craig Ethos Gold (TSX-V: ECC)(OTC: ETHOF) Chairman Craig Roberts on Drilling at Perk-Rocky & Duplicating New Found Gold's Success
Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the Chairman of Ethos Gold, Mr. Craig Roberts. Craig, how have you been?
Craig Roberts: I've been good, Gerardo. Quite busy as I think you know, and no, things are good.
Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, congratulations on... I think I have to start with New Found Gold, right? I joked off air that it seems like the last time we spoke was a couple of billion dollars ago. I want to talk Ethos because I know we're all excited as shareholders to see a duplicate of the success at New Found Gold, but let's go into the process and the way the discovery there was made. You're the CEO and Director there, of course, and it's been phenomenal to watch. The run has been impressive. The assays, the drill results have been just stellar, stellar. What initially attracted you to the team and the project? Then, we can get into some more details here on Ethos.
Craig Roberts: Sure. No. Happy to talk about that for a bit, Gerardo. Yeah. I'm the director and CEO at New Found Gold. When I got involved actually, it was late... Started to get involved late 2019 and they just finished their initial drill program and the very first hole on the Queensway project returned 19 meters of 93 grams per tonne gold, which is 19 meters of three ounces per tonne essentially. A spectacular hole, and that was relatively shallow.
Certainly, that was on its own, enough to get very interested and without getting into the details, I did come on board as a director and then the CEO. Maybe just in terms of being attracted to the project and just talking the specifics of it, obviously that drill hole, that discovery hole was quite spectacular and a big part of the sequence of events where I got involved, but a bigger picture as well. This project is over 100 kilometers long north to south, and the project's been acquired along two very deep crustal structures that were prior to that drill program and subsequently shown, there's gold mineralization associated with them certainly on the northern part of the project on what we call Queensway north and then, recent little gold in till surveys and other work has shown that there's some very big gold anomalies coincident with them to the south as well. Without getting into too much detail, there's the Keats discovery, which I think a lot of people might've seen those results. From that initial discovery, hole has been a series of high grade wide intersections, particularly to the south of that initial discovery area.
Gerardo Del Real: Right.
Craig Roberts: We now have it over 400 meters of strike length, and we're still stepping out on it. One of the most recent holes is hole 182, which was, I think 146 grams of 25.6 meters. That's the deepest hole we've released to this point. It's a crazy hole really. I mean, 4.7 ounces of 25 meters.
Gerardo Del Real: Phenomenal.
Craig Roberts: Yeah. Then, two kilometers north of that, we've been drilling a target called Lotto, and I think the best hole there was a bit over two meters of 225 grams, if my memory serves me correctly, but it's starting to get good continuity on that. There's been several other holes, plus 50 grams per ton over two, two and a half meters and the style of mineralization is very similar to what's at Keats. Noranda historically with some shallow drilling, two kilometers south of Keats. It defined as non-compliant resource at 78,000 ounces, plus 10 grams. Clearly, some significant mineralization there and it's actually... As you'll see on our website, there's multiple other locations with high grade boulders, some high grade historic drill intercepts with surface sampling.
Just putting all that together, big picture, what we're going after here is multiple repetitions of this style of mineralization in these deep crustal structures and it appears to be we're very... Our view of it is it's a district scale project with great potential to find multiple high grade targets starting near surface. It is what's called orogenic, which without again getting into details, but the third dimension can be very significant as well. Those types of systems globally go plus a thousand meters to depth.
Finally, the other key point I'd make is the location and jurisdiction. We're on the Trans-Canada Highway where it's sort of 15 kilometers out of Gander, Newfoundland, which is a significant size town that has very skilled workers, industrial support, that kind of thing. The government's very favorable to mining there. They're encouraging mining very actively at this point. From an infrastructure location perspective, it'd be hard to pick a better spot almost than we're in. The combination of what we're seeing in terms of the drilling and the larger potential with where it's located makes it a very compelling project, I think.
Gerardo Del Real: Well again, congratulations. As you mentioned, you're a director, you're the CEO. I think you IPO-ed at $1.30. I believe shares are currently trading somewhere north of $13 Canadian today, and that brings me to Ethos. Ethos is currently drilling a project that I'm very excited about, which is the Perk-Rocky Copper-Gold project, but there's also a project about 100 kilometers or so from where you've had the success, right? With New Found Gold. Can you speak to that a bit first and then let's talk Perk-Rocky right afterwards.
Craig Roberts: Sure. Yeah. That's Ethos' Toogood project. It's actually about 115 square kilometer project. There is quite a lot of... It's about 28 kilometers of strike length, again, on some structures, some fairly significant regional deep seated structures. We appear to have both orogenic and epithermal style gold mineralization there. There's a number of showings on surface with some quite interesting visible gold. There's some pictures of that on our website as well. We've put a team together, kicking off fieldwork currently. Bigger picture. A lot of the gold mineralization Newfoundland is related to a collision event where what was called the Iapetus Ocean… It was actually Europe and North America colliding about 450 million years ago. That is Ordovician Devonian time and a lot of the gold mineralization in Newfoundland is related to that collisional event.
