Categories: General Market Commentary / Precious Metals
Topics: General Market Commentary / General Precious Metals

Millrock Resources (TSX-V: MRO) CEO Greg Beischer on Exciting Early Interpretation of Drill Core from the Temporarily Suspended Drill Campaign at the 64North Gold Project in Alaska

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Millrock Resources (TSX-V: MRO)(OTC: MLRKF), Mr. Greg Beischer. Greg, first and foremost, how are you and your family doing?

Greg Beischer: Well. Thanks for asking, Gerardo. We're hunkered down. I'm here in my home office in Anchorage, Alaska and my family's sort of flung all over the world. But right now they're all in very safe spots. So everything's okay.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent, excellent. That's good to hear. 

Let's get to the news that you announced yesterday. It's news of course that we were all expecting, that being the temporary suspension of the drill campaign on the Aurora Target. But there was a lot in this news release that I want to touch on in just a bit and just get your take on. 

There're several zones of quartz veining with sulfide mineralization. I know it's early and I know we try not to get too excited about what core looks like, but it looks like all the right stuff from my amateur eye. We'll talk about that in a sec. 

First and foremost, can you speak to the temporary suspension of the drill campaign?

Greg Beischer: Sure can. I'm actually quite disappointed about it, Gerardo. The drill crew and the geologists that we had on site on the hill beside the Pogo mine were actually in one of the safest places in the world. There was almost no contact with the outside world at all. But unfortunately the drill contractor was very concerned about having his people stranded in Alaska. They're all from Idaho. He wanted them to be home with their families safely before any travel restrictions went into place. So it's a call he made. 

I would've preferred to keep drilling, but it's uncharted waters. It's tough to really say the right thing to do. I appreciate what the mayor of Anchorage recently said. He said, "We'll never know if we overreacted or did too much, but we're definitely going to know if we underreacted and do too little." So I think those are pretty good words to live by, and you just can't fault any decisions of prudence at this point.

So we shut it down, and fortunately we did get the entire first hole drilled and we were a third of the way through the second one. All the cores up in Fairbanks now. We've logged the first hole, cut it, sampled it, and it's in the assay lab. The labs are still running at this point as they're considered by Alaska to be an essential industry, mines and oil and gas and that are essential activities. So they're continuing, at least for now. So we're hopeful to get those assay results out of the lab about a month from now. So we'll be waiting in great anticipation, actually.

Gerardo Del Real: Well you know I have to ask you, Greg, and again, I'll caution everyone listening, it is early, we don't have assay numbers but we do have a mineral package that I know you've looked at, you've looked over, you've seen the core. What does it look like and how does it compare to what you were hoping to see?

Greg Beischer: Well, Gerardo, normally we would never do this. We would never make a press release and mention what we saw in the core. But in this case since the program's now shut down, at least temporarily, we thought we'd go ahead and do that. 

I'll tell you the truth. We're really, really excited about what we see. We collared the hole, and to our surprise it was intersecting mineralization almost right away. Through the whole first 320 meters of the first drill hole, we are seeing veins here and there with the pyrite and arsenopyrites, and those are great indicators that there's also gold. But then we hit a really nice stretch at about 240 meters that was very heavily veined. Multiple veins of quartz with an abundance of pyrite, arsenopyrites, and even a little bit of the mineral bismuthinite, a bismuth sulfide. 

We know that when we see those sulfide minerals next door at Pogo, it means there's gold in it, too. I've seen drill cores through the Pogo mine and near the edges of it, and man, if you laid this drill hole out beside Northern Star's core you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, even as a trained geologist. It looks identical.

Now I've got to be cautious here. The regulatory compliance folks make me warn all the investors that just because the mineralization in this hole looks exactly like mineralization right next door at the Pogo Gold Mine, it does not necessarily mean that we've discovered a deposit on our ground. But visually it looks great. I'm very hopeful for the assays, but I'm trying not to be over promotional, and just wait for the assays because I've been disappointed before by a good-looking core. But it's a lot better to have good-looking core than bad-looking core, and this looks good.

Gerardo Del Real: You described the alteration in Hole 1 as moderate to intense and pervasive throughout the upper 320 meters of the hole. Can you speak to that a bit?

