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Under the Spotlight – Simon Ridgeway, Bob Moriarty & Rick Mills

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Under the Spotlight – Simon Ridgeway, Bob Moriarty & Rick Mills

 

 

 

Rick Mills, Editor and Publisher, Ahead of the Herd:

 

I was just talking about my experience in the east end of the Tombstone, I flew into Harlan Meade’s camp, he was working on the zinc/ lead Selwyn deposit. The worst thing I remember about that trip was that damn landing strip. The best thing was the food. What also stood was also just how remote and rough country it was.

 

Simon Ridgway, CEO, Rackla Metals:

 

Yeah, it’s rugged country. Where we’re working now, we have to be very careful, you know this discovery’s quite something, but I’ve never seen a 450-meter cliff exposing so much veining and alteration. It’s got its benefits, but it’s also got its risks. We’re drilling at the base of the cliff and when it rains, lots of rocks come down. We have to be very careful how we go about it.

 

RM: Well, I was a CN signal maintainer at Boston Bar BC. We had 40 km of pretty much slide fence all the way through from Boston Bar south through the canyon to Hell’s Gate and beyond. The rail tracks are hundreds of meters below the highway and all those tunnels along there, so there are slide fences everywhere on the tracks below. And everywhere there is a highway tunnel you can pretty much bet there’s one on the tracks.

 

It was dangerous just to motorcar through let alone stop to work, you’d hear the rocks coming down and you’d try to hide behind a pole, or run into a tunnel if you were lucky, and hope to God it’s not huge and take you and the pole out. Most of the time you never looked up, you couldn’t see them until it was too late to move, just run for cover.

 

SR: I just came back, I was up there for the first couple of weeks of drilling, wanting to see those first holes, and yeah, it’s tough country but I still like being out there, banging rocks and hiking through the trails. As we get older our reactions slow down quite a bit, don’t they?

 

Bob Moriarty, Founder, 321gold:

 

Well, speak for yourself. The last time we saw each other I went to bed, and we were going to get up the next day and have a chat and I woke up for breakfast and you had disappeared.

 

SR: That was up in northern Finland right, or Sweden?

 

BM: I think it was Sweden, and I was wondering if it was something I said. I never had a chance to ask.

 

SR: I think it was something that happened in my life, I’m not sure whether it was family or whatever, but I do remember that and having to send you apologies. Boy that was a long time ago.

 

BM: Do not remind me.

 

SR: Here we are in a new play.

 

RM: Simon, you’ve been up in Rackla, you’ve been up in that eastern belt, the tungsten belt, that end of the Tombstone, to everybody that was always a tungsten belt. What was it about that area that got you so interested?

 

SR: I lived in Dawson City quite a few years and it’s really where I learned to prospect within those Tombstone mountains in the western Yukon. Actually, the first company I listed back in ‘91 was called Tombstone Explorations. It was a tough company to get listed with that name, I was stubborn and got it done in the end, but at that time like you say it was believed that the eastern part of the belt was tungsten-tin rich.

 

Than, I saw Snowline’s discovery, like I’m only here because of Snowline. In 2022 I was at the Boca Raton conference with Rick Rule, and I had lunch with one of my shareholders and he told me about Snowline. I hadn’t heard the name so when I got back to my hotel room I looked at their discovery and thought, “Wow that’s impressive, obviously.” I did the research over the next couple of months and all that ground to the east of Snowline was open.

 

All those intrusives that go into the Northwest Territories, in all of the research I did nobody had walked inside those intrusive looking for gold.

 

So, it seemed to me even though the belief was they’re all tungsten-rich and gold-poor, Snowline contradicted that, so I financed Rackla and jumped into the belt, and we’re still the only player in the Northwest Territories in the belt, it’s quite amazing.

 

We’ve still got lots of ground to look at there, so I just believed if we got boots on the ground inside those intrusive bodies, in that belt, that we would have a chance of finding something like Rackla and here we are.