New Found Gold is in a certain regime in that collisional event. Valentine Lake, which is the Marathon Gold project is in a portion of that collision. That's a little further to the west. I think that the Ethos project is probably geologically more directly in the belt of rocks that Marathon is in and then directly in what New Found Gold is in. But in any case, there's gold showings, multiple gold showings up to some quite high grades over the whole project area. Ethos’ Toogood project area and lots of things to follow up on. We've got a good team put together for it, kicking off fieldwork shortly and we are actually proceeding with a permitting process for drilling as well. We're hoping to move that project to the drill stage sometime later this year.
Gerardo Del Real: I spoke with newly appointed CEO, Alex Heath, and he was very, very excited about the ongoing drill program at Perk-Rocky. Tell me a bit about that project, your thoughts, and then why the technical team is as excited as it seems they are.
Craig Roberts: Sure. Well, Perk-Rocky is... As you may know, porphyry type deposits often come in clusters. Once you get into the right geologic terrain, it's common even over tens of kilometers and more to have multiple porphyry style deposits and this particular target is in a belt. It's recognized to have other significant copper/gold porphyry zones of deposits. It's a very big target. We've got mineralization there over, I think five by eight kilometer area. It also shows up on satellite imagery, aster imagery and we've had several phases of field work. It does kind of dovetail as well into the technical team. We've put together in the last six months or more, a really good team of people, largely we are a discovery group company as well. John Robbins, Jim Peterson in that group, and Rob Carpenter is our chief technical advisor.
Rob has a long history with discovery group. Particularly with respect to Perk-Rocky, we've got Dr. Al Wainwright. He did his PhD on copper-gold porphyries and Dan MacNeil, who's also a consulting geologist who's had a lot of copper experience. Those two have had a lot to do with our understanding and analysis of the project. They went on site and looked at it and Al Wainwright particularly went there. When he came back, he said based on what he saw, he said he'd rank it in the top 5% of these kinds of targets. There's a whole bunch of quite technical reasons why he is that positive on it. Those are actually in a presentation on our website, but some of the simpler ones are just the size of the footprint, the extent of the copper mineralization. But things like porphyry dikes, they see telescoping. It looks like the top of the system is preserved as indications that the depths to mineralization is... If the target is where we think it is, won't be too deep.
Yeah. Most simply, if you look over that five by eight kilometer area at some of the copper and gold numbers that have come right off surface, there's some really good numbers there. It shows that we've got copper-gold mineralization. We also have the classic alteration sequence that you look for from a prophylactic to argillic to potassic. It's a classic porphyry zonation that you look for. We have that, and that helps you to zone in on the particular target areas. Yeah. I don't know if that answers the question, but...
Gerardo Del Real: That answers it really well, Craig. Obviously, it has all the hallmarks of a significant discovery. Let's see if mother nature cooperates.
I suspect we'll know soon with this type of system. But look, the bottom line is Ethos has cashed up. You have multiple, nearing 10, I believe it's down to nine right now, on-district-scale land packages. Several of those, we'll see drilling here in the second half of the year. Given the macro backdrop and the gold price being where it's at, I couldn't be more excited to see how things play out. Is there anything else that you'd like to add to that, Craig?
Craig Roberts: Yeah. No, that's exactly right, Gerardo. What I would say is some people... You could look at Ethos and say, "Well, they've got 10 projects. They're not focused." But actually, the opposite is true. We very consciously put together a strategy where we've combined a really strong technical team. That technical team are also large shareholders of Ethos. They've all come in and they all hold significant positions in Ethos. They're all invested in the company. We now have about $12 million in working capital, so our strategy is to have a larger number of projects to sequentially go after them initially with desktop work, then fields work, then drill target definition. Then, to develop a sequence of drill targets on these multiple projects and to spend our money judiciously, but sequentially on the ones that really come to the top in terms of excitement, right?
We're starting with Perk-Rocky. We're moving quite a number of the other projects along. We didn't even talk about Ontario or Quebec. Some very exciting projects there as well. We've got that combination of... I believe that the team, we're well funded and we've got a very systematic well-budgeted plan to go after these targets. Yeah. I think it's going to be really excited about Perk-Rocky, about the drilling. They're really excited about Toogood, Newfoundland, about getting to drilling that later in the year, but we've also got a number of other things coming down the pipeline. Yeah. I think it's going to be a good year for Ethos.
Gerardo Del Real: Exciting time for the company. I'm biased as I am, because I'm speaking with you and everyone knows that I eat my own cooking. I'm a shareholder. I've added to my position recently, but again, a lot to be excited for. Congrats on the success and fingers crossed on future success. Thank you so much, Craig.
Craig Roberts: Thanks, Gerardo. Really appreciate it.
Gerardo Del Real: Yeah. Chat soon.
Craig Roberts: Thank you.