Gold Discoveries in the Yukon and Newfoundland Prove that Greenfields Exploration Work

0:08 Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Greenfields exploration panel. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with 3 experienced geologists who have each enjoyed the success of making significant gold discoveries in both Western and Eastern Canada. I'm pleased to introduce Adrienne Fleming, CEO and Director of Gold Island, Dr. Rob Carpenter, the Co-Chairman of Prospector metals, and Roger Moss, the CEO of Labrador Gold. Our speakers are going to share with us the aspects of how these discoveries were made and why we're calling them the Greenfields case histories. But before we begin, I just want to remind you all that you can submit questions at any time using the Q&A panel on the right hand side of the screen. We're going to try to get to as many as possible after the panel discussion and as always it's being recorded and available to watch afterwards on six.com.

0:57 But just to kick it off, if each of you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself, saying a few words about who you are and your current affiliation. I'll pass it to you, Roger, to kick it off. Yeah, okay. Thanks, Dasha, and thanks to you and Adrian for setting this up. I think It's a good time to be having a discussion like this about greenfields exploration. And probably not enough being talked about getting back to grassroots, as we as we also call it. From my from my part, I am, as you mentioned, the CEO of Labrador Gold Corp. And I'm a geologist been working in the mineral exploration industry for many years and almost entirely in grassroots exploration, including right now with Labrador Gold.

1:46 My career started in Namibia where I was fortunate to be involved in a discovery there of the gold mine, Navishab. And from there, moved to Canada, South America, a little bit in Europe, but now back in Canada and, as you know out in Newfoundland. And our project, the Newfoundland Kingsway Project, it's a grassroots project. We've made a few discoveries there over the last 2 years. And I think we'll talk about it in a little bit more detail, but it's really that fundamental grassroots exploration that has enabled us to get to where we are today, where we're drilling a good way, probably about halfway through a 100,000 meter drill program, and with the cash to sustain that going through to the end. So I think the basics of Systematic grassroots exploration is one of the things that we're going to talk about. And I think it's obviously in my career, it's been where I've had the most success.

2:59 And I think we're doing the same thing again now in Newfoundland. Great, thank you. I look forward to hearing more about that. Dr. Rob, can you introduce yourself? Hi everyone, thanks Dasha. Yeah, so I'm a geologist by trade. I spent most of my early career working for the major companies, primarily in Canada, gold, and also nickel. And I was lucky enough early on to be working for some crews that made some big discoveries. They didn't need me to make it, but I was just lucky enough to be there. The Hope Bay Belt with BHP, Meliodine with Western Mining, and I was lucky enough as a young geologist to see how these greenfield discoveries were made.

3:48 And it was quite an addictive experience to see it and as I grew older into my into the profession I decided that was the route I wanted to take as well. I did some academic work, hence the Dr. Rob I guess. Also I worked for the government which is where I met Adrian actually and in 2004 I moved to Vancouver and I met John Robbins of the Discovery Group. And we put together a company called Kaminak Gold Corporation. And the aim of that company was to, again, do greenfields exploration, primarily gold in Canada. And we had some success and we're lucky enough to make a greenfields discovery. And now I'm with a company called Prospector Metals and they trade on the TSX Venture Exchange. The symbol is PPP.

4:40 And I'm co-chairman with Craig Roberts and Alex Heath is our CEO and Joe Price is our Vice President of Exploration. And we have a diverse portfolio of projects, gold and nickel, in Ontario and Quebec, and also in Newfoundland.

4:58 And yeah, our business model is, again, Greenfields Exploration, primarily trying to replicate what we did at Kaminak and yeah as Roger had alluded to Greenfields exploration is very addictive and success is you know is sometimes you know elusive but it can be quite rewarding. Great. Thank you so much. And of course, Adrian, please introduce yourself. Thank you, Dasha. And thank you to Roger and to Rob for agreeing to participate today. And the goal of today's get together is to provide people with a little bit more information I think about what what greenfields exploration really is and each of us has had the good fortune to be involved in 1 or more of that kind of discovery.

5:53 We're gonna talk about that in a minute. However, a little bit about me, I'm an Aussie geologist. I've been in this business heading for 5 decades now. I had the good fortune, I guess early in my career, to work out of Australia with the junior and then I was hired by Placer Development, a very important and esteemed Canadian exploration company and I worked with Placer in Australia and Papua New Guinea and also some time in Canada. Then I guess I got back into the junior space with companies in different parts of the world And I've been lucky enough to be a part of teams and in some cases leading the team that that made significant exploration successes in various places. The first one was the Porgera Goa project in Papua New Guinea where when I was up there working we found the high-grade zone 7 part of that system which catapulted it into a very lucrative mining operation which was subsequently developed.

