Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: Gold Stocks

T2 Metals (TSX-V: TWO)(OTC: TWOSF) CEO Mark Saxon and Technical Advisor Shawn Ryan on Drilling a Potential Keno Twin at Shanghai

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of T2 Metals (TSX-V: TWO)(OTC: TWOSF), Mr. Mark Saxon, and a man that frankly needs no introduction, first time here with our audience, Mr. Shawn Ryan. Gentleman, great to have you on. Heck of a day to have you on with gold right up there near the $5,000 level. Silver at $102. Historic day, all the way around.

Mark Saxon: Yeah, quite incredible Gerardo and great to be here and love this new format with the video, so looking forward to many more of these. But yeah, Shawn and I are sitting here in Vancouver, just been down at the MIF conference and the market's buzzing, gold and silver buzzing, so very exciting time.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, T2 had some news this week. High grade gold, high grade silver, beautiful timing, right? The chef's kiss on that. And I want to get to it, but before we get into that, Shawn, I would absolutely love to hear; one, how you ended up with this project initially; two, why you made it such a personal project to yourself. And then three, I would love for Mark to explain, and you to explain how it ended up in Mark and T2's hands. So I'll let you go ahead and provide the context there, sir.

Shawn Ryan: Yep. Okay, thanks. Yeah, the Shanghai project I've had since actually 2004. So before there was any actually gold found in the whole camp really, like it was a silver camp, but it looked like there was something going on there from, actually, I'm a researcher prospector. So we found some clues from some 1968 Geochem from the GSC. But yeah, so we've had that project and it was acquired ironically just when Strata Gold was out staking the Dublin Gulch. They staked a big 2,000 claim claim block, which is where Victoria Gold is. But when they were done staking, I jumped on the helicopter the next day and then I acquired this piece of real estate. Ironically, they left what I was looking at. They picked up the big package. And then the discussion came up, "Well, why did you pick that project up, Shawn?"

I said, "Well, I picked up the Robert Service Thrust Fault." At the time, we thought it was a good clue. That's where Banyan's now finding their deposit. So the idea was, but with Terry, there was Terry Tucker there at the time and he said, "No, no, we actually have the Robert Service Thrust Fault."

I said, "No, no. Yeah, yeah." I said, "You guys used the GSC old map."

He said, "Yeah, we used the GSC map."

I said, "Yeah." I said, "The YTG government guys, Don Murphy, just put out a $5 paper map that you should go have a look at."

He says, "What do you mean?"

I said, "There's actually a map that actually shows the Robert Service Thrust Fault moved." And that's what I picked up.

So the idea is that it's basically, it was a part of the key of this district, or at least it's a key, it's a structure, and that's what Banyan's drilling right next to that with most of their mineralized fluids is coming up that structure and dumping out into the rocks around.

But things take time. And is it a silver project or is it a gold project? It actually has both on it. And even to the sale, when I did option it out to Mark, how are we going to promote that? There's both targets on there, but today, you want to talk about both.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. No, and listen, two things, right? The first, best return on investment on $5, probably, that you've had in quite some time. The second, it's interesting that you mentioned Banyan and the thrust fault because they're starting to really hone in on really high grade silver here as of late, right?

Shawn Ryan: Yep.

Gerardo Del Real: They had kilogram plus intercepts here, and it looks like they're starting to figure out the way that that system runs. So you're surrounded, Mark, by future mines, multimillion ounce deposits. I think Banyan's deposits wound up being over 10 million gold ounces, and now it looks like some pretty important silver that's showing up in the system. So this has never been drilled before. Is that accurate?

Mark Saxon: That's correct. And yeah, Shawn has been quite modest in his introduction of himself there as a prospector and researcher. And yes, I'm sure you know Gerardo, but many might not, that Shawn's been amazing successful discoveries in the Yukon by just being really rigorous and doing things a lot of geos used to be trained to do, but are no longer trained to do about taking samples properly, respect the rocks, do things in the right order. And that's how Shawn has had this project and taken it to a point, but hasn't taken it through to drilling as yet. And so that's our job. Our challenge is to get some holes in.

