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The world’s most iconic precious metal has soared back into prominence in recent months hovering around the USD$1800 mark for most of 2021 (closing in on USD$1900 at press time). Yes, gold is back in a big, big way.
Vancouver BC-based
Newrange Gold Corp. (
TSX-V.NRG,
OTCMKTS: NRGOF,
Forum) is a precious metals exploration and development company focused on district-scale gold exploration in favorable jurisdictions including Nevada, Ontario, and Colorado. With locally high-grade, near-surface oxide gold mineralization spread over more than a kilometre, Newrange’s flagship Pamlico Project is poised to become a significant new Nevada discovery.
And the man at the helm of the company is CEO & Director Bob Archer– a mining industry veteran with more than 40 years’ experience working throughout North and South America.
In this informative investment video podcast, Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson caught up with Mr. Archer to get investors and company shareholders up-to-date on all things Newrange Gold.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: So first off, for our Stockhouse metals & mining investor audience, can you give us a bit of background about yourself and Newrange Gold?
BA: Sure thing. Well, as you mentioned, Dave, I'm a veteran in the industry; sometimes hate to think about the number of years, but nonetheless hopefully experience will pay off. I spent the first 15 years of my career in Northern Ontario and Quebec working for major mining companies like Newmont and Placer Dome, and that's particularly relevant to the Pamlico, or sorry, to the Newrange story because of our North Birch project that's located up in the Red Lake district of Ontario. So hopefully we come back to that in a minute, but since 2004, myself and a Mexican business partner started a company that's now called Great Panther Mining and essentially built that from two guys and an idea into a producing mining company. So,13 years with Great Panther leading that, leading the growth of the company and then stepped down as CEO in August of 2017 and looking for something else to do and ran into the co-founder of Newrange, Bob Carrington, who is also a veteran geologist, and he asked me to join the Board, which I did in March 2018 and then started as CEO in January of 2019. So, essentially, I look after the capital markets and administrative side of things from my home in British Columbia. Bob, who lives in Reno, operates and runs the project from his house and is only a couple of hours away from the Pamlico project. So, this has worked out really well for us through the pandemic with him being down there and me being up here and the project hasn't suffered through lack of our ability to cross the border. So, things have gone reasonably well for us and we’re looking forward to continuing a busy year in 2021.
SH: As I mentioned in the intro, can you talk about the recent excitement around the Pamlico Project in Nevada?
BA:Yeah, absolutely. Newrange picked up the project in 2016 when they made the move from Colombia, where they had been working previously, back into the US. The Pamlico district is a very historic district dating back to the late 1800’s when it was known as one of the highest-grade districts in Nevada, and it's been privately owned since that time, so for about 125 years. It’s never really seen much in the way of modern exploration and that was one of the things that really intrigued me about the project and Bob Carrington as well. So, we initially took a look at the high-grade area and the old workings and so on, and we did get some very good drill results just before I joined the company in 2017.
But what has caused a lot of the excitement more recently is that, in stepping back from that immediate area and looking at a larger area to better understand the geological setting and why the gold is there in the first place, why we think it's high grade, what kind of a model do we think we're looking at? We ran what's called an induced polarization (IP) geophysical survey, which detects fine-grained sulfide mineralization in the rocks. We have determined that gold is typically associated with the fine grain sulfides; not always the other way around; but where you find gold, you should find sulfides. The IP is an indirect way of telling you where the better targets are for finding gold.
By expanding on that survey, what we have done is, we have been able to reinterpret the geology of that surrounding area. And we now have a series of very strong targets that cover an area of about 30 square kilometers. So, with that in mind and the revised model we are looking at three or four different styles of mineralization spread over a very large area which collectively give us the potential for a multimillion-ounce discovery on the project. We just started drilling again last week, so it is a very, very exciting time for us.
SH: You’ve said that given the mining history and lack of modern exploration at Pamlico, you think this is a real ‘sleeper’ of a project with major discovery potential. How so?