7:04 I worked in Western Australia and on something called Big Bell that became a mine. Spent a bit of time at Hope Bay after and during the time that Rob Carpenter was up there doing some work. And then I spent quite a bit of time in the Guyana shield of South America with the company called Golden Star and during my watch

7:28 we discovered the Gross Roosevelt mine or deposit which is now has resources and production of something like 15 million ounces. I'm the director of a couple of Canadian based companies but I'm also the CEO of Gold Island Inc. That company has a number of prospects in newfound land. We're just starting work on those and a bit like Rob and I think Roger, once you've had some success in this business, and we're looking for treasure. That success creates, I guess, a bit of an endorphin hit, and you become a bit of an addict because you think, well, the next one, that's going to be the really big one.

8:18 So that's me. Thank you. Great. Thank you and welcome. So obviously this panel is about greenfields exploration, which each of you are really familiar with. But for those who aren't, what does greenfields exploration really mean? And I'll just pass it to whoever wants to answer that. Rob, go. Oh, you know, so greenfields is a bit of a loaded question. You know, an investor might think of a greenfield project differently than a geologist, but the way I see greenfield would be, you know, it's essentially new ideas and new areas. So you're fighting dogma and you're going against the grain and you're trying to be first mover into an area.

9:03 And that takes a lot of guts because you're the one leading the charge, you're not at the back of the pack. You know, it usually involves district scale land positions. So large, large land positions where you're doing early geochemical surveys or geophysical surveys trying to 0 in to the areas of interest. So, it doesn't start with a drill. And investors need to know that. This type of, you know, investors commonly want to get into something where they can drill right away and they want an outcome yes or no.

9:38 The greenfield exploration model is much more technical and it's much more, You know, you have to be a patient investor and you have to be a patient geologist as well. You know, in many ways it's, you know, you're writing the textbook rather than reading it. And so you have to have a very good team of geologists around you that can interpret information in real time to pivot on what you think is important and isn't important. Is that a good start? I think it's a great start. I think that's a very good start. Roger, would you like to go next? Yeah, I'm not sure there's a lot to add there, but yeah, like I said, most of my career has been spent in greenfields, grassroots exploration, and I think part of the attraction for me is that it is like a treasure hunt, and you're completely in control.

10:35 Well, almost completely in control of the outcome. And it's based on science. It's based on the knowledge that you have, and the team around you has, and what you can put into it. And I think just going, as Rob said, in these large areas, and whether you're looking at geophysics or geochemistry, and obviously, the goal of the whole thing is to narrow that area down into the best possible, we call them anomalies, that could then be drill tested. But that does take time. I mean, even in Newfoundland recently, we spent a year doing grassroots exploration before we started drilling. And in many cases, as Rob alluded to, investors don't really want to stick around for that long anymore, which is really sad. And I think one of the things that the 3 of us share, have in common based on our discussion today, is that we were all introduced to this very early on in our careers.

11:38 And certainly for me, that made a lasting impression. And how you can get in there and using these techniques that are available and And actually come up with a with a discovery and as you say that that's very That's very inspiring and addictive and you know, I mean there's a lot has been made of more recent techno technological advances and you know, I think I I'm open to all all technology that I can use to to to help move that greenfields exploration ahead, but ultimately it comes down to your team of geologists or geophysicists that are gonna interpret whatever technology it is that you're using and to come up with the best targets to move forward.

12:36 Thank you, Andrew, do you have anything to add? Yes, just a couple of comments. There's an adage that I heard quite a few times in the early part of my career, which was that the best place to look for a new deposit is within sight of a mining headframe. So there's a mine down there. And if you just look at where maybe you think the trend is, you go along the trend, and perhaps you'll find another one. And I think a lot of exploration, certainly from the 1970s, which is when I got into the business, was on the basis of people going out and looking at where other people had found something on the surface. And that is not grassroots exploration.

13:22 You know, that's following up indications from maybe previous mining or stuff that prospectors have come up with. Grassroots exploration has a conceptual

13:35 basis because geoscientists and economic geologists like ourselves understand that there are certain geological terrains or types of packages of rocks which host different types of mineral systems. And so, you know, you start off, in the case of rob with nickel, you know that nickel occurs in particular types of lithology or rocks, and in some cases, particular ages of rocks. And so with the advent of computers becoming available in mineral exploration, we've enhanced our ability to compile large amounts of data. And by combining different layers of data and looking at coincidence, you can begin to identify places where perhaps there's never been any exploration done, but

14:27 the indications from geology and geophysics and the age of the rocks and the tectonic history, the plate tectonic history of the area indicates that that might be a fertile place to look for a new mineral occurrence and it doesn't have to be just gold, it can be copper, it can be nickel, It can

14:50 be silver, a number of other minerals, even iron ore. And so once you've identified the space where you think there's the possibility of finding something, then you have to move to a very systematic approach where you're doing some kind of grid work, it might be geophysics, it might be geochemistry, it might be a combination, it might be just going out and mapping. And that is the approach for greenfields, which is very different from saying, well, I just learned that somewhere out there near Kalgoorlie, there's an old showing that some pits that people have forgotten about and I'm gonna go and acquire that property and start doing some work. So it's a more theoretical or conceptual approach to the process of looking for new deposits.