 

Snowline’s discovery was they found that outcropping, this vein in the creek with visible gold in the intrusive, from that they drilled off 8-10 million ounces, so I just wanted to get boots on the ground inside all those intrusive bodies and check them out and here we are.

 

RM: Yeah, Crescat was in a financing that closed in July 2021, Scott Berdahl was appointed the next month as SGD’s CEO. It was an interesting search and there’s been some extremely exciting results.

 

In one of your news releases, you said you did a UAV-based photogrammetric survey, and you did an airborne geophysical survey in late ’24, now the photogrammetry revealed sheeted veining and alteration over a larger area. What other techniques do you employ that might help directly detect mineralization where there’s no exposed outcrop? What are you using up there?

 

SR: We’re just putting boots on the ground, the geochemistry the government did over the last 20 years has been a good indicator for us. We look for bismuth in the stream geochemistry and that leads us to the rich intrusive bodies you go clambering around in, right. But that’s pretty much it.

 

The geophysics helps because these intrusives generally form a strong mag low. When the intrusive comes into these sedimentary rocks there’s lot of pyrite and it alters up the pyrrhotites so they get very gossanous and create a mag high around so you get this donut-shaped mag low, and that can lead you to some intrusives that are not exposed.

 

The government mapping only shows the ones that have been worked on. There are others that have never been looked at, they’ve never been known to be intrusives, so based upon the mag low and the stream geochemistry, you’ve got bismuth, then we go and prospect those areas even if there’s no intrusive mapped in there.

 

But now it’s just a case of drilling, this is quite remote, it’s not as remote as Snowline but it 30-40 kilometers from a road, and that road is a 12-hour drive from Whitehorse.

 

So, in July of last year we took the first samples, we got the first results back in August, and here we are in the first two weeks of getting back into the project; this year we’re drilling because that’s pretty much what you’ve got to do. To have to camp in this area and send geos mapping and sampling and wait months for results it’s just not worth it, so we get the drill on the project and test it.

 

It looks like it’s a huge alteration system, whether we’re sticking these pinpricks in the right place or not time will tell, we’ll find out. But we’re going to start doing longer holes, so far, we’re on hole 4, the drilling has been going pretty well, we’re getting sort of 50 meters a shift, which is very good. We’re seeing the same things we’re seeing in the cliff face; it looks good. So that’s basically it: prospecting, find the sheeted veining in the intrusive, drill it.

 

RM: Please give us the overall plan for the year and what exactly you aim to accomplish.

 

SR: The plan for this year is to do 4,000 meters of drilling from the southern face of this cliff, where we’re getting all of this mineralization.

 

Over a 500-meter space there’s a lot of gold falling down this cliff face, in over 550 meters along the cliff face we’re getting over a gram, so we’re going to test that area. We’re going to drill into the heart of this cliff, so the cliff from the base it’s 450 meters to the top of the ridge and it’s about 450 to 500 meters through the cliff, right.

 

On the other side of the cliff, it’s equally as steep and we’ve got the same looking veining over there, although the geochemistry does seem slightly different, we’re getting some arsenic over there and we don’t have any in what we call the BiTe zone. So, we’re going to be drilling from that southern face and drilling along that 550m space and cutting into the mountain.

 

Some of the last few holes are going to be 600-700 meters, right now the hole we’re drilling is 450 meters, so we’re just going to give it a really good test and try to find the heart of this system and find the continuity of the gold mineralization.

 

It is different to Snowline and some of the other RIGS deposits, we’re not seeing visible gold in the core itself, but I’m not concerned about that because every time we get bismuth, we get gold and I’m seeing bismuth in the core so I’m very happy about that.

 

Quinton Hennigh was up a week ago and he was pretty excited by the amount; he was calling us the “Bismuth Kings”. Every time we’re looking at bismuth we’re seeing gold, that’s what we’re seeing in the drilling so we’re pretty excited.

 

RM: There’s a lot of talk about drilling from the ridge top and more likely from the break of the slope. I don’t think you had enough info when this program started to say, “Ok we’re going to put a drill here and drill down” and I don’t know if you’re going to drill up there this year or not, if you’re going to get the time, if the weather’s going to permit it.

