When we last caught up with
Green River Gold Corp. (CCR) (
CSE.CCR,
OTC: CCRRF,
Forum) and their CEO Perry Little, he updated our investor audience and Green River Gold shareholders on the latest company developments…especially the just-announced exploration drilling at their nickel and talc project in Quesnel in BC’s historic and prolific Cariboo mining country, and an airborne survey that has revealed intriguing magnetic anomalies at its Fontaine Lode Gold Project.
Today, Perry gets us up-to-date on the latest and greatest hits from CCR.
(CLICK IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO)
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: To start off with, Perry, for Stockhouse investors that might be new to company. can you tell us a little bit about yourself and reacquaint our audience on the unique history of Green River Gold?
PL: I'll do a fast forward version because I think a few people have probably heard this story more often than they care to, but yeah, I'm a retired stockbroker who was a gold bug and economist. I was quite convinced in 2016 that I'd had enough of the brokerage industry after 25 years and it was time to move on. So I started with a little private company doing a little bit of placer mining out in the Cariboo. I was familiar with two companies out there, quite familiar, with the old Barkerville gold mines which was the big dog in the area and Omineca Mining and so I'd been out there and looked around the area and I thought, you know there's a chance we could do something with placer mining.
So we went out there to do that in 2016. I very rapidly realized that the opportunities were much larger than I expected and that we needed a public vehicle. So we started Green River Gold in 2017. We took charge of a nearly defunct public mining company, got it renamed, recapitalized and in September of 2017, it became Green River Gold. We started looking for properties at that point. I'll ignore the rest of the private company stuff but through the private enterprise we ended up putting up a bit of a headquarters there. We've got a presence in Quesnel because we have a 6,000 square foot shop and office, which Green River shares. It is primarily the private company that builds equipment and supplies the local miners. It gave us a nice toe hold though, which is very important in helping to find property out there. So we have all local geologists, all local people and we looked around for quite a while before we actually acquired property.
It was almost two years before we made our first property acquisition through Green River. That was the Fontaine Lode Gold project. We should call it Lode Gold plus because there's a lot more there than just gold. It is 90 square kilometers. It shares 10 linear kilometers of border, roughly, with Osisko who have taken over Barkerville gold mines with fabulous timing for us. They're in the process of building a mine right now and we're right on the fairway with our gold property that is on a trend that leads down from Osisko down south through our property and through Karus Gold, which is owned I believe 27% by Eric Sprott. Then below that there's Spanish Mountain Gold. There's a big prevailing trend and we're right on that trend. So we're really happy with the gold property we've got.
Today I want to stray off that topic a little bit because when we staked that property our advisors at the time suggested we maybe just veer a little bit off to the north and west and pick up an extra 20 square kilometers of claims, which probably weren't prone to gold, although you never know. But that portion had some old nickel showings and a deposit of something that very few people know about called talc. And that's what I want to talk about today because that's what's gotten really interesting in this story.
We're still a gold company, but right now it's all about nickel and talc.
SH: Can you update our investor audience and your Green River Gold shareholders on any new company developments, especially the newly discovered nickel and chromium mixed in at your aforementioned talc deposit?
PL: Yes. It sure is exciting for us. It's got our attention in the short term. It's diverted us away from gold but we're going back to gold again in the spring. What happened was we shot a UAV Mag survey on the entire 90 square kilometer property last year and it highlighted something we kind of expected might be there from historical showings. There's a big Mag anomaly on that Northwest piece of this property. It's about three kilometers long about a half a kilometer wide with a very distinct magnetic signature that we expected could be nickel, based on old records. We intend to go after that very aggressively in the spring but there's another anomaly just offset slightly from that. There is a weaker Mag signature that runs for, well, from what we can see over a kilometer, and it parallels an old talc deposit that was found back a few years ago.
I can’t remember when it was found but in the 1980s, there was a lot of work done on this talc deposit.