15:43 Great. Well, thank you so much. Now I want to take a deeper dive into each of your stories and successes. Starting with you, Adrian, I understand you headed up a company called Underworld Resources that started exploring in the Yukon in 2007. The drill holes that herald the golden saddle discovery were drilled in 2008. What took you to the Yukon and what happened? Yes, thanks. Yes, Underworld Resources is a company that I started with Rob McLeod and Mike Williams from Vancouver. We listed it in 2007 and to begin with we were doing some exploration in the South Island of New Zealand And we started looking at opportunities in in South America Chile and Peru in particular, But Rob McLeod came across some systematic soil geochemical work that a guy called Sean Ryan had been doing south of Dawson City in the Yukon.

16:45 Rob's a very experienced geologist, good friend and colleague of mine. Rob got very excited about that geochemistry,

16:52 asked me to have a look at it, and I thought it looked pretty compelling. Ryan had collected some 3,000 soil samples on a grid basis, about an hour's helicopter flight south of Dawson City. And so we liked the look of that. We managed to option the property from him. And in 2007, in our 1st Yukon field season, we went out and did some mapping, did some trenching. We collected another thousand or so samples and we did some trenching with a little tiny trenching machine. You could move around with a helicopter. And so one of those trenches returned 37 meters at just a bit over a gram and within that interval there was 5 gram per ton over 5 meters.

17:47 Now unfortunately the assays didn't come back until very late in the season so we weren't able to start the drill program till the following year 2008. So the first drilling took place in 2008.

17:59 We had identified 5 different targets, we put 1 or 2 holes in each of them and very fortunately for us, where that trench had returned a bit of a gram over 37 metres, the first couple of holes there, which were holes 4 and 5, intersected around 20 metres at 4.5 grams per tonne from about 14 metres below the surface. So they were the discovery holes. And then we continued with the second phase of drilling. It was the global financial crisis. We really had our back to the wall to try and raise money, but hole 21 in 2008, I returned 50 metres at 3.1 grand per tonne at Golden Saddle and we got quite excited and that helped us to raise some more money.

18:54 And in 2009, which was our second phase of drilling, We'd managed to raise about 5 million, and we committed 2 and then 3 drill rigs.

19:07 And fortunately for us, hole 31 cut 3.5 gram per ton over 100 meters. And that was a stellar hole, hole 31 in the Golden Saddle deposit. We were coming out of the global financial crisis. We managed to raise about another 9 million on the back of that. And by the end of that second year of drilling, we had drilled 60 holes into this deposit. And early 2010,

19:45 we issued our maiden resource, and that was a touch over 1 million ounces of 3.2 grand per ton. So the pace at which we made a discovery in a trench and then after 2 seasons of drilling to come up with 1 million ounces, it's almost unprecedented. I mean, we kept pinching ourselves and saying, you know, are we dreaming? Is this really happening? Because it happened so quickly. And then of course, at the Prospectus Conference in 2010, the people from Kinross came along and said, we want to buy your company, you've got 24 hours to say yes. And so we thought, ooh, what do we do now? We rushed off to our brokers and advisors and said, well, you think we should do this? We were all pretty convinced that we should do it. And Kinross finished up paying a 30% premium to our stock price.

20:36 I think Kinross offered us $2.58. And so all of the people that had bought shares in Underworld Resources made money and we the principals were the recipients of a bit of a windfall. So that's the story of Underworld Resources and I don't think in the balance of my career I'll have the good fortune to repeat the pace at which that discovery was made and you know the success. However Dasher, there's a black mark against this discovery because it is still not a mine.

21:22 Some people would say it doesn't count. And the property is now owned by a company called White Gold. They've found more there. And I think once additional infrastructure is developed in the Yukon, that will become a minor. I hope I'm still alive when it happens. Thank you so much. I'm going to move on to you, Rob. Kamenet Gold, which you led, was also working in the Yukon, south of Dawson City. The discovery drilled holes that found the coffee deposit were drilled in 2010. What is the backstory to that discovery? Well, I love hearing that story every time, Adrienne, and I've heard you tell it, and I've heard Rob tell it, and Jody and others, and I love it every time. I'll be re-watching this one for sure.