 

SR: I don’t think so, it’ll be tough to get water up there, we’re giving it a very good test from where we are. The first samples we took when we got into camp this year, we went to the ridge top and we took about 20 samples, some channel samples and we do have those results in.

 

We extended the BiTe zone when we made the discovery and got those very high grades. We went to the west of that which we hadn’t prospected before and took a bunch of samples from there.

 

Those results I’ll publish Monday, but the ridge top is going to be very hard to get rigs and get water up there, so I think this year the test we’re giving it from the base of the breaking slope of the cliff and sort of halfway up. I think it’ll be a very good test, and it’ll show us if we’ve got continuity to the system and try to pin the heart of it. And then we’ll plan for the ridge top next year.

 

RM: You’re obviously going to drill from up there sooner or later, that’s a lot of free tonnage with zero strip ratio, but it doesn’t seem essential yet.

 

SR: It’s very steep and on ridge top there’s only a couple of places you can land, and there’s probably only about 20% that you can actually walk along at the moment, so we’ve got mountaineer geos up there testing the different levels. Right now, they’re on the north face because the drill rig is on the south face and everything is rolling.

 

Every time we get rain the rain undermines the final stuff and rocks start rolling down so we’ve got a couple of experts in there to tell us when not to be drilling at the base of the cliff because rocks are coming down, so we’ve got to be very careful, but they will pick some spots where they can prepare pads for next year, where we will drill from the ridge top.

 

We’re getting some broad intervals of nice veining, so I’m very encouraged that we’ll be back in here big-time next year. Right now, the camp is about a 20-minute flight by helicopter. We had quite a bonus in that Selwyn Chihong, the Chinese company that owns the Howard’s Pass lead-zinc deposit — which I think Harlan Mead made the discovery way back then actually does that seem familiar to you, Howard’s Pass lead-zinc? — anyway we camp there and it’s about a 20-minute flight to the project so every morning we fly the drillers in and back, that’s 40 minutes flight, the pad builders in and back that’s another 40 minutes flight, the geos in and back.

 

So, we’re set in that this year will give us a great idea if we have continuity of mineralization, we’re probably testing an area of 500 by 500 by 400 meters vertical so that’s probably the size of Snowline’s deposit, more or less, so we’re testing a broad area with this drilling.

 

RM: Permitting in the NWT use to be a problem, they have fixed that.

 

SR: To get the permit to drill this target was very simple. We applied for it, we got the first response within 30 days, we answered their questions, bang we got the permit, it was like 6 weeks from start to finish.

 

So hopefully this winter we’ll be able to permit putting an air strip in there. Using the ice roads, take a couple of D-8s in and build an air strip at the base of the cliff so we’ll be much closer and not have to spend so much helicopter time and time itself getting into the property.

 

RM: I visited that Selwyn camp, they had a four-star chef and yes, the food was incredible. The landing strip was called the ski jump, reminded me of an aircraft carrier with the sloped front end. When we left the pilot stood on the brakes, revved the engine to max RPM, and letting the brakes go he’d scream ‘off we go,” we’d hit the end of the runway, jump into the air and started sinking immediately, then he’d yell ‘maybe.’

 

Let’s bring Bob in here, Bob do you want to jump in here with something?

 

BM: I sure do; Quinton and I discussed what he saw when he was up there. And I believe exactly what you said, I’ve been in the Yukon and I’ve been in Alaska at placer projects and the very best pathfinder for gold is not gold it’s bismuth. And he pointed out that the difference between Snowline and Rackla is that with Snowline you have a lot of bismuth associated with physical gold but with Rackla you don’t, and my comment to him was who cares?

 

Because as long as you’ve got the bismuth you’ve got gold, and you essentially have said the same thing. Now here’s what I would like you to do, I want you to go into specifics on the drill program because I’m going to kind of define the project, and you just laid out the linear parameters: it’s 500 by 500 by 400 and it’s kind of a triangle. Tell us how you’re doing the drilling.