Shawn, and through his investments, completed four and a half thousand soil samples, completed geophysics, some surface mapping, and through that work, has really identified some great targets. The silver target is an area of past mining, and that's where the Shanghai name comes from. So Shanghai was the old workings that was particularly focused on silver because that's high grade silver, it's high grade lead, it's high grade silver at surface. That's what that Keno Hill district was known for 50 years ago. So we've got that target, which is the Shanghai mine, but in the same area, we've got that developing target, which is the Banyan target or the Victoria Gold Eagle target. In the soil samples, yeah, Shawn's work has identified up to six grams of gold in soil samples, which is remarkable. It hasn't been drill tested. Nobody's gone back and really mapped until we came along, and we've been doing that work ourselves. And so we've got those two layers of targets and yeah, we'll advance them both in succession.

Gerardo Del Real: I have to ask, what comes next? You're getting silver and gold samples, high grade ones, and mind you, it's just samples at this point, but they're pretty widespread. And I've known you, Mark, for nearly two decades now, I know how methodical you are.

Shawn, your reputation speaks for itself as to how rigorous you are. And so I'm excited to see this thing drilled properly, right? Because of the rigorous diligence process that each of you undertakes when delineating targets. What comes next?

Mark Saxon: So I guess from our point of view, and yeah, we raised money in December. We've got $1.7 million in the bank. So we've got okay money without being out of the park money. That amount of money suits our market cap and it suits our capital structure, which is really tight. So with that money, we'll do a little bit of surface drilling, and that's in the area which is where we've got a lot of data from the old Shanghai workings. So we've got a fair bit of knowledge there and Shawn has developed a good bit of knowledge. We'll do a little bit of work in that area with drilling, and that's RAB drilling, that's something we can do in the winter at the backside of winter.

Following on with that in summer, we'll be preparing towards deeper diamond drilling at a more rigorous program. And yeah, obviously raising money in between, but yeah, the market at the moment supports that and the share price is moving well to support that.

Gerardo Del Real: Shawn, I almost hate to ask, but I'm going to have to ask. With the amount of deposits and discoveries that you've made and you being really intimate with this region and having this project for as long as you did, what type of system are you targeting scale wise? What is the analog that looks similar to this that... And I know it's early, it's never been drilled, but…

Shawn Ryan: No, no, but it's pretty easy. This is actually called the, it's a mirror image to the Keno Hill camp. There's a fault, it's called an anticline and so you have the Keno on one side and you have the Shanghai on the other side. So it's a twin and we have figures to show that. Mark will have it online there, too, but the idea is that it's the twin. So this stuff that we're doing here, there was a guy, a well known geologist called Arrow Ajo that actually was there in the '60s and knew that this is the opposite, the opposite side, it's got to have the silver. So they knew all about this. And that's why in the '65, and they were working it from the early '60s and they put an added in, in '65. And then they were getting ready to go for it, to develop more, and then everybody disappeared. And then you said, "Well, what happened to everybody?" They were on it. This was the same crew that made the discovery in Faro, and they all packed up and went to Faro and they left.

Gerardo Del Real: Of course.

Shawn Ryan: And so, but what's Banyan's just proven, and this is what's kind of interesting, these targets were known, like the Banyan, the Orex, was from the '96 and the Airstrip, I think it was from the late '50s. They had evidence there. Dublin Gulch was known from Arrow Ajo's days way up on top. He has maps showing that. So what's put the whole Yukon on fire here, like Sitka, where those guys are, again, Newmont was there in the early '90s. It was this drilling phase. And I'm from the Timmins camp and so we drill a lot. The Yukon hardly drills. They put three or four holes, five holes, pack up, leave out. So that's why Sitka made more discoveries and that's why Banyan, because these guys are drilling 30,000 to 40,000 meters a year. Now they're putting the drill to the ground. And so that's what's... Everybody's going, "Wow, we're making these discoveries," like Snowline. The showing that they drilled, they were looking at the previous company back in the late 2009, '10 era, but they drilled it. So this is what's going to be fun about it.

So what we do from geochemistry, we take a lot of good detailed soils, tighten up the grid, you start with a bigger picture, come in. And so that's what we've done now in the Shanghai wall. We've outlined easily four or five brand new veins, never been drilled, never looked at. We know where the Shanghai went in, but there's a whole bunch of them, and it's across three kilometer span. So there's the Keno Hills on the other side, the camp, and they got over 50 deposits in these same kind of settings where they find these high grade veins, and that's where Hecla is. So that camp produced well over 200 million ounces in silver over its course of its life. But we're on the other side and nobody's poked the hole. And that's what I'm telling to people, "Welcome to the Yukon," because it's still a virgin. We haven't drill tested these things and we're just getting in.