22:10 Kaminak started in 2005 and we were a spin out from a diamond company And we spent, and our properties are primarily in Nunavut, British Columbia, and some in Ontario. And we were chewing through these properties, trying to evaluate them. And we were aware of the discovery in the Yukon by Adrian and his group. And we know Rob and Adrian, and they're well-respected people. And we knew that when they started reporting 3 grams over 50 meters, that we should start paying attention. And a gentleman in Vancouver by the name of Cal Everett, who at the time was with PI Financial, had us in our room. And he said, you know, you guys gotta go talk to these underworld guys. And he had some core that Rob and Adrian had given them. And

22:53 it looked really intriguing to us. Geologically, it looked like nothing we'd ever seen before, which is a good thing. So we kind of put it on the back burner for a few months, we were wondering what to do. And then it was the roundup in 2009, when myself and our chief geologist, Craig Finnegan, walked into a bar and sat down and started talking to a couple other geos we knew. And there was this prospector there waving some samples around in the air and we introduced ourselves and he said, hi, I'm Sean Ryan.

23:25 We said, oh, we finally get to meet Sean Ryan. And our relationship blossomed from there. And less than a month later, we had an agreement on the coffee property, which was adjacent on the other side of the river to Adrian and his group. And Sean showed us some very compelling surface geochemical chemical chemical data. It's smacked of district scale and multiple discoveries. And it had never been drilled before. So in 2009, we did a very extensive trenching program. Again, there was pressure on us to drill it right away. And we didn't. And we spent a year looking at the existing data, doing geophysics, doing structural interpretations, doing more soil chemistry and doing more trenching, all led by Sean and his crew at Ground Truth Exploration.

24:16 Primarily a gentleman by the name of Isaac Fage. And if you ever get a chance to work with Isaac, I would do it, but he's really busy and I'm gonna hopefully try to keep him busier. So yeah, and we kind of suffered in the markets a little bit because people were expecting us to drill right away. But we drilled our first hole early in 2010 and our first hole was 17 grams over about 15 meters. And our strategy in 2010 was simple. You know, we had a very target-rich environment. So our objective was to try to make as many discoveries as we could over that 30 kilometer property. We weren't doing 5 meter step outs or 10 meter step outs or 20 meter step outs. We were very aggressive. We wanted to make sure that investors understood the real potential and the real value in this project.

25:09 You have to have smart people and the key guys behind that discovery, I mentioned Craig Finnegan, Tim Smith, our VP exploration, Alan Wainwright, Adam Simmons, Roy Kudluktu, very great geologists and very great friends as well. And that's one thing that's important. You have to have geos you trust. But that being said, it's not a science experiment. We're here to make money, right? So our job was to not fall in love with any one particular prospect, any one particular zone. And in that summer, we drilled 7 individual gold discoveries across the property, all starting from surface. And our objective was to give the market a real good idea of what the value of that was. And so it took a couple of years to put our initial resource together and that was in the spring or, yeah, spring of 2013.

26:01 And I don't remember the exact number but it the number was at least 3 million ounce resource I can't remember it might it might have been 5 don't don't quote me on that I'm just my memory is kind of bad

26:13 and at that point My services as a geo were kind of limited. After that, it became more of a, put it into a feasibility stage. And at that point, Ira Thomas took over the company and she shepherded it very wisely to, I think it was a PEA and the company was bought by Goldcorp in 2016 for $500 million. So not a linear story and it involved a lot of different people at a lot of different stages. You know, the discoveries are important, the pre-discoveries are important, but also, you know, you drill a hole as a geologist, you have to make sure you have competent people that understand how to put geometry onto zones and make them into deposits.

26:59 And that's a big challenge that a lot, a lot of, not a lot of geologists get the opportunity to do. Thank you so much. Rob, can I, Dasha, can I jump in and just ask Rob a question before we go to Roger? So Rob, you know, you had a lot of geochemistry by Isaac Fage, you know, and that indicated sort of where to go, but what step did you, what was the steps from geochemistry to where you put the first drill holes?

27:29 So what happened, we knew these things were hosted in fault zones, but we didn't know the geometry of the fault zone. And Isaac was out there in the, just as the snow had fell in late 2009, and it was something about a photo that he took from the helicopter that showed the shadowing where we can see how the structures just lined up right along a north-south feature. And it was subtle. You know, we walked over it 100 times that summer and couldn't see it. But Isaac said, hey, Rob, you guys got to see this photograph I just took. You know, the zones and all of the trench samples line up along this trend. And we drilled it, and that later became the Supremo T3 zone, which I think to this day is still the largest ounce reservoir on that property.

