The Yukon’s Forgotten Silver

Jason Weber: Thanks, Gerardo. I've been doing very well. Thanks.

Jason Weber: Yeah, absolutely. It's like having kids and they're all your favorites. Haldane's always been one we've been very excited to explore. The work we've done in the past has just reinforced our feelings that this project had great potential for these kinds of results. And recent drilling brought that to bear. We're really excited about moving forward here.

Jason Weber: Yeah, Haldane is on the Western edge of the Keno Hill Silver District. The Keno Hill district is named after the Keno Hill Mines, which were discovered back over 100 years ago. And it was about the same time that silver mineralization was discovered at Haldane as well. The difference being, Haldane being on the western edge and up on a hillside, it was a little secluded from the main area of mining.

So it got left sort of forgotten about for a long, long time. And it's only been recent years that groups have gotten back involved. And so we picked Haldane up a few years ago, 2018, and decided to take a more holistic approach, using what's been known about the Keno Hill District in general.

Especially recently, our neighbor Alexco has been doing a lot of work in exploration and development, and recently got their Keno Hill Mine back up and running. And so with that knowledge that has been gained there, we were able to apply that at Haldane, and, I would like to think that that helped me to the discovery at the West Fault.

Jason Weber: We'll look at a program this spring. We'd had a program planned already. We raised money back in the fall. We knew we'd have to execute the program at Haldane over two phases. We were just going to run out of time before winter really set in, which is exactly what happened.

So we'd planned to come back anyways this spring. So we'll be back in there. And it was just a matter of what was going to be the priority. We had to see what was going to come out of that drilling. We drilled two holes at West Fault. We drove another two holes at the Middlecoff Zone.

The Middlecoff is another zone on the property that's known to produce high grade mineralization. The old timers were in there hand-mining thousands of grams per tonne silver back in the 1920s.

Jason Weber: Yeah, and that was a nice segue you made for me, Gerardo. This intersection that we got at the Middlecoff, the one that you quoted, the 0.89 meters of 342 grams silver is, it's kind of similar to what was hit at the West Fault, where we went down dip and hit a 8.72 meter wide section that averaged 311 g/t silver. So the hit at Middlecoff is a similar grade but over a much, much wider width. And so that just kind of backs up our sort of exploration thesis when we target these veins, is even a narrower vein that's got the right silver mineralogy in it is encouraging for us.

And we knew, moving to the south at Middlecoff like we did, we intersected this mineralization about 30 meters to the south of the 2019 drill holes that were drilled in this area. And that was following up again on high-grade narrow intersections. We kind of figured this vein does continue to the south, because another, oh, let's call it 100 meters to the south, there is a historical hole that was drilled in the 1960s from underground that hit some very high-grade silver, almost 2,800 g/t silver over a meter. So we know this is continuous. What we're doing now is just systematically stepping out on it to try to intersect thicker veins that are going to be more representative of what a potential ore body would look like.

That, together with the West Fault, plus the new discovery, we made ourselves at what we call the Bighorn, three kilometers away... We've got multiple targets to test on the property.

So we'll be in there probably just after breakup this spring, and ready to go do as much drilling as we can.

Jason Weber: Yeah, we've got very good control on the veins themselves. The ore shoots within the veins, the thicker and higher grade portions we're still trying to figure out. At West Fault, for example, there's only three holes there. So there's not a lot to go on yet. Middlecoff, there's more holes and in fact, when we drilled this hole this year, we thought we were chasing a more horizontal ore shoot that we don't think is the case now. Looking at it vertical or at least near vertical is probably the direction we need to be going.

And then cheating a little bit, talking to our friends at Alexco next door, the vertical orientation is probably going to be the one that we want to be chasing. So that'll help define where we position drill holes in Spring 2021.

Jason Weber: Yeah. Besides the fact that their geological team there has been very helpful to us in sitting down with us, discussing the vein mineralogy, how these veins occur, even how they explore for them. But I think even if we didn't get that from them, even if they weren't that gracious, just seeing them with very high-grade intersections very deep in these systems is encouraging. And there was a point in time exploring this district where it was thought that new veins became more zinc-rich at depth and had less silver value to them. Alexco is clearly proving that wrong with the drilling that they're doing. It’s thousands of grams per tonne silver at wide intersections at great depth, so it's really encouraging.

