Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Millrock Resources (TSX-V: MRO)(OTC: MLRKF) CEO Greg Beischer on a Busy Second Half of Exploration

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Millrock Resources, Mr. Greg Beischer. Greg, how the heck are you?

Greg Beischer: Well, running flat out Gerardo, we're in full swing in the exploration season in Alaska. Lots of activity and lots of potential catalysts for Millrock share price increase.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's talk about that. It's no secret that the shares have fallen to pretty close to 52 week lows, which I think presents a pretty compelling opportunity given the amount of potential catalysts in the near and the midterm. You basically have an entire second half worth of news programmed in, and of course everyone's hoping that within that, there's some good news and possibly a discovery or two, you had an update here about a week or so ago, providing exploration updates for all of the Alaska gold projects, and it's getting to be quite a few. I wanted to give you an opportunity to kind of give everybody an update on everything that's going on, a lot of moving parts.

Greg Beischer: Let me start with 64 North Project in Alaska where our partner Resolution Minerals was very active over the month of June, using a heliportable reverse circulation drill rig to test targets that we had developed together with them last exploration season, in summer 2020, geophysical surveys, geochemical surveys, all leading up to drilling last month. It was a really interesting target, flatline conductive zone, reminiscent of the Pogo deposit, which is about a 10 million ounce gold mine. We're hoping to find another one and so fairly similar geophysical, geochemical signature. They intersected and explained the conductive zone with some graphitic material, but also with attendant quartz veining and sulfide mineralization. We're anticipating those results, hopefully in August. We know that the labs are getting overwhelmed, but hopefully those results will be received and published by Resolution in August. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high. As you'll recall, last year, we had similar visual results that ended up being disappointing in their gold content, but we're always hopeful when we see good looking rocks like this.

Gerardo Del Real: Thus far, the exploration programs have been a technical success. We know exploration can take time. Everybody, including myself, always wants discovery in the first couple of holes. It's not typically how it plays out, some of the better discoveries, in the space, have taken, 20, 30, 70, 80 holes before we make that discovery. Of course, we're hoping that's not the case here, but you got to be encouraged technically anyhow, on the rocks that you're seeing, the structures, the controls. It sounds to me like you're vectoring in closer to what everybody hopes is a discovery of significance.

Greg Beischer: Let's hope Gerardo, us geologists are eternal optimists, we have to be. It was a well-thought out targeting that Resolution did and all credit to them for drilling these holes. As you know, Millrock is a very large shareholder of Resolution and also we're hoping they make that discovery. That'll make those shares valuable to Millrock and in turn increase, Millrock share price as well.

Gerardo Del Real: Elsewhere in Alaska, you expanded in a very significant manner, the royalty interest in the Fairbanks Gold District. Can you comment on that please?

Greg Beischer: You bet. I'm really proud of the work we've done there. We started as true contrarians four or five years ago, starting to build a land position in a longstanding mining camp. It was possible only because it was such a bad downturn that we were living through, but we managed to make relatively low cost agreements with some existing claim owners. Last year, when things started to pick up, we made a deal with a company that's called themselves, Felix Gold, as a nod to Felix Pedro, who initially discovered gold in Fairbanks, well over a hundred years ago now. We've made a great partnership with them and they've raised a lot of money privately that we're collaboratively putting into the ground with them right now, got a very aggressive soil sampling programs underway. We built out the land position to staking claims on open ground after doing a pretty extensive data compilation work across the whole district.

I think this is something that's been lacking for Fairbanks, no one stepped back and looked at the whole district and sort of proactively gone after the parts of it that we think have the highest potential. That's what we've done as a group with Felix Gold, their stated intention is to become a publicly traded company in the near future, probably some months away now. We'll again be major shareholders of that company once it's up and running, and we'll be royalty holders on all the claims, those that we had already owned from years ago, but all the new ones as well. There's some advanced minimum royalty payments associated with these royalties. That's been a big part of Millrock's moves over the last couple of years, sort of following the EMX royalties model, just making sure that we can generate more cashflow so that we become a more sustainable exploration company and don't have to keep going back to sell shares in our company through equity financings and diluting our shareholders. I'm really happy with how we've been able to transition, a relatively modest investment in Fairbanks into a really big project that has a great potential for Millrock and it's shareholders.

Gerardo Del Real: I tend to be of the opinion that the gold price is going to start firming up. I think by year end, we're going to see, if not new highs, very close to new highs. Their timing to go public sounds like it's very, very opportune. Let's talk about Ester Dome, this is another project in Alaska. You're evaluating a gold resource for the Grant Mine, which is a portion of the Ester Dome on project. Can you give us an update there?

Greg Beischer: Yeah, I can. Felix Gold has been managing that part of the work. They've got a team in Australia, that's been crunching all the historic information, getting it all into a database and then a 3D model, and that's all gone well. I'm going to stop short of telling you what they've come up with, I'm going to wait until that's been announced. They've been able to use all the existing historic data to create JORC compliant. That's the Australian Joint Ore Resources Commission standards. They've been able to get a bonafide resource from the existing drill hole data. That'll be announced soon. It's a little bit bigger than we had thought from the historic NI 43-101 report that we had in hand, and it's good. It's a good high-grade vein deposit with a decent chance for expanding well beyond the known resource, but that's all going to come out here real soon in terms of hard numbers. I can't release those numbers just yet.

Gerardo Del Real: Fair enough. Fair enough. Last but not least, if I'm not mistaken, you have soil geochemical surveys underway at Treasure Creek. How is that coming along?

Greg Beischer: The Treasure Creek work has been completed already. The crews have done a great job, made better progress than we thought. Now they've moved to the east on a lot of the new land that we picked up through agreements with a company called Fairbanks Exploration and another with a company called DG Resources, plus claims that we've staked on our own. We're doing the first pass geochemical work out there and these claims are all just to the north of Kinross' Fort Knox mine, which is a fantastic gold mine for Kinross, and also in and around and surrounding Free Gold Venture's claims where they've made what we believe to be a very significant gold discovery at Cleary Hill. We're definitely in the right part of the world for making large gold deposit discoveries there and we're doing the first pass work with an eye to drilling in 2022. Fairbanks, we're coming at it as a longterm exploration effort, sustained effort over a number of years. We just think there's so much more to discover at Fairbanks.

Gerardo Del Real: A lot going on for a company with a market cap of, I believe, right around $11 and a half million Canadian. Greg, thank you for that very, very thorough update. Anything else to add?

Greg Beischer: Just that, we'll soon be announcing further agreements on other projects here in Alaska and in Mexico. It's going to be one drill hole after another it looks like going forward, for maybe years to come.

Gerardo Del Real: You have a lot going on, I'll let you get to it. Thank you again, Greg.

Greg Beischer: My pleasure Gerardo, always.

Gerardo Del Real: Chat soon.