28:18 Oh, amazing. Yeah, that's quite incredible. And I think it shows the fact that in this work, serendipity is important as well, despite all the best science and geology that we do, having that serendipity is vital in some cases. All right, well that leads me to you, Roger. Your company Labrador Gold began searching for gold in Labrador in 2018, but in 2021, the discovery holes at the high-grade Big Bain mineralization were found in Newfoundland. So from Labrador to Newfoundland, how did that happen? And can you just take us through the events that led to the Big Bain discovery? Yeah, sure. So again, what we had done previously, prior to even going to Labrador, we had a project in Ontario, which we had done grassroots work on. It was a long strike from probe mines, Borden Lake discovery.

29:23 But that work, we drilled a few holes testing geophysical anomalies, which hadn't turned out well. And again, partly it was partly because we rushed, we tried to rush the drilling to please the investors. So lesson learned there. And but when we didn't, when we didn't find anything, and that was only A22 and 500 meter drill program. Then we had to look for something else. And one of our backers, a precious metal fund out of the Netherlands, put me in touch with Sean Ryan, who's a common thread here. And he had had enough of the Yukon by this time, apparently, and that started staking in Newfoundland and Labrador.

30:14 And He had 3 projects in Labrador that he wanted to option. And so I met with Sean and we went through it together and we ended up optioning all 3 of them. And these were huge, huge properties, as Sean is known for staking very large properties and district scale kind of things. And these were grassroots. I mean, there had been a little bit to work on 2 of them. One of them was a Greenstone belt, which Sean's take the almost the entirety of which is I mean for those of you that know Greenstone Belts that's unheard of and so yeah I mean we had a good package of properties to work on and we worked systematically through them we ended up with with keeping 2 dropping 1 but you know the the it just became a struggle raising money on these grassroots exploration plays, even though we were having success with both lots of soil sampling with Ground Truth and Isaac.

31:20 And we were progressing them along, but it got to the point in 2019 that We decided that we needed to find something else in order to raise money, something that the market would find a little more exciting. And that, again, this serendipity played a part in that because in January of 2020, Newfound Gold announced their big discovery on the Queensway project. I knew that Sean also had claims in Newfoundland and talking to Sean about that And through a whole bunch of different pathways and discussions and bidding wars and everything, we managed to end up with the Kingsway project.

32:11 And that was 2 years ago at the PDAC, in fact, where we signed the deal for that. And again, there's been quite a lot of work done on this project in Newfoundland. But for me, the key aspect of that project And why we went after it so aggressively was this major structure that ran through the property that seemed to be very closely associated with the gold mineralization that New Farm Gold had found, and before them, back in the 90s, NIRANDA exploration. So there were a whole bunch of gold occurrences sitting adjacent to this major fault zone called the Alpen fault zone. And so that's what I wanted to have a part of. And so that was the initial thought. Following that, we did, obviously, that we did whatever we could, whatever we could, out of the assessment files.

33:13 And a shout out to the Newfoundland government. That system, that online, geoscience online system they have is incredible and it's one of the one of the best that I've seen in terms of ease of access and ease of use. So a lot of information we got from that on past work. And then we went to work with ground truth again. And we did lots of soil geochemistry, big grids, covered most of those solid grids with ground magnetics and electromagnetics as well. And then we followed up the anomalies of prospecting. And that's like you'll hear again and again that you can't find anything in the West anymore.

34:00 Just sitting on sitting on surface. But 2 of the discoveries that we made, Big Vein and Golden Glove, in the last 2 years were found by prospecting following up on solid geochemistry. And we're finding more. So it's prospecting definitely still works. And I think it's one of the ways that you can go from the geochemistry, as to Adrian's point earlier, going from the geochemistry to the drill. You can use geophysics, obviously, to see where the anomalies are. But if you have prospecting and you find stuff on surface, that's even better, because then you have a pretty good idea where things are. And you can measure the directions of where these things are going, and plan your drill holes accordingly.

34:50 So really, it was looking at, as we've talked about, the basic setting, the geological setting of the property, and then getting on the ground and doing that systematic exploration to the point where we're drilling. And fortunately, the drilling worked this time. And it took 14 holes. Took 14 holes for us to find visible gold in the drill core at at Big Vane and that was kind of a little nerve-wracking because as we all know the Turnaround time at the labs was such that we didn't we didn't really have much information from the first 13 holes so So we were we were going on a wing and a prayer and some XRF data, but as you know it turned out pretty good.