 

SR: Well, we started out at the BiTe zone, and from each pad we built at the base of the cliff there, there’s three orientations to the veining that we see, and we’re not 100% sure which one or if all of them are carrying the gold or not. So the first hole’s azimuth is 90 degrees, the second one is 60, so from each of these pads they’d be stepping down at that breaking slope with drilling, and we’re drilling 50° dip, it’s about 50 on each of the holes, so we’re drilling into the cliff and then splaying into the center of the cliff and we’re stepping down that 550 meters of geo-chem anomaly.

 

We’re also stepping south across the talus, because that Talisman zone is about 150 meters thick and we’re testing under the talus as well. That’s looking very similar to into the cliffs, so the intrusive continues to the other side of the talus.

 

And then for the final holes of the year we’ll work our way to the very end of that alteration zone, you can see some fresh granite at the end of those 550 meters that was sampled. That is a silly place to put a pad so we’re going to go up about half of the mountain, to the slope break, and put a pad there, and drill two 700-meter holes from there that will cut into the mountain itself, testing some 300 meters laterally into the mountain from those other holes. So that’s how we’re testing this broad area, we’ll be getting all of the gold coming down.

 

BM: Quinton and I were talking about Sitka literally a year ago, and he was telling them that instead of drilling shallow holes they needed to drill deep holes, and absolutely when they went deep, they went big. So, they went from a gram or gram and a half hole to much richer holes and much greater length. Do you see any indications that you get an increase in grade with depth or an increase in veining?

 

SR: All the holes we’ve finished with so far at the end of the holes we’re seeing more veining in that latter portion of the hole.

 

BM: Ok so you’re verifying exactly what he said.

 

SR: Right, but I do think we are a bit different in that this intrusive has just been exposed, you know the sedimentary has just gone off the top, you can see this thing is just poking up through the sediments, so we’ve got that whole carapace below us to test, so I believe we’re going to have to go a lot deeper in the future — well not have to but I think we’ll want to — and we are seeing some very good numbers coming in from some of the first rock samples we took to the west of where we made the discovery last year; we’ll want to drill deep holes as well into this cliff because of the the intensity of the alteration and there’s just the top of it sticking out of the ground, it’s a perfect scenario.

 

BM: Ok, now Quinton told me I think your first hole was 200 meters and your second hole was 300 meters, what are the dimensions of the holes so far?

 

SR: Well, the first one was 280, I stopped that hole myself, and then we did the next one which was at 70° azimuth, the first one was 90, that one went to 330 meters.

 

I wanted to try to see if we can see continuity of the veining between those two holes, right? Then we stepped back 75 meters down the face to the west, and those holes were 430 and we stepped across the valley and that hole was 430 as well. I can’t really guess at what area we’ve tested so far, but the next step back from the pad we’re on now we’re going to do two holes, they’re going to be both 400-meter holes and then we’ll step back another 120 meters to that pad.

 

Like I said, the area that we’re going to be testing with the program is pretty much what I said previously, about 500 by 500 by 400 so that would be from like halfway up the cliff, right, 400 meters vertically from there so it would be like 200 meters down from the very bottom and 200 meters up.

 

BM: Ok, now do you use an XRF to determine a rough grade of the bismuth?

 

SR: No, we haven’t yet, we’ve used it to see if what we’re looking at is bismuth, but now we recognize it quite easily. Initially, we asked ourselves is it bismuth or moly? It’s a grey, silvery mineral, there is some moly there in places, but I don’t know if the percentage of the bismuth in the XRF would be that reliable.

 

You know there’s two kinds of bismuth— in the veins and then there’s bismuth in the intensely altered areas which we’re calling sericite diorite. I don’t know if it’s a different rock, different dikes or if it’s the same intrusive that’s intensely altered.

 

We’re not sure at this point if we’re going to do thin sections, but when we say the bismuth disseminated in the intrusive on these really narrow fractures there’s quite a bit. I’m imagining we’re going to get some very good gold numbers from those.

