora in Mexico. We're early stage explorers and really that's the highest risk part of the whole industry, but it's also the highest potential reward. We try to mitigate that risk by always having partner companies earning an interest in our projects by providing exploration funding.

If you invest in Millrock, we'll use your money as a shareholder to generate new projects. But that's all. We leave it to the mining companies to fund the drilling holes on our projects and we've really stuck rigorously to that, and I think that's why it's paid off for. Over the last 5 years, we were fortunate to have funding partners through that very tight time, but over the last 2 years we got really aggressive on project acquisition. We were gambling, really, that the market was at the bottom.

We're quite grateful to our main financiers who provided the money that we needed to make those acquisitions. They're contrarians and we are too. We kind of look at ourselves as a contrarian exploration company. It's been a bad 5 years but we sure made the most of it and it's going to pay off for our shareholders now.

Gerardo Del Real: It sounds like it's a much more exciting time going into this next second half of the year than it was going into the second half of last year now. You mentioned the prospect generator model and the upside, of course, is that you're able to provide shareholders multiple opportunities at a discovery while mitigating the dilution that can sometimes accompany doing it yourself. Millrock's chief exploration officer, Philip St. George, happens to be the first geologist to recognize the porphyry mineralization that led to the discovery of the Pebble deposit which is one of the greatest stores of wealth ever discovered. That deposit now has over 57 billion pounds of copper if I'm not mistaken, 70 million ounces of gold, 3.4 billion pounds of molybdenum and 344 million ounces of silver. Those aren't typos and those numbers only represent what is in the measured and indicated categories.

Now, permitting issues have plagued that project obviously but I'd say Philip did his part. I'd love to have Philip on in the near future but in the meantime, can you tell me what current projects you and the team are most excited about?

Greg Beischer: Sure. Yes. Phil is credited with the original discovery of the Pebble Deposit while he was working for Cominco as a relatively young man, 25 or so years ago now. Within a very large gold soil anomaly that his team has defined, he recognized the porphyry style alteration and he collared the discovery holes and subsequently for Cominco, he drilled off about the first half billion tons of that deposit. It's just a really great early stage discovery and one that we'd love to make. Really a lot of credit goes to Northern Dynasty, too, who made later discoveries that proved that the depositis  actually an enormous deposit and in fact quite high grade.

Millrock's tried to generate similar projects, and Liberty Bell is a new one for us. We just acquired it late last year in central Alaska. You might want to keep your eye on this one. It's a very similar situation. There's huge gold and soil anomaly. We've got a known gold deposit in the ground, and there's signs of porphyry mineralization and really this could be the next one.

Other projects that I'm excited about, things are going great in Sonora, Mexico. We've made a deal with Centerra Gold and have active exploration underway. In the Golden Triangle, honestly, we're still just learning what we've purchased but there's some great signs that surface on our claim blocks which are located adjacent to Pretium's amazing high grade Brucejack gold deposit and Seabridge's KSM deposit. This is a really exciting district and a prospector's dream. The glaciers have been receding very rapidly now, exposing rocks and minerals that no geologists has ever seen before.

Gerardo Del Real: Interesting.

Greg Beischer: Over the years, we've been able to attract a lot of funding from major companies, and as geologists that came up through the ranks of major mining companies earlier in our careers, Phil and I know what those major companies are looking for. Generally, we're pursuing deposit models that if a discovery was made would make a great difference to the bottom line of a major mining company... so district scale land packages with geological science indicating permissibility of a giant deposit is what we've developed. That's what we generate.

Gold and copper are our main focus commodities.

Gerardo Del Real: That's exciting. Now, one of the big advantages that I see Millrock has is the jurisdictional diversification. You have properties from Alaska, to Mexico and in between. But the commodity diversification and the fact that you have projects in Alaska and Mexico and BC means that you can explore year-round, which provides for a lot of news flow. Can you share which projects you expect to see drilling on in the second half of this year?