So now I can't wait to see because these anomalies are all laid out. And because there, it's a little bit glaciated, but it's still, relatively... It's not as bad as Ontario. There was these layers. Dawson's virtually unglaciated, but you could see the structures. And that's why when we mimic the old Shanghai added with my soils on top, so there's two different workings. You see how the soils line up perfectly because the vein comes to surface, so it proves our model. Now you look a little bit to the west and you see four more of these and you're going, like nobody's ever? Because they didn't know about it. Geochemistry in the '60s and the early '60s wasn't that good at the time.

So this is why we're using modern science. And you know what the cool part is? Is we use LIDAR. So you fly the LIDAR, we see the trenches from 1962, you could see the trenches because it takes the vegetation and they had grab samples of 2,200 ounces silver and one ounce gold up there and nobody's gone back. So now we could take that kind of data and our geophysics and VLF inversions and soil geochemistry, add the structure and geology, and then it becomes like that's what it's all about is a probability game, but we've increased our probability so high that we're going to hit stuff.

Mark Saxon: We know we've got high grades, we know we've got the structure, we know where we can stand on the side of the hill and we can look in one direction at the Keno Hill camp, which is an operating mine with Hecla. We look in the other direction and we're looking at Banyan, which is four or five Ks away with eight million ounces. And yeah, on a project that hasn't had a drill hole just because of the good fortune of its history. So yeah, I'd like to say it was... Shawn's done the hard work, so for me, it's not that hard. And yeah, to be able to see an amazing target here.

Shawn Ryan: But it's just like we even have Victoria Gold Style on the north side. So that's going to be gold porphyries and that's what Sitka is working on and the Snowline and stuff like that. We have that style at target. So that's what's unique about it. It's sitting right in the middle of all these. So that's when, now, the Yukon is gaining confidence in the drilling phase and that's why it's on fire, in a sense.

Mark Saxon: Yeah. It's getting unlocked with commitment to drilling and drilling thousands of meters, not hundreds of meters that were drilled in the past. And yeah, that's what's unlocking all these amazing deposits and there will be mines.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, Mark knows, as a speculator, he's known me for a while. My favorite way to add value, I love writing checks for drilling and exploration, right? The development's great, the production's great. I love seeing mines being built, but there's nothing that excites me in the morning when it comes to this business as exploration and drilling.

Shawn Ryan: This project, it's ready for that. In the 2008 to '11, we were still doing grassroots stuff. We're still looking for new targets, just starting with soils. This kind of target, it's already advanced. The soils are pretty well done. There's more ground to be done, but some big targets, walls are done, and the geophysics is done, so it's ready to drill. So that's the kind of projects we need in this market, is he's going to raise money to drill now.

Mark Saxon: Yeah. And then I suppose to finish that conversation, Gerardo, that the project has what's called a class three permit. So the class three permit means, yeah, we can drill tomorrow. We don't need any further permits. And that allows the drill pads and also the roads to get around and do that work.

Shawn Ryan: And trenching.

Mark Saxon: And trenching in a camp and everything we need to get underway, so there's no waiting for permits.

Gerardo Del Real: Exciting times. I love introducing new projects and stories to our audience from... This isn't inception, but it's earlier stage, right? It's never been drilled. And so the discovery process is always fascinating.

Shawn Ryan: This is the blue sky. This is where you hit the home runs and all it takes a few good drills, like one or two.

Gerardo Del Real: That's it. That's it.

Mark Saxon: Yeah, that's wonderful.

Gerardo Del Real: Perfect time. And gentlemen, it's been an absolute blast. I cannot wait to see a drill turning and then to start getting assays and understanding the geometry of things and then the potential and the scale there should be an exciting and transformational 2026. Shawn, Mark, thank you, as always. Anything to add to that?

Mark Saxon: No, that's a good one. We look forward to seeing you in the next few days.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's do it. Let's do it. Shawn, thank you so much, gentlemen.

Mark Saxon: Thanks, yep.

Gerardo Del Real: Appreciate it. Have a good one.

Mark Saxon: Thanks, Gerardo.

Shawn Ryan: Bye-bye.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

Click here to see more from T2 Metals Corp.