So once we had the Mag survey results and we realized there was something going on there, I negotiated the last couple of claims that were missing on the talc deposit. We did that in July. Only then did we start talking about talc. I'll tell you about the talc market if I can because most people don't understand it. People know talcum powder. That's a very, very small fraction of the global talc market. Talc is the softest mineral. It has all kinds of uses because of the properties that come with being the softest mineral. Much of it is used in paper, in ceramics and plastics, industrial solvents, paint. It’s got just a huge number of industrial uses and they seem to be coming up with more. Plastics is a growth area for it. It's about a 3-billion-dollar annual market and there are no talc mines west of Timmins in Canada. There is talc imported into Western Canada. So we thought it was interesting to go out, maybe take a look and once we picked up the extra couple of claims, we thought we'd go drill this stuff because we wanted to see what was going on. I mean, we had a magnetic signature over there on what we thought was just going to be a talc deposit. Well, it turns out we've got more than just talc. There is a significant amount of nickel and chromium buried in with the talc. We did not expect that.
That kind of blew us away. So we started drilling on this with just a one-man drill, just a shallow little backpack drill, we got down about 60 feet because talc is so soft. This tiny little drill actually went down 60 feet. We drilled numerous holes. The best one was hole number six. We only went down 15.2 meters with this one. The bottom five meters of it were the best part of it and it was 0.25% nickel, 0.13% chromium but by the time you get down about 40 feet, this thing is 75 to 80% talc. So you you've basically got valuable minerals, swimming in a sea of talc, which is in itself, a valuable commodity. Talc goes for about 270 bucks US per milled ton. That's what the average was in 2021 in the U.S. It varies greatly depending on the quality of the talc and the use that it's earmarked for. What we know about the talc occurrence is based on a lot of work that was done in the 80s.
These guys in the 1980’s didn't drill much but boy did they do a lot of homework on the talc. We have a mixture apparently of medium and high-grade talc. That will all have to be proven again but we certainly have a lot of talc and the occurrences of it extend for over a kilometer. So if we actually have a kilometer long stretch of talc hopefully with nickel and chromium through the entire thing this could be a very sizable deposit and the nickel and chromium came as a surprise to us. As I said, we've only drilled very shallow holes as they did back in the eighties, but we have talc, nickel, and chromium, right from the very top. We're drilling off an outcropping and right from the first meter we are already loaded up with nickel, chromium, and talc. So it's echoing exactly the results that they showed in the 1980’s. Speaking of which, when we went out there, we knew approximately where they had drilled from in the 1980’s but not exactly where.
We didn't know for sure because the geographical coordinates seemed to be off a little bit. So from landmarks and whatever, we tried to pick the right outcropping and we drilled and if you want a fluke try this one. We drilled our second hole. We drilled it at 70 degrees. At about the 42-foot mark, we actually intersected one of their drill holes from the 1980’s. So we pierced their arrow basically at 42 feet. We had a 1.4-inch drill core, and we intersected a three-quarter inch drill core from the 1980’s. I don't think you could do that again in a million years but it proved to us that we are exactly where they were and so we are relying on their results to guide us and so far everything they said is true.
It's a very, very heavy talc presence and what they didn't really note was the nickel and chromium, because I don't think anybody was looking for low grade nickel and chromium in those days. So just to give you a bit of an idea where this fits in I think the future of nickel mining is going to be these low grade, near surface nickel mines. There are a couple in BC that are proposed. The one that comes to mind is Decar, which is owned by FPX Nickel. The numbers on it look fabulous and I believe it's 0.18% nickel and it's near surface and it's big and the numbers do look very good.
We’ve got similar showings, right at surface in terms of the nickel, the difference being that we also have the chromium in there, and we are in talc, which is a saleable commodity. So we basically have valuable commodities swimming in a sea of talc. In the 1980s, they planned to build a talc mine here, just on the talc alone never mind any nickel or chromium credits. So you could look at this as a potential talc mine with nickel and chromium for free or a nickel mine with a bunch of talc for free. One or the other but not a lot of waste.
SH: How difficult is it to separate such a soft mineral from something which is obviously higher up on the valence scale, like chromium and nickel versus talc a lot of people probably don't know about this.