35:45 Dasher, I'd like to just pick up a theme that's been mentioned by both Roger and Rob. This is structure. Structure are cracks in the earth's surface and many mineralised systems are associated in one way or another with these faults or shears or cracks in the earth's surface because that's where hot fluid can move up and carry minerals up towards the surface. And Rob talked about the photograph and I do remember that story now. And Roger talked about the Appleton fault, which is one of a number of great big cracks running through newfound land which is one of the reasons why everybody's excited about exploring a newfound land, but There's an element of this with the Golden Saddle discovery in 2007, our first field season there, I brought a colleague of mine, Greg Corbett, who's a well-known consulting geologist to the property.

36:45 We had a couple of young geologists there who were doing some mapping and working with the trenching program. And so we were talking with Greg about the structures that might occur in the area where we were working and so Greg pulls out some maps and things and then we had a whiteboard and he's drawing on the whiteboard and saying well You know got the Tintina fault structure, which is this big major crack up to the north of where we were working and he said what you've got in that trench there and a couple of the other places where you're working looks interesting and I think there's going to be some structural control to this mineralisation, if there is mineralisation there.

37:32 And I think those structures are going to be dipping off to the north. They're not, they're not, they might be steeply vertical, but they're probably on an angle. And I think that they're heading towards the north. When we came back in the second field season in 2008, and I said we drilled 5 different targets, when we drilled at Golden Saddle, we oriented the drill hole to the south because we thought the structure was going to the north. And we only just clipped the edge of what became that system. And had we drilled this way, and had we not had the information from Greg Corbett, we would have missed that discovery. We might've found it eventually, but the first few holes would have missed.

38:20 So there's these sort of developments, I call them light bulb moments, when all of a sudden somebody comes up with an idea that's really important to the process of discovery. And the other point I would make from this is that it's really critical and to have a team of people with different skill sets and different opinions and and you need to foster an environment within your exploration team where everybody has an opportunity to contribute some ideas and you need to look and if you're leading that group you need to listen to all those ideas some of them will be off the wall some will be crazy some of them will be worthwhile but but but mineral exploration like so many other activities that we involve ourselves in, is a team thing.

39:09 And the broader the spectrum of skills and experiences in that team, the better chance you have of finding something. So Roger, I love hearing exploration case histories in retrospect. You said you hit on hole 14 and you were wondering what was in hole 1 through 13. So when you finished hole 13, how many more holes were you gonna drill if you didn't find VG? I had to think about it for a while there because, yeah, in the heat of the moment, that wasn't really a fact. We had, what I said is that we had planned 10,000 meters of drilling, now that was 10,000 meters of big vein.

39:55 And so I think the 14th hole was, we were probably somewhere around 3,500, 4,000 meters. So we had a ways to go and you know we had we had the funding in place more than enough to do what we wanted to do and you know given my early experience with having drilled like 10 holes and not find anything, I was quite keen to finish the program that we had planned. And so, yeah. And it wasn't that we weren't getting encouraging results. I mean, we're seeing alteration. We're seeing lots of quartz veining, mineralization, but we hadn't actually seen any gold in the core, which was kind of what we were hoping for was based on our prospecting and the samples that we collected with visible gold.

40:46 So yeah, I was determined to see the 10,000 meters drilled for sure. But I actually, before we move on, I wanted to go on to one of the things that Adrian mentioned about having a good team and encouraging ideas to come forward. And I would say often it's the off the wall ideas that actually work out. So they shouldn't be discounted either. I'm just looking at the time here. We have a lot of really good questions from the attendees and I wanna make sure we can get to some of those. So I'm just going to ask a few of these and then come back if we have time to the questions that I've also prepared. But an attendee, Adrian, is asking, what are the biggest myths in the industry that ought to be dispelled?

41:34 Is that a question for me, Dasha? It's a question, these are all questions for, it's open, but it's an Adrian who's asking the question so maybe an Adrian should answer the question. I think one of the biggest myths is that discoveries come quickly and often it takes, you know, 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years. So as Rob mentioned before, you know, it's tough for investors to put money into little companies like ours and then just sit and wait. But, you know, expiration often doesn't happen quickly. And so people have to be have to be patient. Any others?

42:20 Yeah, I would certainly agree with that. It does take a while. And it's one of those things that happens not just in exploration, but everywhere. It's like all of a sudden something happens and it's like it's an overnight success. But all you all you see is the success. You don't see the years of work that went into making that discovery or coming up with this the next best invention or the next best song or whatever the case may be. So I think, you know, that it does it does take it does take time for sure. The other myth that I would I would say that's out there and probably needs to be dispelled and relatable to what we're talking about here is that Things things are only going to be found undercover that's been said for probably 10 years or more now Probably more than that actually and that if you're going to be exploring and Perhaps perhaps the emphasis there is on is on big big discoveries big deposits You're only going to find them undercover because the surface has been has been swept clean Well, I don't think that's true as we're showing in Newfoundland now and I think elsewhere in Canada especially.