 

BM: Well strangely enough there’s one question I want to ask; what is the grade of the bismuth?

 

SR: We’ve had up to 2%. In that first rock sample we took last year, the first sample taken on this property, the geo that did that talus line, it was pouring with rain when he did it and he took a grab from this area of intensely sericite-altered intrusive, the grab sample that came back was 92 grams gold, and that ran 2% bismuth, 2.13 I think.

 

So, in places it can be pretty high, I mean I don’t know how big that grab sample was, but some of these samples we took to the south of BiTe this year, they had quite a bit of bismuth too, but it’s often in that 0.6, 0.7 of a percent when we’re getting good gold numbers, but that will probably be multi-gram when we get that.

 

BM: I’m going to ask a bit of a technical question; it seems to me that your bismuth would be economic. Has anyone done any thinking about that?

 

SR: We’ve thought about it, but we’ve done nothing about it yet. We want to get the drill program and see the results and see what the average is, but it is something to think about. Also, the tellurium, I mean we’re getting sort of 500 ppm tellurium as well, now I know that both bismuth and tellurium are strategic metals, so something we should look at, and that’s other another reason we would be doing deep holes, we’ve just got to understand what is driving this system.

 

BM: You’re looking at it from a very pragmatic point of view, and the way I look at it is I don’t care how it was formed, I don’t care where it was formed, I only care what’s there and I’ve never run into tellurium so I’ve never thought about the economic issues, but because in that area bismuth is such an important pathfinder, it did occur to me bismuth is like 30 bucks a kilo and it seems to me that that you have three economic minerals.

 

SR: It’s certainly a possibility, I mean let’s see when these results come in.

 

One thing for your audience, Rick, a bit of a hiccup in the program, we’re only just sending the first assays to the lab now, so we’ll be getting results as this program is ending, because we probably have to end the program second week of September.

 

Hopefully it’ll be longer than that, but we couldn’t get into the property until the first week of July, it’s a couple of weeks later than we expected so it’s a short season, we’ve got to be very aggressive, we’ve got to get those deep holes in.

 

People have commented to me, “When are you going to get the first results?” Well, you’re going to have to be patient because we’re just sending the first ones out to the lab right now so it’s going to be three to four weeks from now before we get the results. I’m seeing the results by the bismuth in the core.

 

RM: Simon, do you know what the specific gravity is of that 500 by 500 by 400 size area is?

 

SR: Probably about 2.6, 2.7. Maybe with the bismuth it may be a little heavier. I don’t know if bismuth is that heavy.

 

RM: The BiTe zone is characteristically quite different than what’s been found in the rest of the pluton, the differences are structural with the multiple different veins, and then you’ve got a chemical composition that’s different with the high bismuth and tourmaline.

 

From a RAK news release that came out earlier you were talus sampling at the southern margin of pluton, and you identified a broad alteration zone, and this had intense tourmaline and quartz sulfide veining and that was within the intrusive. The intensity of the veining, it literally shattered the intrusive body, and this is where you got the significant gold grades, up to 92 grams a tonne, with samples returning multi-gram gold.

 

Now, you had so many different veins in so many different directions and it was textbook 60° in this part of the intrusive. Can we explain the differences as heat? Higher heat maybe than other areas of the pluton? And maybe for a longer period of time because that veining it’s just off the charts.

 

SR: I don’t know, yeah, it’s shattered by the veining, maybe by the erosion and you know the oxidation of the sulfides in the veining too may have been a part of that. But let’s get deeper holes in and see. We’re going to have to go deeper. Regardless of what these results are, what’s driving this system? It’s intense.

 

RM: It is very intense because it’s full of vein deformations, basically structural preparation for filling those veins from multiple directions. As you were saying you are seeing the bismuth carries but you’ll have tourmaline carrying as well.

