The 6ix Report - Banyan Gold Commences 2023 Exploration Program And Expands Technical Team

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0:36 Hello everyone and welcome to The 6 Report. I'm here with Tara Christie, President and CEO of Banyan Gold, to discuss the company's recent press release on its 2023 exploration program and expansion to its technical team. So Tara, welcome to the 6th Report. And why don't you first tell me about the addition to your team? Who is this Brad Torral and why is he a good addition to the team?

0:57 Yeah, Brad, you know, he's been working in the Yukon probably over 30 years, most recently with Alexco at their Keno Hill as the president, and you know, really helping to restart that historic mine as well as run their environmental consulting business, which they spun out, but also and also work on the historic liabilities that were there from mining, but huge valuable experience from metallurgy to operations, building mines in the Yukon and permitting in the Yukon, all of that really valuable for Banyan.

1:30 He's part-time, because he's a pretty high caliber person, and he's gonna help us in a staged manner, starting with some metallurgy, and then as we move forward, understanding what our economics are. We're starting to get to that phase where we've got to start thinking about this as a development project, not just an exploration project.

1:49 I've worked with Brad before, he worked with Barrick over the years, he built the first heap leach mine in the Yukon Brewery Creek back in the 1980s. That's a pretty exciting addition for us. Thank you for that. That kind of leads into my second question actually. So you're bringing them on as a technical advisor at this specific time, he's a busy man, but you're bringing them on at this time because of the network, the metallurgical stuff for now?

2:16 Yeah, really, that's where it's going to start. You know, we're moving from the typical work that you do as a junior, which is pretty, you know, wide spaced, really starting to get a much bigger picture of the metallurgy with different metallurgical domains, which we know we have. And different companies are going to look at this project differently. And as you go into your P.A., you want to have done your trade off studies and kind of understand that. And, you know, we're not quite there yet. There's a lot of work that you should do long before you say you're going to do a PEA and we hope to do

2:48 that. And then the other aspects of it, you know, really helping to think about how you would do exploration towards a project where you're trying to find a resource which is mineable opposed to just, you know, an Inferred resource is, even though it's PIC-constrained, really is still very exploration-focused. It's not necessarily optimized from that development perspective. And it's a really different mindset. You have to start turning your mind from exploration to that. And it takes time to make sure you've got time to fill in where you need to drill and do the technical work that you need to do well in advance of that. Perfect. That makes sense. So let's get into the 2023 exploration program. In the press release, it sounds like your team has identified an important lineament that is consistent with a change in the orientation of gold mineralization trends between the power line and the Oryx Hill resources.

3:40 What the heck does that mean and why

3:42 is your team interested in exploring it further?

3:46 When you look at this area, all of these deposits are created by intrusion. So we're in a metasedimentary package where that fluid has come up into and spread out. So some of these structures, so it's structurally controlled, meaning that fluid flow gets funneled through these structures. And so those are areas where you can find higher grade and also give you an idea of where the fluid's coming from. So, you know, we spent a bunch of time over this winter looking at the geochemistry of our deposit and how it varies both

4:17 laterally across the property and vertically through the property because that kind of tells you heat flow directions and gives you an idea of what's going on. And then also looking at the structures from lineaments as well as what we've drilled. And again, it gives you the idea of where's that plumbing system, where's this mineralized coming from, where can we find some higher grade. So yes, we're drill testing that. Right now we've got 2 drills going already. Our third one should be going any day now. We're planning a 25,000 meter program. We really want to front load the winter drilling because it's a lot cheaper and easier. You don't have to build roads. There's not that environmental damage. And some of these areas are really quite wet. So it's way more efficient to be doing it now. But we're testing our normal north dipping holes, which have defined most of this resource because then we intersect these veins that carry them, carry the mineralization.

5:06 But we're also testing east and west because sometimes you can miss structures

5:11 which are important controlling structures as well as might have some of the higher grade stuff there. So it's an exciting year for us. We're testing this model that we've developed with what this plumbing system is. And that'll give us a lot more information on how to target even better as we move through this year. Perfect, and that follows up with my second question. So with the East Oryx Hill property or zone you're looking at doing what exactly is that infill drilling, step out drilling and how much of the drill program will

5:40 be emphasized on that target? So we haven't announced our full drill program yet because we want to see what we get from some of these early results and the technical work that we're doing. But if you recall, last year we had that 2km step out from Orixil and we are going to go east of that because I think that'll show that this deposit has even greater scale and potential to grow. We do know that we have mineralization over 5 kilometers with what we've drilled now. Between Orixal and that 2 kilometers step out, that can be drilled at any time of

6:13 the year. So we're not gonna rush to drill that out right now in the winter time when going further east is more critical as well as drilling some of those other areas. And I think that'll really demonstrate that this is district scale. You know, remember power line in 1 kilometer has 3 million ounces. We've now have mineralization not fully drilled out that it could be an important resource, but over 5 kilometers. That's a very large mineralized area. Pretty unusual.

6:41 Perfect. Is there any other exploration targets or anything else about the program we haven't covered that you want to inform the listeners on?

6:49 You know, I think we've got a huge database now and it's going to really help us target much better this year and the real asset we have is a prep lab right on site which is going to reduce our turnaround time on assays and help us understand what's going on and get our grades even faster. We are planning our resource update for mid-year this year as we committed. Again, it's a stepping stone. We know this is a much larger deposit and we're gonna add lots of value for sure. We're funded and we're gonna end the year with a very strong Treasury as well. Okay, great. And I'm not too familiar with the App Assay Lab turnaround time. So with this upcoming resource update, is it safe to assume it's going to be everything up until this point? Obviously not the 2023 exploration drill in, but everything up until then? Yeah, we drilled to December and we put out all of our results a couple of weeks ago with the last of the 2022 results. So that will be the end for the resource update and then subsequent updates in future would have the drilling that we do in 2023.

7:52 Perfect. Well, thank you, Tara. If you want to learn more about Banyan Gold, you can go to BanyanGold.com. Thank You