Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Riley Gold (TSX-V: RLYG)(OTC: RLYGF) CEO Todd Hilditch on Hitting High-Grade in Nevada and Upcoming Exploration at Tokop

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

Todd Hilditch: I'm outstanding Gerardo, how are you doing?

Gerardo Del Real: I am excellent as well, thank you so much for asking. You just announced the remaining 2021 drill results from your project that seems now, and you did a great job of highlighting this in the headline, seems to be an analog to the Bullfrog Mining District, which is significant in itself. I spoke with you off-air bit. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that it now looks like you have a whole heck of a lot more targets than you did at the beginning of this program. I would love for you to provide a bit of context on the program, what you learned, and then of course we can talk about what comes next.

Todd Hilditch: Absolutely, thanks. And yeah, the news release today was really a culmination of our initial drill work that was a confirmation of some of the work that was done 11, 12 years ago, and that was more of a, "Is this a Fort Knox style Kinross deposit up in Alaska or is it something else?" We have been able to, through our first 12 holes, 10 of which had gold in them... The first three we had up to 17 grams per tonne. These we've had up to 2.63 grams per tonne, so we're getting good grade. We were drilling vein sets, so we were never expecting 100 meter type holes of low grade. It was always about understanding the vein sets and the geology subsurface.

As you say, we've got those out now, we're happy with them, and some of the other work that we're doing is actually identifying a secondary system. The first system is this reduced intrusive related, and now we're looking at a possible of an epithermal type system away from this first area we were working on. So yeah, it's coming together nicely.

Gerardo Del Real: You mentioned in the release having both styles of gold mineralization throughout the property and the potential to expand this project into a district scale opportunity. Walk me through a little bit how you go about prioritizing that here in 2022.

Todd Hilditch: Yeah, so when we finished in September, it was really specific drilling to a small area of where most of the previous operator work had been, and we're talking about less than a kilometer by a kilometer in area, if you will. Getting that completed, and even though the assay labs have been tremendously slow which everybody will tell you, it gave us three to four months to step back and look at bigger picture mapping, sampling, soil grids, things that you would do in a generative basis, and because we've got 21 square kilometers, getting off that main core area of drilling was probably the best thing, and maybe the slowness of the lab helped us because it gave a real unique opportunity to spend good long months trying to put the rest of the puzzle together, and that's when we were able to identify soil grid. 1.4 gram per tonne gold in soils is pretty impressive.

Some of the rock samples that we've announced previously, up to 72 grams per tonne, we continue to get a high grade at surface, not just in the main area, but well off into the bigger 21 square kilometer package. This is where we had the opportunity to say, "Whoa, wait a minute. This isn't just one type of system.” There could be a separate system that is akin to the Bullfrog Mining District, which is 30, 40 kilometers down the road on strike.

This iterative process that the junior companies go through, drilling, mapping, sampling, soil grid, geophysics we are waiting for the interpretation on, that's when we would take all of those pieces of information, pull them together, and then that will identify, "So where next in this big property package do we want to focus?" We do have multiple additional new targets that we wouldn't have known about before had we not done this iterative work in the fall.

Gerardo Del Real: It sounds like in an odd way, and again you mentioned this, but the delays with the labs that everyone has been experiencing have led to some really, really quality field work. I imagine you have a lot of data to interpret here over the next coming months, but I also imagine that you have to be really excited about the next drilling program.

Todd Hilditch: Yeah, we really are. Even if we look at the main core area, and included with the news release was a map of some of our soils and rock samples, within about two K of where we did our drilling, we're getting the same grade at surface, anywhere between 10 and up to 80 grams per tonne, so you take that knowledge and then you apply those other iterations as you just suggested, and then you put it in a bowl and you mix it up and say, "Okay, now that they're on top of each other, where do we go next?"

Todd Hilditch: We do have two, maybe three extremely high priorities, and then three or four that still need some additional work, so we've identified seven new areas that we want to spend some time on... They're not all going to get drilled this year of course, but we would expect that a minimum of two of the targets we could look at getting drilled at some point in '22, once we've completed all of the interpretation and review.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to that interpretation and that review. Looking forward to having you back on. Thank you so much for your time today, Todd.

Todd Hilditch: Oh, thank you, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: All right, we'll chat soon.