Silver Range Resources Ltd (TSX-V:SNG, OTC:SLRRF) CEO Mike Power talked with Proactive about the company’s significant turnaround during the past year. The discussion covered recent and upcoming project activity.
The company has recently vended its Skylight property to Rush Gold, optioned three projects to Walker Lane Resources, and advanced the Bellehelen project with Excalibur Metals.
Proactive: For people who aren’t familiar with the company, you mentioned you're a project generator. Could you give us an overview of what the company is really about?
Mike Power: We’re your classic prospect generator — a precious metal prospect generator. We work in the southwest US. Our business is to identify, acquire, explore, and enhance projects. Then we vend them to partners. So we leverage their capabilities and resources with ours to explore and develop our properties. We have a large portfolio, but we don’t concentrate on any individual project, nor do we drill our own projects with conventional drilling.
You mentioned a bit of a turnaround. Is that related to pricing trends in the market, particularly with precious metals like silver and gold?
Actually, our story is a little different. Last fall, one of our deals that we’d done years ago finally hatched. We ended up with a significant share position in Silver47, a very well-run, well-promoted company. Over a period of eight months, we were able to slowly monetize that position. That allowed us to recap the company without financing, to the tune of about $3 million. By last June, when we finally exited the position, we were breathing a great big sigh of relief and were ready to go.
Tell me a bit about some of the projects you're looking at right now. Where do you see those headed?
We’ve been optioning more projects since last winter. We started with our Skylight property, finally got that vended after years of work with Rush Gold. It’s up on step and ready to go. Shortly after, we optioned three projects to Walker Lane Resources. They’re getting financed right now and we expect them to be working this fall. Finally, after years of work, Excalibur Metals got our Bellehelen project in play. My partner, John Gilbert, left the company to take over as CEO. It’s a great property and in great hands, and we expect some good news there. That brought us through to the summer.
Then we saw a bit of cash in hand. We started staking in August and September. We’ve got some new projects we'll roll out. And we’re really looking forward to finally seeing some action with our Broden Mining deal.
Tell me a bit about that one.
Broden Mining is an effort to restart the Faro mine up in the Yukon, which in its day was the largest lead-zinc-silver mine in the world. When it shut down, there were four or five deposits there. We added our Keg deposit to the mix. Under the guidance of Don McInnes, they’ve been working with the Ross River Dena First Nation and the federal and Yukon governments. They’re working towards finalizing a deal. We think it’s pretty close — we can smell the biscuits. After nine years of effort, we believe this deal might finally happen in the very near future. Fingers crossed. That would be a very significant payday for us.
Quotes have been lightly edited for style and clarity