Greg Beischer: Yeah. Sure. That's one thing. Millrock is almost always exploring. We're active in good times and bad and always presents to our shareholders the possibility that we will make a discovery that increases our share price dramatically. So as I mentioned, right now we're really active in Sonora, Mexico, Centerra Gold's optionsed two of our projects so far, and I actually see this relationship growing further. We're doing surface exploration at our Los Chinos and Los Cuarentas projects now. The results look very favorable and so we expect to be drilling these gold targets early in the fall. The Los Chinos where we're digging trenches right now to expose the bedrock and collecting samples and the results from those samples should be made public in the news release in a few weeks from now.

We're really quite excited about this project. It's located on the highway just south from the San Francisco mine, which is operated by Timmins Gold. This deposit is a large orogenic gold deposit, large scale, bulk mineable, heap leach.. and while the grades really not very high, it makes money because they can extract it at such low cost. The mineralization we've discovered is in just the exact same geologic setting and looks exactly the same as it does at the San Francisco. We really look forward to drilling that probably starting in September.

Over the summer, we're advancing all of our Alaska projects, an Australian company called Vista is earning in to our Stellar copper-gold project. That drill program could create good value if they make a discovery and another Australian company that you've no doubt heard of, NewCrest, they've become a really solid strategic partner for us, together we've been working quietly away over the last 2 years accumulating projects, and starting to get a lot more serious now and that's a great partnership.

Soon, we should have funding partners for our Liberty Bell project and for our gold Polymetallic Projects in Stewart in British Columbia. We do focus primarily on gold and copper. We also have a uranium deposit actually in New Mexico and I just feel very good about all 3 of those metals going forward. Golds already making its move. Copper will be a couple of years yet probably but it's a good time to pick up projects and uranium's going to boom again one day soon.

Gerardo DelReal: Absolutely. It sounds like it's going to be a very busy second half of the year for Millrock and Millrock shareholders. I'm excited to see the results as they start trickling in. Now, Greg, I can't thank you enough for your time today. Is there anything else that you'd like to add that maybe I missed?

Greg Beischer: Sure. I just comment that these past 5 years really have been challenging but Millrock's done its best. We've kept our staff all intact. We've took advantage of the opportunity that was created by these adverse conditions. We bought up properties. We've stake others that have been abandoned. That land position that we accumulated in the Stewart Gold Triangle, it simply wouldn't have been possible in any other market other than the one that existed in November of last year. We've made bold moves.

Honestly, it was gut-wrenching at times because there was just no way of knowing if our timing was right. We were spending money but we really didn't know if our timing was right, but it looks like our intuition maybe was right. We bought at the bottom in true contrarian fashion and I think our shareholders are going to reap the rewards now. Our share prices increased from an all-time low, I guess, in January of 15 cents so we moved up but I think there's a long way to go even just in a rising market, but, of course, if we drill a discovery hole then the share price is really going to take off in this market now that it's receptive to good news. Each drill hole is one that could propel Millrock to the very next level and we're almost always going to be drilling from here on out.

We just keep doing really sound scientific work, exploration on a continuous basis... and one day we're going to make that game changing discovery and I think it's coming soon.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. It's exciting, Gre,g to see in a business where so many companies just collect checks and do very little meaningful work. It's exciting to see Millrock get out there and have all of these exploration plans and actually be executing. You've done a brilliant job of using this latest downturn to actually add value and I'm excited like I mentioned to see what the second half brings. I want to thank you again for coming on, Greg. Hopefully we have you on soon again as the news flow continues, we'd like to have you back and thank you again.

Greg Beischer: Thank you, Gerardo. It will be great to have Phil on sometime soon and get his comments on some of our projects.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. I'd love to hear the story of the discovery there at Pebble and hopefully we can have him on in the next week or two if we could set that up.

Greg Beischer: Great. All the best. Thank you.

Gerardo DelReal: Thank you, Greg.