28. Prospecting Success in the Yukon Territory, Canada

[MUSIC] Hi, everyone, and welcome to Discovery to Recovery, where we bring you geo-science stories from the world of order positive. This podcast is brought to you by the Society of Economic Geologists and is sponsored by ALS Gold Spot Discoveries. You could listen on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and more. My name is Halley Kevel, project geologist at Anglo-American and I'm your host for this week's episode. In last week's episode, you heard all about geo-microbiology and all stages of the mining value chain. Today we'll be talking about government initiatives to fund mineral exploration, specifically the Yukon Mineral Exploration Program or YNEP that provides financial support to people and companies prospecting in Yukon territory. We have some great guests today to discuss their prospecting paths and how this program has helped them out. Scott Castleman of the Yukon Geological Survey has kindly agreed to introduce the topic of the YNEP program itself. So without further ado, I will introduce Scott. Scott Castleman is a registered professional geoscientist with a bachelor of science degree in geology from Carlton University in 1985. He worked in the mineral exploration industry from 1985 to 2015. He served two terms as president of the Yukon Chamber of Mind and three years as the chair of the Dawson Regional Planning Commission. In May of 2015, Scott joined the Yukon Geological Survey and is currently the head of minerals geology. Thank you so much Scott for joining us today and thanks for being part of this episode. Thanks for having me, Halley. So first of all, I guess could you just tell us what YNEP is, what it stands for, and how long you've been working on the program? Yeah, YNEP is the Yukon Mineral Exploration Program. It's a program that the Yukon government has been running since about the mid-1980s. Currently, it's operated as Yukon Mineral Exploration Program or YNEP. How has it shifted in what it entails? Like, has it always just been to fund prospectors or have there been elements of it that sort of came and went? Yeah, to a certain degree, it was originally set up to fund prospectors and it would give them seed money to get out and allow them to get into further areas of field in the Yukon assistance with helicopters and some of the operating costs that they would have analyzing samples. And then it developed into a more broad ranging program and that switch focused mostly on the Mineral Exploration Program in the mid-90s or so where it would actually fund junior mining companies and private companies as well as prospectors to assist them in some of the work that they did. And then in about the mid-2000s, we added the placer industry to it as well. And what's your role in the program and how long have you been in that role? So I'm the head of Mineral's geology at the Yukon Geological Survey, and our group manages the Weimipp program. So I would supervise our Weimipp geologists who would take care of the program. And how many people typically apply each year and how competitive is it? Like what percentage of people get denied funding? Yeah, it really varies but I think the maximum number of applicants we've ever had in a year is probably about 150. This current year we're looking at 63 applicants, which is on the lower end. And typically about 50 to 75 percent of the applicants will get funded. The budget has varied. It's increased over time generally, starting at around the half a million dollar mark in the 80s. And up to right now we're at $1.4 million is the funding for the program. But in 2020, with pandemic hitting and the difficulties in the industry, especially getting funding and that kind of thing, we actually increased it to 2.5 million for for a one-year one-time event. Wow, amazing. And do people, is there a maximum cost you can request, like a maximum amount of funding? Well, so as I mentioned, there is a placer module. And for that, the individual company needs to provide 50 percent of the funds, the YMET program would provide 50. And that's to a maximum of $40,000. For the hard rock modules, there are three. There's a grassroots module where the proponent, typically their individuals, could get up to $15,000. And that would be 100 percent of the funding that they could get. So they don't have to match with their own funding. And then there's the focused regional module where a proponent can get up to $25,000. YMET will contribute 75 percent, and the proponent needs to provide the other 25 percent. And then the last module in the hard rock side is the target evaluation, where the proponent could get up to $50,000, and they have to match it, $50,000. Okay, well, I can see how this would be extremely beneficial, not just for, you know, early-stage prospectors, but also, ultimately, for the UConn government. I mean, how many of these projects that you've been witness to have become advanced projects? Ooh, let's look at some of the stats. So over the life of the prospectors' assistance, the YMET and the YMET program, the government has contributed about $33 million. And that's translated into about $3 of investment from the mining companies to every dollar that the government has put in. And then on top of that, there have been some amazing discoveries that have come out of the YMET program. And I'll mention four of them. So on the hard rock side, your audience may be familiar with the coffee project that Newmont Corporation now has. Yeah, I was wondering, I know Sean Ryan was involved in discovering that. Yeah, Sean knows how to use the YMET program. And he's probably one of our greatest users and one of the greatest successes that we've had in the program. So Sean got YMET funding in 2006 and 2007 for the coffee project. Total investment from the Yukon government was $30,000. To date, since that time, there has been $382 million spent on coffee by Newmont, Kaminak, Sean, and all the companies leading up to where we are today. And a mine permit is being prepared for that project. So the billions of dollars that will come out of that project all came out of a $30,000 