BA:I think the fact that it has not seen a lot of modern exploration is one reason and, the companies that were in there before really focused just on the old mine areas and we have surveyed more than 300 openings in that immediate area. So, they are spread out and they're significant enough in their own right, but it seems that no one has really done what we have recently done in terms of stepping back, looking at the larger scale potential of this, and really trying to better understand what's driving the entire system. And by doing that, we really have now I think, started to unlock the potential of this whole district. And the fact that a lot of what we've been finding is buried just below surface. Still very close to surface. The most recent zone that we discovered just earlier this year is only about 10 to 15 meters below surface. So, very, very close - still within the reaches of open pit mining for sure. But the fact that it is not quite exposed at surface just means it's essentially a blind discovery and we feel that there are more areas like this on the property. It’s just going to take a little bit more work to basically unearth them, if you like, literally.
SH: You’ve had a busy start to 2021 including your most recent drill results at Pamlico. Can you walk us through some of the highlights?
BA:In following up the IP results that we got last year, and we haven't yet had a chance to follow up on the ones that we generated this year, but in doing that, we not only drilled some more high-grade results in the area we knew about, but we stepped out about 85 meters from that area, found a new high-grade zone, and we also stepped out about one kilometre north of there and found a brand-new style of mineralization that we never knew existed. Whereas the high-grade mineralization is typically hosted in quartz veins, and quartz breccias, that type of thing, this new zone is a series of relatively flat lying, stacked layers that are enriched in gold, and we've only drilled four holes into this area so far. But it looks, based on those four holes, that it's at least 200 meters by 50 meters in size and open in all directions. That, in itself, indicates that there's potential for a large, bulk tonnage, low grade type system that would be amenable to open pit mining. So, that plus the IP, the geophysics, the new targets that we have with the new style of mineralization are all leading us to something much, much larger.
SH: You’ve recently commenced exploration on the North Birch Project, east of Red Lake Ontario. Can you give us an overview of that project?
BA:The North Birch project is of personal interest for me in the sense that not only have I worked in that area before, but it's modeled after the Musselwhite gold mine, which is a little farther north in Ontario, and I worked on the pre-feasibility study for Musselwhite back in 1994 with Placer Dome and Placer put it into production in ‘97 and it's been operating since then. So, it's an 8-million-ounce deposit (past production and reserves) currently operated by Newmont Goldcorp. It’s a style of mineralization that is called an iron formation hosted gold deposit. This is a quite specific style of gold mineralization that is hosted in a rock type called iron formation. As the name suggests, it's very rich in iron and it's very magnetic and it shows up on the airborne magnetic surveys. From that, you can determine where the iron formation is folded around and cut off and sheared and, so you can interpret the strong structural environment that's required for the gold mineralization.
The North Birch project is very, very similar in that respect to Musselwhite. It’s analogous to the Musselwhite mine and yet the horizon itself has never been drilled. There is gold in the rocks, just on the south side. There's a past producing mine just three kilometers away. There is the Springpole deposit that's being advanced by First Mining only 12 kilometers away and that's almost 5 million ounces. So, there's definitely gold in the region. We feel that the North Birch target is a prime target and the main horizon that we're looking at there is about eight kilometers long. We’ve recently done an IP survey there as well and generated some pretty significant drill targets. We’re looking at drill testing those this summer and we're very excited about that because it's never been tested before. If we are successful in finding gold along that horizon then, with eight kilometers to work with, that could be sizeable.
SH: Investors should know that the Company has a strong cash position and is well-financed for summer 2021 exploration. Can you tell us a bit about the sale of your Colombian assets and your recent financing, and what are the core benefits of being ‘cashed up’ like this?
BA:It was two-fold, as we pulled out of Colombia and with really no intention of going back, we decided to monetize the assets that we had there. So, we sold off all the projects, including the subsidiary company and through last year we had been using the proceeds of those sales in order to fund our exploration. That’s what funded all of our drilling last year. That meant that we didn't have to go back to market time and time again, taking further dilution, and so it was nice to have that. Currently we still have a little over half a million dollars in marketable securities from one of those sales. On top of that, we've just recently completed a $3 million financing - $1 million dollars flow through for the Red Lake project and $2 million non-flow through for Nevada.