43:40 I agree with that, that prospecting can still work and Labrador Gold is very proof of that. One thing I'll add, and it's not really a myth, but it's more kind of like misconceptions. I'm a geologist and I study gold deposits and I try to find them, but more people ask me where I think the price of gold is going to do than anything else. And I answer by saying I have no idea. Why are you asking me that? I'm a geologist. I'm not an economic economist, right? So I think that's a myth, is that people, investors think that because we can find gold, we understand the gold market. And what I'll say might be a bit controversial, but the price of gold doesn't really matter. If we have funding, if we're getting funded to do our work, it means someone thinks we can make money. And good deposits are found in bear markets.

44:30 That's very important. You don't need record high gold prices to find big gold deposits. And Adrian's proof of that, and the Kaminak and the Underworld story emerged from a very terrible market. And our 2 companies did well because of 2 reasons. One is strong management but also we had money. We didn't just throw it away at what came shiny object. Both Underworld and Camenac were very frugal with how they spent their money And when a good opportunity came around, a big reason why we were able to work on those is because our competitors had no money because of the downturn. So that would be a myth is that downturns are great for us because it means you can get bigger land positions, it means things are cheaper, it means prospectors may be a little bit more desperate to do a deal and no one's paying attention to you. One of the things you need to succeed as Greenfield is you need to have nobody paying attention to you and staking around you and mucking up what you're trying to do. So, in many ways, bear markets are actually what the 3 of us would probably prefer.

45:41 Agreed. Another question here, Are Greenfield's exploration skills easily transferable from the precious metal sector to the base metals or battery metal sector or does a young geologist have to pick a lane? Yes, yes and yes. To all of them? I think yeah like you know you know a magnetometer or a geochemical analysis doesn't care what element you're looking for. And my advice to a young geologist would be try to learn as many different things as you can. Try to learn gold, or try to learn nickel, or learn zinc, and look at the different models, and look at the variations that people use of different tools, and how they think about what they're looking at. Like in gold, we're looking for grams per ton, right? Whereas in also 10 grams per ton in our game is big. But if you're looking for zinc, you need 80,000 PPM. So it's many orders of magnitude more.

46:45 So I would suggest to any young geologist, get in the field and work with people who know how to make discoveries or have success, be in a good environment, and try to see as many different things as you could see. One of my professors at university, Dr. Hodder, Bob Hodder, told me, he said, you know, Karp, you're only going to be as good as the rocks that you've seen. And it's something that has stuck with me since I was 19 years old, and it's absolutely true. Yeah, I would agree with that. And, you know, I think, I think Rob kind of hit it on the nail there. Like, as a young geologist, if you're if you're working in a greenstone belt, there are all kinds of mineral deposit models that can be that that can show up in that greenstone belt. You've got nickel, you've got gold, you've got base metals, and then you probably got others, iron ore. Like all of these things can be in the same greenstone belt and are commonly.

47:44 So If you're working on a big land package your your company or the focus may be gold But in the back your mind you also need to know that Nickel occurs in commodity it's which may be in the Greenstone belt and and that that base metal via master parts It's occurring the falsic volcanics, which may be off to the side. So you know I think working in those environments you almost have to have the knowledge of all of those kinds of things even though you may be specifically targeting one of the commodities. My only other comment for the young geologists, if you're out there, is don't be afraid to learn about the business side, you know, about the selling of the shares and the stocks and how money is raised, because the reality is, as a young geologist or any geologist, you really are the one that understands the true value of what's in the ground.

48:37 And if you don't have a geological background, a salesperson or a businessman doesn't have that inside card that you have. And don't be intimidated by people that are from the business side. For many, many years, I thought, oh, I could never do that, right? And then I'd met John Robbins and he said, well, Rob, it's actually not that hard, especially if you're a geologist. Here are some things you need to learn and here are some people that can teach you. So yeah, learn as much as rocks as you can but don't be afraid of the business side because all of these discoveries are made by people just like you. Thank you. Yeah, We have a bunch of questions here. David is asking, across the junior exploration space there is a growing number of patient investors. What are the tells, the metrics, the events that an investor would look for to take their loss and move on regardless of how favorable the project appears?