investment from the Yukon government. Another Sean Ryan success story was what the white gold property. In 2003, Sean got $25,000 under the YMET program. I made a significant discovery a few years later. And to date, there's been $53 million spent on the white gold deposit. Still not at a permitting stage yet, but the resource there is, I think, 1.25 million ounces. Another success story, which is actively being explored right now, is the Orback project of onion gold. They received YMET funding in 2016, 2018, and 2019. Total amount there was $100,000. To date, there has been $30 million spent on that project. And they're actively drilling right now. And they announced a approximately 1 million ounce resource two years ago that is being updated this spring. We expect new numbers coming out of there soon. And that is probably going to be the largest drill program going on in the Yukon right now. Those are three hard rock success stories. And I'll mention one plaster success story. The big creek, clear creek area of Yukon. So clear creek is between Victoria Gold's eagle gold mine and the past producing brewery creek mine. In 2014, a individual got a $35,000 YMET grant there. Did some plaster exploration and vended the property to a plaster miner, a famous Yukon plaster miner, Stuart Schmidt. And that creek now produces 8,000 ounces of gold per year. So if you do the math on that, that's quite a bit of money coming out of, it's about $60 million, give or take, coming out of that creek from a $35,000 YMET investment. That is absolutely incredible. I wasn't expecting such great success stories, but I guess it makes sense. The programs that are out a long time, there's a lot of exploration in the Yukon, a lot of really good deposits in the Yukon. So because this is so successful, I mean, I imagine that there's other programs like it, but I've only really heard of YMET, and that's probably just because of my own network and my own working in the Yukon. But do you know of any other funding initiatives that are similar in other provinces or even globally? Yeah, well, I know across Canada, we actually often get calls from other jurisdictions because this program is very well recognized. The one we have in the Yukon, there are similar ones scattered across the country. There is a similar program that runs in an Northwest territory. It's slightly different, but the same kind of idea. And Newfoundland has a prospector assistance program that is also very well recognized. And it's changed over the years, but it's used there to assist their early stage projects. And I'm sure there are others, but those ones are the ones that I'm aware of right now. And globally, do you know of any, I guess? Yeah, I don't know beyond, beyond our reach. I have a hard enough time. Keep track of what's going on here, little alone in other countries. Fair enough. Well, if our listeners know of a great funding initiative, it's similar to why map in another country that can contact us and let us know and we can do an episode on that. Yeah, absolutely. And if they're looking to start one up somewhere else, I'd be happy to send you copies of our rules and how it works. Great. Thanks, Scott. Thank you very, very much for your time and thank you for being a part of this podcast episode. No troubles. Thanks for having me, Holly. After that great intro to the program from Scott, we are now going to chat to Jack Milton about his prospecting adventures supported by the YMAT program. We recorded this portion of the interview in April 2022 before the summer field season started and at the end of the episode, we'll hear about how his summer panned out with his claims in the Yukon. Jack has spent the past 14 years working on projects across Yukon, Northwest Territories and VC for junior exploration companies. Jack has a passion for testing new ideas and technology in the exploration environment from grassroots exploration through resource expansion to the development of advanced stage projects. By day, Jack is the Chief Geologist for Fire Weed Metals, exploring for sediment-hosted zinc deposits in the Selwyn Basin. And by night, he pursues his own search for porphyry copper deposits in the Dawson range Yukon using Zircon Geochronology and Geochemistry. In 2015, he completed a PhD in Geological Science at the Mineral Deposit Research Unit, University of British Columbia, focusing on the sediment-hosted copper deposits of the Redstone Copper Bell. Prior to this, he completed an MSC in Mining Geology and honors BSC and applied geology at the Cambourine School of Minds University of Exeter. He's a fellow of the Geological Society of London and a professional geologist with EGBC. All right, well, thanks for joining us on the podcast today, Jack. Yeah, thanks, Hally, very happy to be here. I guess we'll get right into the WIMEP program itself since Scott Castleman kindly did the introduction for us. What do you personally think is the most valuable part of the WIMEP program in terms of how it can help early stage prospectors like yourself well? Yeah, I think that one of the best things about the WIMEP program is that it just encourages people to get out there, a test, a new idea, or go and look at an old area that hasn't been looked at in a long time. I like that it prioritizes these areas and prioritizes remote areas that would not otherwise see much work. What I really like about WIMEP is that it supports individuals and prospectors and it can give 100% funding to a project. You don't even have to be a geologist, you know, it's a prospecting program. So anyone with a good idea is eligible for funding. You look at other jurisdictions in Canada, they run similar projects in Australia. A lot of these are restricted just to exploration companies that are quite so bigger grants with more lengthly application processes. WIMEP application process is quite straightforward. Do you present your idea in a document and it's assessed by a panel of geologists and the best ones get funded. So it's out there, it's available and I think that other jurisdictions should take that and be giving out grants in order to encourage exploration, particularly