Greg Beischer: It definitely indicates a strong and robust mineralizing system. For nontechnical people, alteration of the wall rocks with the host rocks adjacent to the quartz veins become altered by those hot hydrothermal fluids moving through the raw depositing metals, whether it be iron sulfide, arsenic sulfide, or bismuth sulfide. That's how the rocks get altered. The fluids are passing through fractures in the rocks forming veins as they cool, but pervading through the surrounding wall rocks and changing their character. It's obvious to the trained eye that the rocks are different. They're bleached looking, they have the minerals sericite and dolomite. 

Again, it's the exact same alteration assemblage as is present at the Pogo mine and the Goodpaster deposit that is on Northern Star's ground just a short distance across the claim boundary.

Gerardo Del Real: Now the second hole was suspended at 194.4 meters. Can you talk about the quartz veins and the veinlets in the pyrite and the mineral composition there? Is it similar? Is it identical? Were there differences? Give me your take on that, Greg.

Greg Beischer: Yeah, it's a bit early for me to be able to do that. I haven't seen the core personally. It's only just being removed back to Fairbanks, and we're just getting the photographs of it now. But the geologist did do a quick log as she pulled it out of the ground and it sounded quite interesting. There was veins and sulfide minerals again, but I don't have a good description of it yet. However, it was really honestly very disappointing to stop this hole at just 200 meters in. We were going to take it down 600 meters. 

It's in a lower area of the project, downhill, down in the valley, right up against the claim boundary and just a very short distance from where we know that Northern Star is drilling holes into what's probably going to be an ore body at the Goodpaster deposit. This, therefore, would've got us down quite deep into the stratigraphy.

At the Goodpaster deposit, we understand now that they've got six stacked flat-lying quartz veins. Gosh, it just really felt from the brief descriptions we've got in the upper 200 meters that we're really, really close to intersecting something exactly like that. So quite irksome and disappointing to be on hold when it just feels like it's that close. All we can do is roll with it. It's a temporary delay.

I think what we're roughly planning to do is to get a different drill contractor from Alaska with Alaskans that don't have the same interstate travel restrictions. Once we get them out on the hill, they're the most safe people in the world. They're isolated completely, and so completely safe from any virus infection. Hopefully we'll be doing that sometime starting in May.

Gerardo Del Real: Well I know this is early, Greg, but I'm going to give you a baseball analogy and explain why I was laughing. I, as you know, am a die hard Cub fan. I spent my childhood in Chicago and I remember the 2016 World Series. The game was tied. It looked like we were headed downhill, and then it started raining. That rain delay was the longest rain delay I've ever experienced in my baseball fandom life. And of course what happened next was nothing short of magic, right? It was what we had all been waiting for, and some people including myself, their entire lives.

So I know that it's early, I know the core is encouraging obviously, and we certainly aren't announcing a discovery. But man, it's playing out in a very similar way, and I hope we have a tenth of the results that we got with the Cubs winning the World Series, and we can get something economic here that looks good. 

I know you have a ton of targets and I got to ask you that before you leave. How are you using this downtime while you get another drilling contractor out there?

Greg Beischer: Sure. That's a great analogy first of all, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's hope it works out.

Greg Beischer: Yeah. If this turns out to be as good as I hope, it'd be like winning the World Series after a lifetime. Let's hope that's the case. But the game really could go either way and you just got to wait for the results, that's all there is to it. 

It's a huge property and Resolution has to spend at least $1 million dollars on the huge claim block as a whole. And so to do that effectively and efficiently, we've had a team of geologists reviewing our data banks and extracting targets. So we've got about another couple of weeks of intense planning work on that, and then we'll have the summer plan laid out. 

The intention here is to have a steady stream of drill ready targets set to go. The one we're drilling now, it's obviously an absolutely compelling target, but there's a lot of other good things out there and we'll be looking forward to advancing each one of those, as well.

Gerardo Del Real: Fantastic. Greg, thank you for that update. I appreciate it. We'll chat soon.

Greg Beischer: Excellent. Talk to you soon, Gerardo. Be safe. Your family, too.

Gerardo Del Real: Same to you. Be safe out there.