49:32 For example, how long can you hold on to a claim in Canada without advancing a project because of lack of funding? That's a big question. I can answer the bit about the claims in Canada and basically in most jurisdictions you have to pay every year, you have to do a certain amount of work every year in order to keep the claims in good standing for another year. Now if you happen to do a lot of work in 1 year, then that gets added on. So if you did a big sort of airborne survey, for example, that'll probably cover your cost for several years, same with drilling. So by the year to year, you do have to keep the claims in good standing.

50:24 Dasher, I would say in addition to that, that if Investors are putting money into the greenfields exploration space. Most companies doing that are for big packages of land. And one of the measures of whether the company is actually making progress is to see that they're continuing to shrink the area because the goal is to start off with a big area and then keep doing work to eliminate all the area that you think doesn't have anything in it. All right, I'm gonna move on to the next one, Thank you. Jordan is asking, what are the usual steps that you would undertake to ensure success with your greenfield?

51:16 Well, ensure success, that's a loaded question. 1 in several thousand ideas ever becomes a mine or a prospect. So I prefer the de-risk phrase. So we want to de-risk it. And you have to de-risk it geologically, you have to make sure that there's no red flags. And the sooner you can find where the red flag is, the sooner you can decide whether or not you want to be there or not. Geological red flags often aren't apparent until you see them. Other red flags could be more obvious to someone early on. It could be social economic areas. Is the area you want to explore in an area where permits have been denied by regulatory agencies before?

52:01 Is there a social license that needs to be acquired there that might be beyond your means? So, you know, I think ensuring success is a tough one. If I could do that, boy, I'd be a happy guy. But, you know, ensuring that the risk stays in the rock is really what the answer is. The rocks don't lie. And you've just got to look at that information and say, is it move forward or move on? And I think a lot of really smart geologists are good at allocating capital and spending it, but sometimes geologists get a little married to their projects and they don't know when to stop spending money. Or investors will say, don't stop spending money, keep going, keep going, keep going. And so those can be some of the challenges as well. But to ensure success, boy, I wish I knew how to do that.

52:54 Yeah, I would just add to Rob's comment there. It's, you know, It is hard to be successful in greenfields exploration. And so investors should not be too upset if a geologist does decide this isn't working, I'm moving on. It's way better than taking more money and spending it on things that are probably not going to work out. So the best idea is to work through what we've been talking about during this webinar, all the different systematic expiration stages. And then every one of them has a decision point. At that decision point you say yes or no and if it's yes you carry on if it's no you walk away and that should not reflect badly on the management of the company because that essentially in the end they're going to be saving investors money.

53:51 That's right. I see a comment from Homie Sandeman, who's with the Newfoundland Geological Survey. And he's saying all investors in greenfield space should look at companies that have a strong technical team. I think that's one of the things we've mentioned already, you know, diversity in your technical team and good skills. Yeah. I know we're a few minutes before we have to wrap up, but we have another question here that I think is interesting. Has the technology used by Greenfields Explorers changed much over the years? And are there any significant improvements becoming available in the near future? Technologies continues to advance. And, you know, in my 40 odd years in the business, when I started, we didn't have laptop computers.

54:37 There's a plethora of new techniques and methodologies that continue to evolve, which helps us to be successful. Yeah, one of the technologies is LIDAR, which is an airborne, you know, very like a centimeter scale resolution topography. And remember in 2010 Isaac Fage from a helicopter saw a shadow. LIDAR would have picked that up pretty quickly. And that technology wasn't available then. And that's really good at identifying the key structures that Adrian had mentioned. And another thing that LIDAR is very good for as well is, you know, the old timers did a lot of trenches and they'd blow stuff up. Like, you know, sometimes it'd be the size of a, you know, a small car or whatever. And through the years, those get overgrown.

55:23 But LiDAR can find that. And the old reports, you know, not everyone wanted to share their information back then. So, you know, the LiDAR, among other things, can help you identify where key previous work had been. So yeah, there are some technological advances, but, you know, you got to use them to put boots on the ground to go get hammers on rocks, you know. You can't use technology to, you know, enhance technology. If you don't use it to get hammers on rocks, then it's really wasted. Yeah, I agree. All right. Okay, well, we are approaching the end. So I just want to thank you so much. I feel like we could have talked for another hour. We didn't get to all the questions that I wanted to cover, but there were so many from the attendees.

56:11 So thank you so much for sharing your stories. Thank you for everyone who attended today and asked all these great questions. If you do have any follow-up questions after this panel, feel free to reach out to any of these men here and I'm sure they'll be happy to follow up with you directly. You can also find more information on their website and of course a recording of this panel will be live on six.com so you can re-watch it and share it amongst your friends. But thank you all so much for taking the time today. And hope you have a great rest of your day.