 

Now in Peru you’ve got an awful lot of tourmaline gold-bearing breccias coming up to the surface and that’s not what this is, but there are a lot of examples of tourmaline carrying gold. You look in the WA, the goldfields in Australia, and you see that the tourmaline is usually black in color and it’s very common through the WA goldfields and it’s mostly associated with quartz veining, and it looks like black veining within the quartz. There’s an awful lot of history with gold and tourmaline.

 

SR: Yeah, my first couple of grab samples on the property when we went there the first time, when we got the results back, I took a couple of grabs from a quartz tourmaline vein and got 6.8 grams I think it was. Anyway, it’s an exciting project for sure, and like I said the fact that this has just been unroofed means we’ve got that whole carapace.

 

Now you look at Sitka and see the depths they’re going to right now, so I think ours is totally intact. I don’t want to get too excited but it’s a hell of a target. Let’s get in there and get the results back of this first drilling.

 

Meanwhile let’s keep drilling blind as we are and define the size and we can tell when we’re getting to the edge, and the bismuth starts to drop off we’ll stop drilling but so far, we haven’t seen that.

 

RM: Let’s jump back to that 92-gram-a-tonne sample, I know the geo was grabbing samples and you don’t take the worst-looking of the lot, that’s for sure, you try and take a representative but what was it about that 92g/t sample that kicked his interest? You’ve said there was no visible gold, so it wasn’t that. What exactly was it?

 

SR: I’ve asked him about it a couple of times and basically, he said, “Look, Simon it was pissing rain, it was raining so hard and with the intensity of the sericite alteration I just took a grab from that area.” So, the area of this sericite alteration we’ve got several of them now, but the intrusive gets kind of bleached, it’s a little white, you can see its pretty intense alteration, and he took a grab from that.

 

He said, “I didn’t see any sulfides in it,” now when we got it back to the office after we got the results back we took a look and you can see a little bismuth disseminated within the intrusive, but he could’ve grabbed a few meters away and got 1 gram, but he said he didn’t see the sulfides, it was just hard rain and the intense alternation made him grab it.

 

So, he took two that day, there was one that was 92g and the other one was 15.9, that was from about 50 meters away. That was a vein though cutting the intrusive. We’re seeing similar stuff to the south, now we’ve gone to the south of where we put that.

 

So, we did that chip channel away from where we’d taken those results before, we didn’t want to go to that particular high-grade zone, and we got 38 meters of 1.8 grams. That’s pretty much the work with did last season

 

RE: Where else is this intense alteration?

 

SR: Now when I went in there this year the first thing we did, we went to the ridge top, we went to the BiTe zone and we went to the west of the BiTe zone and we saw more of those areas with that intense alteration, and we took some samples from there, and in those we can see that the bismuth is on some very narrow fracture planes, right.

 

So, do we understand the orientation of those fracture planes? Right now no, we will when we get the numbers, starting with mapping the core obviously in great detail, so we’ll understand that and know a lot more about it once we get the results in, but we are seeing the bismuth in the intrusive is disseminated and sometimes in these little teeny narrow black lines maybe less than a millimeter.

 

RM: And we do know that it’s definitely not refractory? We’ve been told that. How do we know that, has there been specific tests?

 

SR: I don’t think we know that I just don’t think there’s any of these RIGS systems yet where it has been refractory. There’s no arsenopyrite, when we get the results back of the geochemistry this bismuth-telluride gold, little bit of copper maybe 200-300 ppm copper, but there’s no deleterious minerals in there that would make me think it’s refractory.

 

We can’t see the gold, so I mean time will tell, it is not the time right now to do that, let’s find something before we do metallurgy, maybe we’ll run some this winter once we get the results back of the drilling, I think that would be a logical thing to do, but at this point I don’t know any RIGS systems that are refractory.

 

RM: Yeah, I mean we’re getting good gold recovery from the grab samples and channel cuts that you’ve taken, there doesn’t seem to be a problem, should that not be enough to lay this argument to rest?

 

SR: We can pan in the talus; we’ve done panning there and found gold.