in remote areas or expensive places to work. Imagine the Yukon is quite expensive if you don't have your own funds to get up into the middle of nowhere. I mean, a lot of it's helicopter access only, right? It is, yeah, there's some very remote parts of the Yukon that you need a helicopter or a fixed-wing access to get to and that's a major barrier for a lot of exploration for companies and individuals. And I guess this is a good question for you. I assume you're a BC resident, not a Yukon resident or are you a Yukon resident. I'm a BC resident and I was able to participate in the program for the last couple of years. Interesting. So can you tell us what got you started? Like what year you first applied, where the idea came from and what WIMEPs enabled you to do over the last few years? Yeah, so I first applied in 2020 and it was actually a project that was born out of COVID lockdown when COVID hit. I spent some time working on an idea that I've had wanted to explore for a long time, which is using a new technique, a new idea to test an old search space in the Yukon, which is looking for poor free deposits. And the idea that I'm testing is using Zerkon in stream sediments to try and find new poor free targets in these areas that it can look at for years in terms of prospecting. The two things that I'm looking at are dating these Zerkons, but also looking at the fertility indicators using the geochemistry of these Zerkons too. Are you using only Zerkon or using other heavy minerals in the stream sediments samples? Yeah, so I actually take a stream sediments sample and do poor free copper indicator mineral logging. So it does look for other heavy minerals, gold, what's the gold, and minerals that are associated with poor free alteration and mineralization. But the chemistry work that I'm doing is just on the Zerkon, and it's primarily the dating of the Zerkon that I found to be effective at trying to find particular intrusions that are known to be associated with mineralization across the Yukon. In areas where when you go and look at a bedrock map, they don't appear to exist, but I've found plenty of drainages where it's producing Zerkons of the right age, where it doesn't say there's anything on the map. So it's a tool I'm using to reduce the search space and refine area selection. So I've looked at a very large part of the Yukon and in a very cost-effective and cheap way have honed in on a few different areas that are producing these Zerkons or streams are producing these Zerkons that I think are associated with poor free targets. Okay, and in terms of Yukon poor free deposits, what is the most prospective age range? So what I'm looking for is a casino age of the Zerkons, these very late quotacious ages, and these occur in Yukon as very small volume intrusions, and that's key in locating a search space where you think that you can find these things because there's not much outcrop in these areas, it's sort of rolling hills with very little outcrop, so they could easily be missed in regional mapping as small enough to be missed. These larger, big batholith type intrusions pretty hard to miss, but these small volume intrusions could easily be nested in larger, earlier batholiths all across Yukon and all across the world. Interesting, I have so many questions. I guess how the first question is how did you narrow in on an area? You said you had a large part of the Yukon, I assume there's large parts of the Yukon that you're not looking in. Are you in a specific belt? Are you, I mean, what's the square kilometer coverage that you're trying to cover with your stream set program and what size catchments are you done sampling? Yeah, that's a good question, so I honed in on the Dawson range in Yukon, in an area where there's this gap of poor free occurrences in a belt that I think should otherwise be uninterrupted. It's in an area that's escaped glaciation, so that was one of the factors in choosing an area selection. I didn't want the influence of glacially derived icons within the drainages, because that's going to complicate things another level. I focused on an area that, and it's related to the lack of glaciation, an area that has deep oxidation, and that is because most of the previous work in the Yukon has focused on areas that have anomalous stream sediment geochemistry, and if you look at all the assessment work that's been filed in the Yukon, almost all of it is within areas that are broadly anomalous, and the sort of antithesis of those that in all these other areas that don't have stream sediment anomalies, there's been essentially no or very little work, and in an area that's been deeply oxidized, it's possible that all the copper has been leached out of those rocks, and they don't produce these kind of classic stream sediment anomalies, or if they do, they could be quite subtle, whereas zircon is going to survive that oxidation process, and will still be in the stream sediment as fresh as it was in the rock. All right, interesting, and so in terms of catchment size, do you have like a minimum catchment size and a maximum catchment size that you're looking at, or are you trying to start really big and then crossoff areas of the map that are not prospective? I'm not sure what you can do with one line-up grant in one summer or how many people you have in the program. Yeah, so I mean to put it into perspective in terms of how cost-efficient I think it was, you know, in 2020 I surveyed an area that was over 200 square kilometers, and it took one day, and you know, total cost of the program was just over $30,000. So yeah, there are expensive samples to run, but when you consider that working in remote areas, your cost is largely proportional to the time that you spend out there. So if you can get in and quickly survey an area very cost-effectively, which I think you can do with these kind of zircon samples. And in terms of how big of drainages, you know, did I go for it? It's very variable, but I kind of developed a technique of assessing these things to a level of statistical confidence that's not possible with traditional stream sediment jake chemistry. So it gives you good confidence both that there either is something there or that there isn't something there and you can move on. The first year was just myself and the helicopter pilot, and we took a jet ranger out into the Dawson range and collected sediments from a whole bunch of creeks. And last year I took one of the geo and spent about four days in total looking at any even bigger area. Have you staked any claims yet? Or is this all an open ground that you're working? I have staked claims on these drainages where I'm seeing these casino age zircons, and you go and look in those drainages and there's no casino sweep rocks mapped. And all across Yukon these rocks are almost always associated with porphyry copper gold, a molly venerization. Did you find in those catchments, did you find any other indicators of porphyrys, or are we just looking at the age of the zircon? Did you have any other minerals that would indicate that a porphyry would be there? Yes, so there's, you know, in some of these catchments, there's gold grains as well, and that's part of porphyry copper indicating mineral logging is looking at how many gold grains come out. You're making a zircon separate, you know, using density separation. So the gold grains will come out with that as well. And again, it's another good thing that will survive oxidation and be present in a stream sediment still. But many porphyrys will lack that sort of plaster gold, if you like, on top of them, particularly if the epithelma environment's no longer there and hasn't been preserved. It could be too fine-grained. But in some of these drainages, I'm also seeing gold anomalies. Some tungsten minerals, like at the plaster on top of Casino and Canadian Creek, you see tungsten minerals that are associated with that likely derived from the porphyry too. So yeah, I'm looking at a broader suite of minerals, not just zircon. So the first summer you went out, you were just looking on open ground, then you got some results back and then last summer you staked, is that what the process was? Yeah, so I did the staking in April last year, and I actually just got back from Yukon. I did a bit more staking this April. April is a pretty good time to go out and staking Yukon. You've got nice long days, and it's nice and crisp and cool. You still have to do porphyrys staking, or how does that work in the Yukon? In the Yukon, it's ground staking, so you've got to get out there and put the posts on the ground or chop trees down and make posts, and it's a very antiquated system. You can't do it from the comfort of your own desk. Is there. do other provinces or territories have that same staking system, or are most online now? Most are online. NWT still has ground staking, but I think almost all of the other provinces or territories have map staking. So then I guess what is your summer look like this year? Are you going to go back to those flames and take stream sediment samples in smaller catchments, or are you going to go do some ground mapping, or what's the plan? Yeah, so the plan for this summer would be to do a bit more stream sediment sampling, and also soil sampling, and get in and do a sort of focus grid on these on these drainages. So last year I went in and did exactly what he said there, focused on smaller drainages and hone in on where these are coming from, and I did that successfully last year. I took a few soil samples and found some anomalies, and I'm going to head back there and try and find these casino sweet intrusions with soil sampling. I'm not sure how many people it's going to be this year, but it's probably going to be more than just me. I think it'll be a little bit different this year, probably stay out in the flames and camp out there. So I guess what would success look like for you in terms of next steps and what you would find before you would then potentially option it or sell it or start a company, and would that be different to what WIMEP would view as a success? So I think I think what WIMEP would view as a success is that more money is being brought in and spent in the territory. It's to encourage exploration and encourage spending in eukon based businesses. What I would view as a success ultimately is selling these claims on to an exploration or mining company, and I think that I would also see another version of success, which is the validation that this new idea works in the search space, and I think to some degree that that has been validated in that I've gone out there and found these casino sweet sire cons in the strangest, and those rocks must be there present in the bedrock, but the real validation, of course, would be finding a large casino style porphyry intrusion or porphyry deposit out in eukon in area of a very little previous exploration work. And is there anything else you want to tell our listeners about your claims or about WIMEP or about eukon porphyries in general? Well, I'd say that I'm working by myself right now, but does any companies out there that want to change that? I'd encourage them to reach out. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jack, and I look forward to hearing more about what you get up to in the eukon this summer. That's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show. Our next speaker is eukon born Ryan Berkey, who we will also hear from before and after the summer field season of North. Ryan Berkey has worked across many facets of the mining industry and has been involved with eukon mineral exploration since 2010. He has been involved in all stages of exploration from the idea stage, early prospecting a discovery through to advanced exploration and resource definition. He's currently an exploration geologist for Victoria Goldcorp. Previously, he was an exploration geologist at Archer Catherone Associates from September 2019 to March of 2020, and an exploration geologist at Ground Truth Exploration from May 2019 to September 2019. More recently, he's been developing grassroots exploration projects within the eukon from boots on the ground prospecting. Ryan obtained a Bachelor of Science Geology honors from Memorial University in 2018 and is a geologist in training with the professional engineers and geoscientists of Newfoundland and Labrador. He's also a member of PDAC and SEG. Thanks for joining us today, Ryan. Yeah, thanks for having me, Halle. Where are you calling in from today? Today, I'm calling in from the Eagle Gold Mine. I work full-time as an exploration geologist for Victoria Goldcorp. And somehow yet you still have time to get into the WIMAP program and have some of your own properties? Yeah, so one of the benefits of working with an operator is a lot of flexibility on my off-time to go and pursue other things like obtaining WIMAP grants and going out and prospecting in my spare time. So it's pretty great. You're a busy guy. Yeah. So what got you into the WIMAP program in the first place? Like how did you hear about it? And how many years have you been applying for WIMAP grants? First heard about the WIMAP program from my dad actually, who is also a geologist. And he worked at the eukon geological survey. I believe from 1990 up until 2010. And he actually administered the funding for the program for a number of years. I guess him coming home and telling you know about different prospectors, just hearing stories. One in particularly that stuck with me was Sean Ryan, a local prospector who in the early 2000s made a few discoveries through this WIMAP program. So he's kind of got a good track record of success. So I started to look into it in a little bit more detail after I finished my undergraduate degree. And then in 2019 was the first year that I decided to put together a WIMAP application. And I've been doing it ever since. Have they all been successful? No. The WIMAP program has a very strict criteria that they base projects on. And the best applications are chosen to receive funding. So in 2019, I put in two applications. And only one was approved. In 2020, I think I put in four. And I received two. And then last year, as well, I think I put in three. And I received two changes from year to year depending on how many applicants there are. And the quality of the rest of the applications. Right. Right. That makes sense. But congratulations on, it sounds like most of them have been successful. So that's great. Yeah, thanks. I understand you have two sort of main projects. You have a project that's near White Horse. Can you tell us about that and tell us what the concept was and how your WIMAP grant has been able to do the work you need to do to figure out more about it? Sure. So the first project that I started to develop is 70 kilometers south of White Horse. And the rationale behind the project was there's actually a historical gold mine in the area that was producing between 1986 to 1988. And during those three years of production, there was quite a flurry of exploration activity in the area. And quite a few promising discoveries were made in 1988, which then never got follow up after the mine shut down. So I put together an application to go and revisit those historical showing. So the first thing I did was I performed a literature review of all the work that was done in the 1980s. And then I kind of ranked what I believe to be the most promising targets. And then I took into account the geological setting of the historical producing mine. It's all the mouse group of gold mine. And it's a classic low self-ordination epithermal gold deposit. Which is going to be my next question. What kind of deposit? At what it produced, I think it was around an average grade of 8 grams per ton and historical production was around 80,000 ounces of gold. There's also two other advanced stage deposits that have mineral resources on them. With that knowledge, I looked a little bit further south where another Eocene age volcanic complex exists called the Bennett Maple Cannot Complex. So it's similar in size and it's the same age. It consists of very similar geology to the mouse-cookham complex to the north. And in the past three years, I've discovered quite a bit of additional mineralization. And how did you go about finding this mineralization from the literature of you to staking the claims to getting on the ground like was it road access? And what sort of exploration or did you actually get up to your first year of that program? In the first year in 2019, I staked 13 claims and went out with a university colleague Charlie Pike for nine days in early September as a helicopter accessible project. And we just, you know, hiked around in the area and prospective to geological mapping stations. Every time we came across rye light and a site of assault dikes, which were likely Eocene aged, we mapped those out and just generally put together a geological picture of the area, which was followed up in 2020 with the program of three people for ten days. So we went back out and performed a ground magnetic survey, till sampling survey, and an additional prospecting. And then that turned into 2021 work. And at this point, the claim block had grown from the original 13 claims all the way to 185. The story starts to develop a little more in terms of, you know, what is contributing to the geology. You get an idea of structural trends and corridors of mineralization. And then you're just looking for that quartz vein float sample for alteration where you see stringer veinlets in the raw as you get closer to a zone, or maybe you see some bleaching in the ground and die, right? Just anything to sort of vector you into potential areas of mineralization. And what have you found in terms of mineralized zones? Have you found different types of mineralization? Have you found something that you're hoping might be a drill target? It's the best thing you found on this property. Well, there's essentially five showings that I've discovered over a five kilometer strike length that all seem to be related to a main sort of north east trending structural corridor. Each showing is related to this corridor and then intersecting east-west secondary faults. So the mineralization is really varied over the five kilometers. The highest grab sample ran 11,000 grams per tonne silver, as well as a hand trench. We dug in 2020 that returns almost I think 460 grams silver over eight meters, including a high grade interval of 1100 grams silver over two meters. And then as you move a little further north, there's another zone called the silver train, which is quite a bit of very oxidized quartz epidote vein float, which has occasional extremely high copper grades up to four or five percent paired with anomalous molybdenum, as well as decent silver grades. That's sort of a different signature where you've got those base metals coming in that are, you know, perhaps you're getting a little bit closer to heat source or you're lower down within kind of a intermediate sulfidation type system. So that main base metal rich showing it's a kilometer away from a rye-lite die, which has returned grab samples up to almost 50 grams gold. Like there's all this high grade vein material spatially associated with a die about a kilometer away from this base metal rich area. So that's pretty interesting as well. Yeah. What are your next steps to follow up on this stuff? Like what are you going to be back there this summer? I would like to be definitely the kind of preliminary prospecting has led into the definition of these discrete zones for follow up work. And the next step would be to do some detailed geological mapping, maybe one to 500 scale over those areas, as well as some hand trenching to better identify where these mineralized zones are occurring in subcrop or an outcrop and hopefully to linear a preliminary drilling target. Great. Well, maybe switch gears just to your other project because I know you have a bunch going on with why I'm that. Yeah. So my other project, it's located near Clare Lake, which is a large lake in the Yukon, the project itself is called the catch property. And the catch property was spurred from I was reading a BC GS publication from 2010 for free copper assessment of British Columbia and Yukon territory Canada. And I was surprised when I looked at the maps, which show all these mines down in BC. And then as you go up into the Yukon, there's like hardly any. And there's this huge tract of areas where there's like no mines, but you know geology doesn't really respect borders, just because there's a border between BC and the Yukon doesn't mean that the geology shouldn't continue. I also read another paper by Rob Mackie, who took all the regional geochemical data, which is publicly available for the Yukon. And he compared them against different deposit types and then created heat maps of potential of getting that deposit type. So some sort of sophisticated machine learning process or something like that. Yeah, I remember seeing that work in a poster that they presented that. I guess it was round up one year. Yeah, interesting work that they did for sure on regional data sets. Yeah. So at the end of the day, you get a nice heat map that can point you in the right direction. So the Clare Lake area has a very high probability for I believe those epithermal gold silver as well as porphyry copper molley potential. So I decided to look there and found basically a brand new area of mineralization that had never been found before. So I got super lucky. How did you find that? How did you go from the map to finding that? Well, I wasn't just luck, I'm sure. Well, so I took Rob Mackie's data and then I also looked at the regional magnetic data and there was an interesting magnetic anomaly as well in the area. And I also looked at proximity to large scale crystal faults and the catch property is four kilometers away from the teslin vault. So these are all different tidbits of data that kind of led me to go and initially do a program where we took 500 meter space till samples over a 25 square kilometer area. So how many of you did that? That seems like a lot of work for just the last vector. Just four. But super good team, my partner Kate, she went out and I took her out for the very first time to do soil sampling, which she was super good at. Yeah, my good friend Laura as well and then a colleague of mine named Logan Roots. So between the four of us we collected this really good base data set. So we collected 115 till samples, 32 stream sediment samples and then I also collected about 60 rock samples and the data indicated that there was some copper anomalism and the northern end of the sample grid. So I went back and logged that up in 2021 with detailed 100 meter by 100 meter grid over that main area. Generalization in some of these soil anomalies was to 1% copper highest gold value for my soil sample was like 2.3 grams time gold. This large anomaly started to make itself known and worked with the data and I could just shut it up in kind of a synced executive summary. And then I started marketing the project to a company called ATAC Resources Breasts Interests and we went ahead and and a confidentiality agreement eventually led into a successful option agreement. And now they're now they have the option to earn 100% interest in that property and going to be doing some work on it this year. So that's an exciting exciting development on that one for sure. Congratulations. So what would the ideal next next few years look like for you? What do you think they could potentially find at the cash property? Well tax planning on running 20 kilometers of fine IP and they're also going to be following I think more detailed sampling in that main zone that the hopes of identifying a preliminary target which would be drilled as early as summer 2023 if they're successful. Delineating a drill target and they have success in their maiden drill hole. That'll obviously lead into our extensive drilling and hopefully resource definition in that's a pretty it's kind of like a situation you know but that's the possible case scenario. I will tell. So the prize is a shallow buried porphyry system? Yeah essentially. A lot of the soil geochemistry is very elevated and copper and gold. Rocks on the property are super altered and oxidized have fairly extensive political alteration. Minor zones of gestion and malachite staining and some areas as well have so developed zones of summer and hydrate kind of on the underside of a lot of the rocks on surface. So very least it just shows that it's a very oxidized system. The basalts in theory are so altered on surface that the 100 or 200 meters below surface could be a causative rising intrusion that has created these localized zones of bretiation and alteration in the overlying method mechanics. Yeah. Well that's that's exciting stuff Ryan. Thanks for taking the time to join us today on the podcast and I'll be staying tuned to figure out what's happening next with your property. Yeah thanks for having me howie. I really appreciate it. And now for the post summer interviews. First we will welcome back Jack Milton to discuss how his field season went in terms of his prospecting adventures. This interview was recorded in September 2022. Thanks very much for coming back on the episode Jack. Yeah thanks honey thanks for uh yeah haven't been back on the show. So when we last spoke I think you were about to go up for both your your full-time job and uh to do some work on your claims up in the Yukon. So did you get up there? I did I did manage to get out to uh to my claims just a couple of weeks ago in the Dawson Range in Yukon. So yeah it was out there just for a very short focus program and it was four days long and uh did a bit of sort of targeted soil sampling and following up on some of these anonlies that have generated using zircons in streamed soils. So you said that last summer you got the right age zircons. Was there anything else you were looking for? Was it just just the zircon age and zircon chemistry? That's right so yeah the main sort of technique that I've used is to just look for the age of the zircons and the chemistry of the zircons is a little bit secondary to the technique. I think the strength of it really is looking for the age due to you know there's really strong association in Yukon between very late-cretaceous intrusions and complementaryization and you know you look at almost all the intrusions of that age across Yukon and they're mineralized but they're quite small volume and finding drainages with these zircons over the past couple of years has been uh you know the focus of the program and this year was really following up on that and trying to sort of demonstrate a that this that this method works and that it's you know a valuable tool to go and reduce this sort of area selection when you're looking at these large sort of regional programs and to demonstrate that there's something there and something worth following up on so it's uh yeah it was an intense you know four days of of work and too early for results yet and I'm sure just like everyone else is facing these long cues at the labs here there'll be a couple of months before we get in the solar results back on that. Yeah we've had a very long wait times for our labs too. So how did you go from your zircon ages to then doing a soil sampling program. How did you figure out where in these catchments where you had the right age zircons where to actually do a soil grid? Yeah it's a good question so I've focused the effort down over two different years of sort of regional sampling and the first year was doing a assessing an area a reasonably large area in the Dawson range and the second year was narrowing that focus down into smaller and smaller drainages and trying to follow them up and find these nested drainages that producing zircons of the right age and I was able to do that over the past couple years to reduce that area selection to a level that I could reasonably go in and stake it for myself and when the area has been reduced that much it's a relatively small soil program to go out and test those targets and so I think a lot of the value and the technique is reducing this risk at the early stage of expiration and you know the risk is very high at that stage because if you get it wrong then every penny that you spend thereafter is a complete waste of money so I think that you know it's another tool that people can use to select tenure and follow it up with with other methods appropriate for those areas. Such as soil sampling. Exactly and in the Dawson range there's you know good residual soils developed and you know previous soil programs it looked only for copper and in these kind of oxidized trains those official materials may have very very weekly anomalous levels of copper and soil and may have gone overlooked. And how closely space was your grid? I was doing a sort of 100 meters spaced grid over an anomalous area that identified last year actually did a very small amount of soil sampling and identified one anomalous area and did a follow-up grid at 100 meter spacing on that and the rest was contour sampling and it was using some of the official geology mapping that the YGS has put out to choose those areas so that they're truly representing these sort of basis flow colluvial as official materials that are either in situ or just moved to short distance down slope. Was it just you that went back out to do soil grid or did you have a team of people with you? Yes so this year I hired three other people and they came out with me and helped me on this small soil sampling program so it was fly camping and soil sampling over over a few days. I think you know reducing that area to that level allowed that focused program to happen when working in remote places especially efficiency is key because your costs are pretty much directly proportional to the time that you spend out in the bush. The first year I did this program that was done in one day of sample and one day of helicopter time versus 10 days 20 days you know that's that's an order of magnitude difference. I guess with your full-time work how does that conflict if at all I mean if you didn't have your full-time job would you have done more this summer? Do you think you still would have just done this short program because you've narrowed down the area so much? Yeah I think that you know the sort of constraints of working a full-time job as well as doing this a new spare time you know definitely limits the amount of time that's available but since they reduce the minimum amount of time on these programs which happened just a few years ago you just have to spend a minimum of 30 days out