A PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM PERRY LITTLE, PRES and CEO
A Personal Message to Investors from Perry Little, President & CEO of Green River Gold Corp.
“Years ago, during a long career as a stockbroker, I recognized the difficulty that placer miners experienced in trying to raise capital. It always seemed that there was a huge unlocked potential in that segment of the gold industry. In a time of high and rising gold prices, placer mining is one of the few areas of the industry able to take advantage of those prices to generate actual cash flow within a few months. After leaving the financial industry, I set out to find a financing model that would work for placer miners.
Always a gold bug, I have spent a large portion of the last four years in the Cariboo including a Summer spent living in a wellsite trailer on an active placer mine owned by our private company. Our private company bought those mining claims for $25,000, mined them for a summer with limited success, but then managed to sell them for $100,000. That is when I determined that there is a way to add value to claims through permitting, putting in a bit of infrastructure (roads, retention ponds etc.) and logging the property if necessary. The key was finding a structure that would allow us to have that value added using someone else’s money.
I have built a team of local people, including miners, geological consultants, permitting specialists and our related private company is about to start its fifth season of placer mining. The private company also manufactures gold mining equipment (trommels etc.) for the placer mining community. CCR retails smaller mining equipment and supplies from a portion of our office space on Quesnel. That pays for our rent and a portion of our administrative costs. More importantly, it provides a presence, credibility, and familiarity with the local placer miners. Studying the placer industry by immersing myself in it is how I refined the business model. It has been over five years in planning and experimentation to get here.
Our placer model is a relatively low-risk way of benefitting from the placer boom that is happening. Our other businesses, private and public, in Quesnel are seeing a large increase in demand for our products and services. Demand for decent claims is only increasing as well. Our model is to get paid cash rent by the miners who then add value to our placer claims by mining a small portion, putting in roads and ponds and doing exploration. While this is much like a royalty model, we do not get paid a royalty in gold. I have been at this long enough to know there is no economic way to enforce that royalty in a placer mining setting. Instead, we set a cash rent at the start of the season which is based on anticipated gold recoveries. Once the rental deal is signed, Green River puts up the reclamation bond, which is refundable once reclamation is completed. In many cases, we can recover the cost of the claim and the bonding from one season of rent. However, the real value comes from the increase in the value of the claims as they are turned into actual placer mines from what often looks like a piece of raw forest.
We already own 21 square kilometres of placer claims in good areas. We plan to have a significant number of claims permitted by next Spring at minimal cost. This is scalable, especially for us. We have a very visible presence in the region. All our key people are long time residents of the Quesnel area and, even though placer mining is seasonal, we can keep them on payroll all year through having them work for our related private company enterprises when they aren’t mining
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We are thrilled with the possibilities that our Fontaine Lode Gold project presents. The Fontaine Lode project is a highly prospective and inexpensive lottery ticket that we do hope to cash. However, our placer mining model gives us a separate way to profit from the gold industry without having to rely on any single exploration project.”