Currently, as we speak, we have about $3 million in the bank in cash and marketable securities. As you point out, that'll see us through the summer and the drill programs that are currently underway. That is a nice position to be in, certainly nice to have more robust markets, as opposed to the nine-year drought we seemed to go through from 2011 through to last year. So, hoping for some great results that will allow us to generate a little bit more excitement in the market and get the share price up and bring some dividends back to shareholders.
SH: Can you discuss the overall long-term strategy for the company?
BA:It’squite simple really, Dave, in the sense that we really don't have the intent to take anything all the way through to production. These days with permitting and everything else, that's typically a ten-year process and so, the best return for shareholders is usually in that discovery phase. Essentially from where we are now, through to making that additional discovery and perhaps as far as a resource definition. We hope to get taken out by a larger company somewhere along that journey and the intent there obviously is always to get taken out at a much higher price and therefore all of our shareholders benefit from that. That is really the exit strategy for us.
SH: Bob, can you tell our audience a little bit about your corporate management team along with the experience and innovative ideas they bring to the metals & mining?
BA:Yeah. In addition to myself and Bob Carrington - I have already given a bit of our background. Well, actually, I did not elaborate too much on Bob. He was born and raised in Reno, knows the Nevada geology like the back of his hand. He used to work at the Comstock mine down there, very familiar with the area that we are currently working in and has made or participated in several discoveries in Nevada as well. Not to mention being a past CEO of Gold Canyon who actually owned the Springpole deposit up in our North Birch area that is now owned by First Mining. So, collectively, Bob and I bring a lot of experience in terms of the management team. In addition, we've got several individuals on the board that bring a lot of experience.
Dave Salari who is a mining engineer, operates out of Toronto as a consultant. Ron Schmitz is an accountant by trade, operates an accounting business in Vancouver. We've recently added Colin Jones who lives in New Zealand and Colin is also a very well known and respected geologist. His claim to fame, I guess, is being the lead geologist that did the due diligence on the Bre-X scam when he was with Freeport-McMoRan. So he was one of the key guys that uncovered that scam. He's held in very high regard by the mining industry at large and so it's good to have Colin's technical input as well. Our CFO Dave Cross also operates an accounting firm out of Vancouver and so lots of experience in the mining industry there as well. A lot of well-experienced people on the board - great depth there for us to draw on.
SH: What can you tell our investor audience regarding the current valuation of your stock and why you think it’s a good value buy right now?
BA:Essentially, we have had a little bit of a hiatus in the drilling over the last few months. So there hasn’t really been a lot of news. We’ve been collecting the results from the geophysics, from the last round of assaying and drilling, re-interpreting the geology, gearing up again for another round of drilling, doing the financing and that sort of thing. The share price has kind of been basing at this sort of 14 cent level where it's been for, I guess, maybe the last eight months or so. I think there is tremendous upside from here given the projects and where we're at with everything right now, with very little downside. And so, to sort of put my money where my mouth is, I've been buying shares in the open market as well earlier in the year, and I just participated in the financing that we just completed as well. I'm a firm believer in the company and the prospects that we have, and I think there's tremendous potential going forward.
SH: And finally, Bob, if there’s anything else that I’ve overlooked and you’d like to add, please feel free to elaborate.
BA: I think we have covered most of the salient points, Dave. I think, one of the key things for potential investors to consider is the fact that we just started drilling again last week at Pamlico. And we should be starting to drill in in the Red Lake area, I'm hoping, by the end of June. We should have lots of news flow over the next several months and I'm very confident that a lot of that will be good news, very positive. I think we're in for some good times ahead here, so I'm really looking forward to the next few months.
For more information, visit
newrangegold.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishi