The Golden Triangle of British Columbia is among the world’s most prolific mineralized districts hosting three of Canada's most significant mineral deposits.
The region has played a major role in Canada's mining industry for decades, attracting prospectors and companies from around the world. Located in the north-western region of the province, bordering the US state of Alaska, the Golden Triangle contains the former Eskay Creek Mine (previously owned by Barrick, now Skeena Resources); Newmont and Teck Resources massive copper-gold-silver Galore Creek Project; Pretium Resources Brucejack gold mine; and Newcrest’s Red Chris mine.
Vancouver-based Scottie Resources Corp understands the importance of the Golden Triangle, and all of the company’s properties are located in the area. It has exploration rights to over 52,000 hectares the Stewart Mining Camp located in the southern portion of the Triangle.
The company owns a 100% interest in the high-grade, past-producing Scottie Gold Mine and Bow properties and has the option to purchase a 100% interest in Summit Lake claims which are contiguous with the Scottie Gold Mine property. Scottie also owns 100% interest in the Georgia Project which contains the high-grade past-producing Georgia River Mine, as well as the Cambria Project properties and the Sulu property.
The company’s focus is on expanding the known mineralization around the past-producing mine while advancing near mine high-grade gold targets, with the purpose of delivering a potential resource.
Proactive Resources caught up with Scottie Resources president, director and chief executive officer Brad Rourke to find out more about the company. Proactive: Scottie Resources is focused on the Golden Triangle.
Proactive: What's so special about the region?
Brad Rourke: Well, I think the region has garnered a lot of attention for its inherent geological potential. We've got world-class past-producing mines from the past, whether it's Eskay Creek, Snip, or Premier. It was deemed to be quite a difficult area to work maybe 25 years ago, but what we've seen, especially in the last five years, is that that perception is changing with some really substantial things happening.
Pretium became a producing mine, now producing about 350,000 ounces a year; we’ve had the resurgence of Skeena Resources, which is the old Eskay Creek and Snip Mines; of course, KSM Snowfields, with the world's largest deposit of gold on the planet at 38 million ounces; Treaty Creek has come out in the last five years and has just under a billion dollars market cap with the combined three owners of that deposit; plus Ascot, advancing the old Premier mine which is going to go into production in 2022. And all these things are funded.
The amount of money that's coming into this area in the last 12 months is certainly well over $4 billion. There is the Newmont transaction with GT Gold at $440 million; the around $3.5 billion transaction (between Newcrest and Pretium) just announced last week which is yet to close but all indications are saying that it is going to happen; then we have both Hochschild and the Lundin’s coming into the area within the last 12 months. So we have got these bigger players that have now deemed that this is going to be the place to be. It’s probably one of the top five jurisdictions on planet Earth right now.
Okay, so what's so exciting about the Scottie project?
Well, we've been at it for six years. For the most part, it was the clean-up of an old existing company that I took it over, and that has now been done. We've consolidated our holdings - we started with 400 hectares and now we're well over 52,000 hectares after over a dozen transactions. We believed size mattered, and so we completed that. And then our exploration started off with a small drill program in 2019 with 2,000 meters (m). Then last season, we did 7,000m. And then this season, we've done 14,500m. And every one of those seasons we couldn’t have been happier as we’ve been very successful with the drill bit. We try to break the area up into zones.
We have the old past-producing Scottie Gold Mine, which produced a half ounce per ton in the 1980s and which was then closed down just on the economics. But outside of that we've expanded with property-wide explorations and we've come up with a couple of new zones that are really exciting. One is blue sky, it’s on the other side of the mountain from Scottie, which we call Domino that's still in a greenfields stage right now. But we're coming up with some really interesting results there. And then just to the north of Scottie mine in the valley bottom is something we called Blueberry, and we've had extreme success there over the last three seasons.
And now what we've done is that we’ve confirmed Blueberry as something real. In the last 25 months, we've extended it to 650m of strike, and some really, really exciting grades, which are easy drilling because they're on a road access and are very shallow. One of the most recent hits we put out was 16.5 grams per ton (g/t) gold over 10m, at a depth of just 30m. So we can look at these things with an open-pit frame of mind and we understand that there's a brand new mill (Ascot) turning just down the road from us starting this year, which gives us a lot of excitement. We think we have a stand-alone project, but with all that activity happening in the region, it just gives us optionality.
You mentioned Newcrest buying out your neighbor, Pretium, and that there is a lot of activity going on in the area. Do you think that optionality for Scottie is clear?
It is. When the new management team went in with Pretium we figured something was going on because they decided to shut regional exploration right down. Their exploration team has been dispersed, they sold their non-core asset Snowfields to KSM.So we had a good sense that something was happening. We didn't know it was Newcrest, but it really shows that Newcrest is now betting big on the jurisdiction.
What makes me really excited about that is that when most Pretium shareholders do in fact receive their money for their investment is any of that going to get re-deployed into the area? And if it is, here's a neighbour that is putting up pretty good numbers, and maybe we can capture some of that. So I think that's a great opportunity for us. But mostly, because when there's a big transaction like that, it forces international eyes on the area and that can only be good for us. All we ask is for someone just to look at what we've accomplished, and they can make their own decisions from there. But we are hopeful that we might capture some of that money.
So what would you say you yourself bring to the company as the CEO?
Well, I have a lot of energy and I'm a quite committed CEO, having paid for almost every share that I have. I'm also from the Golden Triangle and am one of the few CEO’s that actually raised their families in the area. Because I'm so familiar with the Golden Triangle, I know how to operate. There's a lot of good operators out there but I believe I can operate more efficiently than most people in the area because I personally know all the service providers, whether it's the drillers or the pad builders or the cooks, we've all lived in the same community.
I have also had some good business success in the past and I’ve got perseverance. We’ve got six years of track record right now and, quite frankly, you can see that we do what we say we're going to do. We're pretty proud of what we've done at the company thus far.
So what should Scottie Resources investors expect in the short to medium term?
Well, we still have probably 10,000m, or more of drilling that we haven't actually received back yet from the labs. So we have a lot of news flow, which is very important when you're investing in junior exploration companies. We probably have 50% of all the drill holes we've ever drilled in the three years that we haven't seen yet. And, if we could just be consistent with what we've done in the last few years, I think we're in really good shape. We are financially in a very good position and are not in any duress at the moment for funds. So we're in good shape and in the midst of planning for another successful program.
Contact the author at jon.hopkins@proactiveinvestors.com