PL: Yeah, it's a good question. Mineralogy is always challenging. I think nickel in particular poses a challenge. We'll see just exactly what happens but we're not totally unique. We're looking at some role models over in Finland where they have a talc mine where they were producing nickel from the tailings and the tailings were in the 0.1 to 0.2% nickel range, similar to what we have. So we're doing some homework on that right now, just to try to figure out exactly what we could do as far as separating them. There's also a talc mine that was using bio leaching to capture the nickel. So we're already talking to some people about the potential for that sort of thing. This is very early stage, don't get me wrong. First off, let's find out how much nickel and chromium we have in there along with the talc and then we'll see how to go about separating them but from the sound of it, it's not impossible and with today's technology very few things are impossible. You've got a camera that's almost making me look good. So there we go. Anything's possible.
SH: So what kind of future development and progress can we expect at your Quesnel nickel and talc project moving forward?
PL: Well, immediately, and I do mean immediately, in early March and we're in mid February right now… in early March we will be drilling deeper. We have acquired a Winkie drill, which sounds funny, but it's named after Mr. Wink who manufactured them and designed them. It will go down about 400 feet and we're all set to start drilling with that in early March off those same outcroppings. We'll pick the exact locations, but we want to see how deep this deposit runs because if it is deep and it runs for a kilometer, then it is large. The old showings don’t say that whether it is several discreet pockets or if there's one long one continuous showing over a one-kilometer stretch. Either way, if it covers a kilometer, we've got something big here and the depth is going to be a big determinant of that. So we'll be able to find that out with this drill. We’ll see if we're still in talc when we get down 400 feet, and by the way those drills go down 400 feet in regular rock. I don't know how deep it'll go in talc because with talc it's like going through Swiss cheese. It's crazy. It's so soft but we'll see perhaps what's underneath it, if we do get to the bottom of it and that has me somewhat intrigued as well.
So that's immediate and we'll have results on that over the next little while. We will also have the assay results from the first hole coming out very shortly. We didn't do an assay yet. We used an XRF gun and that's where we got our readings on the nickel and the chromium and they were incredibly consistent over all the holes, some hotspots, some better spots of course, but there seemed to be a trend that the deeper we went, the better the nickel readings we were getting.
So whether we can read anything into limited results like that, I don't know but we're hoping that we'll see a continuation of that as we go deeper. We could have a large amount of talc here. So yeah, we're quite excited and that's immediate.
Down the road in the spring, we'll be doing a bunch of work on our gold property again and also doing some work on the larger Mag anomaly, which runs three kilometers by half a kilometer wide. That's actually where we expected to find nickel. We did not expect nickel readings like this in the talc, we thought maybe it was on the periphery but what I'm thinking is if we've got this here, what's the bright spot going to be? So we're really excited to get out and look at that larger mag anomaly.
Some people have likened it to the Decar project, which I mentioned earlier, just because of the magnetic signature. It could be similar. We'll see. If we are fortunate if it will be.
SH: What really separates Green River Gold from the competition…especially in the Cariboo…and what makes your nickel & talc project so unique?
PL: Well, there are talc deposits laying around in Western Canada. We're not the only one but nobody's mining one. So there are no talc mines west of Timmins. We've got a couple of major advantages. Number one is the fact that we're loaded up with nickel and chromium at least in this spot and that is somewhat unique. I've done quite a bit of reading on talc and it's not that typical to have large amounts of nickel in with the talc. It does happen as I mentioned. There are some in Finland but it's rare and it's a huge value add with nickel prices where they are and even chromium prices where they are. So having those two things combined with the talc is what really makes it unique and could put it over the top. The other thing we have is proximity to infrastructure and we have this with all of our properties really because it's one contiguous property, it's 93 square kilometers that covers our Fontaine Lode Gold property and this little offshoot that we call the Quesnel Nickel project. it's all contiguous with the nickel and the talc. Where we are drilling, we're 500 yards from a major, well maintained logging road. That logging road, if you travel 16 kilometers north on it you hit the famous Barkerville highway and then you're on pavement for about 50 kilometers into the City of Quesnel. The City of Quesnel, the GQA, the Greater Quesnel Area has about I think, 23,000 people. So all the services you need are there. The rail line goes through there, highway 97 runs north and south through there. That's the main thoroughfare through that part of British Columbia.