Jason Weber: In the background, we're obviously working on the other projects in our portfolio. Tim and Twin Canyon are the two that probably rise to the surface as going to be the most news-generating for us through 2021. At least that's the way it appears at this point.

Twin Canyon, just for a refresher, is our gold project in Colorado, centered on the old Charlene Mine, which was a small underground operation. A family-run gold mine targeting a really weird gold occurrence in really a petroleum-related sandstone. It's kind of a really neat target for us, and that's gone very well. We're proving this target to be much larger than what was originally identified at the mine. So we're in the process of getting a drill permit for that, which would allow us to, hopefully, drill that later in 2021, ideally with a partner. I think we'd like to have a partner come in and test that project for us, and we've got a few groups that are interested in talking to us about that.

And then Tim, of course, is the other silver project in our portfolio, which is Southern Yukon, just north of Coeur's Silvertip mine. Coeur will be commencing exploration here in the spring on that, which again, hopefully, leads to, I wouldn't say it's a given but there is a small chance that they could advance that to the drill stage, maybe get one or two holes in before the end of '21 on that project as well.

So could be lots of drilling this year for Alianza, not just at Haldane.

Jason Weber: We’ve just wrapped-up the work we did through the fall at Twin Canyon. That included some surface work. And then we really wanted to get a better understanding of what might be controlling mineralization underground. Now we’re set up for targeting for a drill program that we would, if we were to find a partner, we could do hopefully later this year.

To do that, we had to understand a little bit of what might be happening underground. So we went into the Charlene mine and took a fairly detailed look at some of the ways that mineralization was occurring.

And I hate to call them veins. They are veins, but they're really just these resistant shears in the sandstone that contained bitumen. And they're just a little harder than the surrounding rock and they have more bitumen than the surrounding rock. And we found that these Northeasterly striking sets of these bitumen veins were more mineralized or better mineralized than some of the other orientations. So that was good. That helps us now, when we orient a drill core from surface. We know we want to cut those veins as orthogonally as possible. So we're going to set up at a right angle to those and that'll help determine our drill direction. And when you consider that with the work that we've done, we've expanded the strike length of the soil geochem anomaly, really just testing along the exposures of where we see the junction create sandstone, which is the prospective host unit.

We've got a much better feel for how we want to drill it now. And that helps us set up for permitting the next program, which we're in the process of doing right now.

Jason Weber: Yeah, absolutely. So, with the success at Haldane, particularly at our West Fault target, that's where we’ll spend the majority of our exploration expenditures this year. We'll target West Fault, in particular, in detail. We'll probably spend 80% of the budget for Haldane at West Fault.

Outside of that, you know, these other projects that we really like, like Twin Canyon, we'll be seeking a partner to move those forward. So we've been getting the word out and talking to various groups who may be interested in taking the project on and advancing it. And to be honest, that was the plan at Twin Canyon all along was to bring somebody in. With Haldane being the focus for our exploration efforts funded from Alianza's treasury.

Jason Weber: Just under $2 million in the treasury right now. At least a million of that will go to the drilling at Haldane, which we hope to start up late April. We've got a drill contract set for that. So now it's just the logistics of getting camp in and people up there and a drill on-site. So that'll take us into late April if the weather allows us to get in there that early.

Jason Weber: Well, when we look at what else we've got on the go, I think it's going to be not just Twin Canyon and Haldane that can generate news for us this year.

We've been working on, maybe a topic for another discussion another day, is a copper generative program that we hope to have some news on in the midterm. And then with Coeur being active at our Tim project in the Southern Yukon, that'll get going with a SkyTEM survey this spring.

It's going to be a busy year for us. Really looking forward to getting out in the field and getting work done on all these projects, but also seeing the results generated from them. And hopefully they’ll be exciting and our investors will see that throughout the year.

Jason Weber: Thanks, Gerardo.