 

RM: I think we can put that argument aside. We need assays from drill results but everything you’ve done so far is proving out that you might be onto a discovery worth chasing. If that’s the case what’s the plan to advance it?

 

SR: Well first thing will be to get a camp for the base and my biggest push this winter is to try and get permits for an ice road in there to push in some big equipment so we can put in a base. There’s a beautiful big valley, there’s a big river right down below us and it hasn’t even got a name, people haven’t been in this area very much.

 

It’s an area that we’ve identified, a ridge 1.5 kilometers long with about a 3-meter difference in altitude over that whole 1.5 km, perfect place for an airstrip. We’ll get a camp in down there and then plan a big program for next year.

 

RM: Do you want to go mining?

 

SR: I made a discovery with Fortuna Global and put it in production and built a mining company, but my MO is to discover these things, get some idea of the size, and sell — get somebody else do the hard work. This is the exciting time, this is the exciting part of the business that I love.

 

BM: Let’s assume for argument’s sake that 500 by 500 by 400 by 2.6 specific gravity times 1.02 grams, if you can duplicate the grade over the body you’re talking about somewhere between 8.5 and 9 million ounces.

 

And the beauty is, and you understand this, but most people won’t, this is not a project that’s going to take 200 holes to prove up. This is a project that we’re going to have a pretty good idea of the size and the grade with very little drilling, ok 4,000 meters drilling for most companies is not a big drill program.

 

Sitka’s doing 30,000 meters this year, but with what you’ve got and what you can observe visually you’ve got potentially 9Moz right now, and you could prove it with 10 holes.

 

SR: Yeah, we can prove that potential, that’s how the program’s being planned. Can we show that continuity? I’m very optimistic but let’s wait for those results. And the grade? We’ve seen some great numbers coming in from the rock samples we took early this year and late last year, so if we can average a gram over broad intervals, and then you throw one of these 10-gram samples every 5 or 6 meters that can really help the grade a lot overall.

 

BM: Well to the extent that 1.02 grams would be a home run, but if you add a high-grade kicker to it and obviously there’s going to be some high-grade character to it because you can’t have a 90-gram sample all by itself.

 

RM: Simon why don’t you wrap it up for us, give us the broad brushstrokes here for investors.

 

SR: One thing I’d like here to mention is we’re going to be putting out some news Monday, I’ll put out some pictures of what we’re doing and where these pads are.

 

Look, the team is doing a fantastic job and they’re being very brave, it is dangerous country, this is a steep cliff and it’s very loose, as I’ve said it’s been shattered by the veining, so I really would like to give a mention to the guys because I’ve walked on these hills the last couple of weeks and I’m back home safe right now and they’re still out there doing it so they’re they’re doing a pretty courageous job.

 

These holes are not going to break it, but they could make it, so if we can show the consistency with some of these holes or with all of them then we’re really onto something very significant. And, I won’t say we’re scratching the top, we’re just scratching the belly. There’s a lot more to be tested.

 

We’re going to probably spend $5 million of the $10 million we’ve got, and then I really believe that working with the Northwest Territories if we can permit a road in to build an airstrip over the winter it’ll be a different story next year.

 

Life would be a lot simpler, and we’ll get a lot more done, and we can start 30- 40,000 meters. I don’t know that we’ll need that, but we can certainly prove up what we’re going to indicate with this drilling.

 

RM: We’re not going to have to wait long to find out a lot of information on the depth, the grade and the continuity of, as you said Simon, an area 500m x 500m x 400m, an area about the size of Snowline’s deposit. Just six weeks away for the assays on the holes.

 

I think you’ve given shareholders something to really think about today and I appreciate your time here, Simon.

 

SR: Thanks for inviting me, Rick, good to talk to you and good to talk to you as always Bob, hopefully we’ll see each other soon.

 

RM: Ok, let’s end it there.

 

BM: Thanks Rick.

 

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Richard does not own shares of Rakla Metals (TSX.V:RAK).

 

Bob Moriarty owns shares of RAK, Simon Ridgway owns shares of RAK.

 

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Posted July 29, 2025

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