So we've got access to all services. We never have to build a person camp there because everybody could commute. It'd be easier than the commute I had from the west end to downtown Edmonton for 25 years. So a very, very simple drive. And we have local people. I guess that's where our big advantage is, infrastructure and local people, because we have another business based in Quesnel, a private business that manufactures mining equipment and is involved in the mining industry. We have the local geologists available. They're good people and you pay for good people but we have local talent and a local labor pool to draw from and we're well known in the area. So it helps. As I said, we bought that Winkie drill rather than rent it because we've already had offers from other miners who want to rent it from us and we have a yard we can store it on when it's not used and a place where we can service it. So, it is a unique business model that way.
SH: I have to mention your stock has had a bit of a roller coaster ride over the past year. What can you tell our investor audience regarding the current valuation of your stock and why you think it’s still a good buy right now?
PL: Well we have just cashed up through some financing, so we don't need any money for a while. We have relatively few shares outstanding trading at about 7 cents. We do have some warrants at 9 and 10 and 11. If those come in, then we'll have even more cash. We're positioned well to move forward right now and add value very quickly. So these deep holes we’ll be drilling. If we have a lot talc there, we're going to be adding a lot of value to that potential deposit with each hole that we drill at relatively low cost because many of our people can commute from their homes in Quesnel every day. So we'll be able to add value quickly.
Gold also seems to be coming back into vogue a little bit in the last few weeks. I'm of the opinion, gold is going to skyrocket over the next several years. Who knows which day the switch turns on but I have lived through a few good gold markets and our gold property is right on the fairway. We got some feedback on that Mag survey as well, that indicated where we should be looking for the gold and that gives us another leg up when gold moves. Our neighbors, Omineca, good friends of ours, did a bunch of work on their property and I think they've got about 400 square kilometers. Don't quote me on that but it's around that much and they have found three priority drill targets. One of them is actually very, very close to the border with our property. So we'll be hopefully sharing a bit of information back and forth with them to see what they found exciting on their property and we'll see if we have the same thing.
So we're benefiting from what our neighbors are doing and there's a lot of activity going on on the gold properties all around us. So I think our gold property's going to be worth more than our current market cap. The nickel and talc, the upside on this is absolutely huge. We have no idea. That's just one hot spot, that mag anomaly where the talc is. The bigger one is unexplored at this point, that'll be for the springtime, we'll get doing some work on that. But all through the winter, we can drill on the talc project and try to add value on that and find out just exactly how big it is.
Yeah, we're a bit of a Swiss army knife, I guess. We're Green River Gold, but you know I went out and reserved greenrivernickel.ca and greenrivernickel.com just in case.
SH: Finally, what’s the long-term strategy for the company moving into 2022 and beyond, and what should all investors be looking out for?
PL: I'm going to focus on the short term rather than the long term. Take a look at the next couple of months and the news flow. We should have news coming out about the nickel and talc project. Keep your eye on that. In the long term, we are still very much a gold company, and we will be spending time and effort trying to determine whether we have gold. Our next-door neighbor has about 6 million ounces proven and probable I believe and they're building a gold mine right now and that is right next door to us. So it's a great place to find gold. It's right next door to a gold mine. We're on a big trend and we intend to be focused on the gold for a long, long time but in the short term, we think we've kind of caught lightning in a bottle with nickel and talc and I'm absolutely thrilled about that.
The last time we interviewed was in December and at the time our drillers had said, I think you’ve got visible nickel in your drill core but there wasn't really much to talk about so that didn't come up in the conversation. Now that we've seen what the results are, it's sort of transformed things here over the last little while and, and we're now very much a nickel play as well as a gold play. So great. We've got two runways to run on and we'll see where that takes us but both of them are in our long-term plans.
For regular updates, visit
greenrivergoldstore.ca.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.