Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals / Gold Stocks

Quartz Mountain Resources (TSX-V: QZM)(OTC: QZMRF) Chairman Bob Dickinson on Unlocking a Major Gold-Silver System via the Drill-Bit at Maestro in Central British Columbia

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the chairman of Quartz Mountain Resources (TSX-V: QZM)(OTC: QZMRF) — none other than Mr. Bob Dickinson. Bob, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on. How are you, sir?

Bob Dickinson: I'm well, Gerardo. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to have a discussion about the things I like most.

Gerardo Del Real: Yes, gold is still firmly above $3,300/oz. Silver is closer to $36 than $35/oz and looks to have a lot of legs. We chatted a few weeks ago… and I can't think of a better time to have an emerging discovery with long intervals of gold and silver mineralization. 

You had some news this morning — which you provided excellent context for in a video presentation — but I wanted to have you on to chat about the results and the methodical approach you're taking to prove this out.

Ultimately, the goal is to get it to a stage where you do what you do best, which is transact properties and add shareholder value at significant premiums, right? 

Bob Dickinson: Well, that's right. We're at the beginning of a major saga here, Gerardo. My view is that there is no such thing as an underground jewelry store. Mines are made by hard work. But to make a mine, you actually have to be locked onto a deposit; a resource.

This morning, we announced four new holes. There are also two holes that we announced last year, plus six other holes that had been drilled in the Maestro-Prodigy target area historically. And every one of those holes has hit zones of gold and silver over very large intervals.

So I think the message from this morning's news release is that we are locked onto a major deposit. We've got a lot of work to do, including methodical drilling, and we plan to attack it methodically, step by step so no errors are made.

But you need to have a deposit to make a mine. And we now know that we have one of those deposits. Now, we're going to carefully drill it off, see how large it is, check its geometry, its mineability, metallurgy — all of those things that are coming.

And we're not going to build a mine. We're going to find a major mine here over the next one to two years, and then we're going to transact. We've done this historically many times especially in BC but also around the world.

Again, mines are made. And we have the team that will make this a mine and do everything it is possible to do. We're definitely locked onto a major saga here. And as you said, there are six long holes drilled in a target now that’s well-defined. The target is quite large.

The area that's been altered on the property — on the Prodigy zone — is well over 500 meters north-south and well over 225 to 250 meters east-west. Those are the areas where we've already drilled.

The six holes are all 700 to 800 meters in length. They've gone to depths of about 625 meters vertically from surface. They've gone laterally; the holes are angle holes laterally about 350 meters.

The distance between the six holes is about 250 feet, say, 75 meters. So there's a large block of ground already established that’s well mineralized, and the target goes substantially farther to the north. So we're underway on one of our great adventures.

Gerardo Del Real: Maestro is a new-ish epithermal gold-silver system. And what's interesting to me is that it shows that classic epithermal potential for both bulk tonnage, which you demonstrated well in today’s results, and then the high grade that you’ve latched onto early on in the most recent program.

Can you speak to the variations there between the bulk tonnage potential and that high-grade potential because when you talk about making and discovering a deposit and then making a mine out of it… you really need both to boost the economics.

I know it’s early, but can you speak to the potential for two different types of mineralization here?

Bob Dickinson: Well, it’s good to have, isn’t it? We have high-grade vein opportunities both in gold and silver, and we definitely have the bulk tonnage in spades. And this is a precious metals gold-silver epithermal-type deposit. Typically, they’re quite large in volume. 

The mineralization is generally spread out but not evenly. Higher grades, moderate grades… and, again, they’re connected. And over large volumes, they’re generally structurally controlled.

We see all of those things here. The most recent example in BC is called the Blackwater deposit. It’s just been permitted and constructed really well by a hugely capitalized company. That is a precious metals gold-silver epithermal-type of deposit.

We're not there yet but we have the target. And we now have the initial holes that say, ‘Hey, we have a high probability of being there in the future as we drill off.’ We need to do a lot of things before we get to where Blackwater is but it’s the same kind of system.

And if you look at the Blackwater system, the reason it is so encouraging is because the Blackwater system has high grade and low grade across the sections. It has the same kind of grades that we've been hitting over big intervals at the Prodigy target at Maestro. It has a green... I don’t want to get too detailed... alterations.

Gerardo Del Real: The sericite component.

Bob Dickinson: Yes, the sericite alteration is the same kind of alteration we have at Prodigy. Many, many geological similarities. So they are the same types of deposits. We have a high probability of getting a Blackwater here at the end of the day.

These are tremendous sagas, and they don't evolve overnight. There's no instant mine. You've got to work hard and push. We've got the team that can do that. We've done it before, and we're on to something very significant in my view.

Gerardo Del Real: You have C$3.6 million in the treasury, I believe. What comes next, Bob?

Bob Dickinson: We're currently mobilizing trucks and low beds from the local town of Smithers to the Maestro property and moving on to the Prodigy site again. We're going to start drilling; all of our drilling was right at the southern end of the target zone, which has now been clearly established as a mineral system. 

And that mineral system — you can see it in the geophysics — goes for 525 meters north. So we're just down at the southern end of the system. We're going to go boom-boom all the way up to the north. And, basically, it won't happen in just the next phase. This phase will keep on going. We'll stop, get our assay results, make sure everything’s drilling in the right direction. We know the structures.

One of the exceptional things here is the rock type that we're hitting is called breccia. It’s a jumbled-up, fragmented rock that's been re-healed again by silica and what they call ankerite — an iron carbonate mineral. And that’s where the gold is.

The gold system has re-healed these — basically, an explosion at great depths — that now is at surface. And we hit that breccia almost all the way down in all of our holes. We have a rock type of very large volume that can host this stuff. And where we’ve drilled and hit, it has extensive gold and silver in spades in it.

Gerardo Del Real: It’s a good time to have gold and silver in spades. Let’s do this again soon, Bob. Thank you so much for your time, sir. A pleasure as always.

Bob Dickinson: Thank you very much.

Gerardo Del Real: Take care.

Bob Dickinson: You bet, Gerardo.

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