The other use of the cash will be to develop Vetas, the gold play it won control of after a drawn-out hostile takeover of CB Gold last year. Slater says prior management was looking at an open-pittable scenario, but a nearby watershed is a red flag on the permitting side. Red Eagle is investigating lower-impact underground options with a much higher cutoff, as well as doing social and community work at Vetas.

CB Gold has a historical resource, but Slater says that will eventually be replaced with one using a different geological model. Most of the drilling was surface drilling, but he says a future work program will probably include some underground drilling.

He described Vetas as “an amazing property” that’s “hugely accretive” to Red Eagle shareholders. “They drilled about 70,000 metres on the property and hit veins 177 times. The average hit was about 30 g/t gold,” Slater says. So worth chasing despite the mine build at Santa Rosa, he adds.

While Vetas is located in the Ventana Gold area play about an 8-hour drive from Santa Rosa, there are synergies on the operational side between CG Gold and Red Eagle, says Slater. On the shareholder front, too: one of the CB Gold shareholders who tendered to Red Eagle was Vancouver mining tycoon Ross Beaty, who was already a Red Eagle shareholder and now owns about 6% of the stock