in the bush and that was sort of an indirect conflict with my vision for the technique which is to not make it 30 days there's to make it one day or two days or three days but cover the same area that you would in a 30-day program of slogging through a bush. Crazy yeah that would be at odds with full-time work. Were you in the field all summer for your job as well? I was so yeah my day job is you know with five-week zinc or actually this year we rebranded to a critical metals company and renamed ourselves five-week metals and yeah that kept me very busy between between juggling those different projects in my day job and doing this in my time off it was it was a very very busy summer. No kidding. What's next for you then in terms of the why I'm up are you just going to send your samples off for analysis with for the results and then figure out what you're going to do next year? Yeah absolutely and you know a lot will depend on those results for those claims but you know I feel like I've if these results prove up something that looks anomalous and looks like a decent target then I think I'd be at the stage where I'd want to try and sort of shop it around and option it off to an exploration company so yeah in terms of what's next for me and in why map I think if I can establish that this technique works is take it to the next spot in the Yukon and figure out you know where the next one of these deposits is going to be and try and use this technique more systematically across a bigger area in Yukon. You guys have been making me very tempted to apply for one of these why map grants but it's been my entire summer in the bush already so yeah maybe maybe another year yeah exciting yeah you know I'd say you know if you've got a new idea if you've got a concept that you've always thought about you know get out there and go go chase after it and go and find the next deposit. Cool thanks Jack for your time I really appreciate it and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next. Yeah thanks for having me on the show. And as for Ryan Berkey what exploration work was done on his claims this summer this second interview with Ryan was also recorded in September of 2022. Thanks for coming back on the podcast again Ryan at the end of the summer I want to hear all about the catch property. Yeah no problem thanks for having me back late in the season I'm glad our schedules aligned and we could sit down for talk. Yeah so I've obviously been following your LinkedIn and your dad LinkedIn and ATAC and I've seen a lot regarding the catch property so it seems a lot to happen since we last spoke at the end of April and and they're drilling now there can you tell me what's going on since we last talked. Yeah so over Christmas ATAC optioned the property and they had a work commitment to spend $150,000 on the project in this year they obviously went out and had a closer look and started to plan a more extensive program than than they had first kind of envisioned so they've run ground magnetics on the property IP soil sampling and they received their surface rock results and they found lots of additional mineralization like a kilometer south of the main target area they found a rock that engraved it over 1% copper and they found another rock that was 1% copper and 1 gram per ton gold and then when the IP results came back at depth there was this very sharp break in like contrasting rock properties for both chargeability and resistivity which likely indicates some sort of large structure at depth so all the stars aligned with the data and it was confident enough to get through and decide to do a mate in drilling program so they fast track the project and they just collared their first hole on September 1st this is September 6th so I'm excited to see how how the program goes for them. Wow are they RC drilling or diamond drilling? Yeah they're RC drilling this year just a quick test of the mineralization and best case scenario would be they have encouraging results again and hopefully would follow that up with the diamond drilling program next season. That's really really cool. That's probably like the best you could hope for this year, right? This initial summer program. Oh definitely. When I first optioned the property to them I thought that maybe the maiden drilling program would happen in 2023 so to have encouraging results that weren't drilling early on is a testament to good data collection on my part in 2019 and 2020 and then also continued effort and really good supplementary data generated by ATAC and a really good group so they're drilling beneath some of the surface trenches that I dug last year that have good solid mineralization and outcrop that also bears this geophysical anomaly that's correlating as well. Nobody really knows what it is but there's good copper signature and good gold as well as the occasional and lead sink kit as well so it's interesting mineralization and there's no historical work for over 50 kilometers in any direction so it really represents a brand new area within the Yukon. That's pretty exciting. Yeah, hopefully when the results come back a little bit more information is is received and you can make an educated guess about what it could be. What's the host? Is it a volcanic? Is it porphyry? Is it none of the above? The host rock is extremely oxidized, triastic, assaults, oddjite here at the salt. Okay. So yeah, but there are occasional quartz marks for free dikes. They're rare that occur on the property and the mineralization is kind of cryptic besides malapite staining on surface but as soon as you open a rock up that's not a fracture surface. The mineralization kind of presents itself just as disseminated pyride and blebby, sometimes blebby calcopyride. ATAC reason identified some boronite but there's a distinct lack of quartz fainting but the oxidation is quite intense and sometimes you get really prominent bugs developed within the basalts as well so. Well if it's an alcoholic porphyry and it's silica under saturated then I guess you wouldn't expect quartz fainting so that's a possibility. Maybe? I don't know. I've not been up there. Yeah, I mean in talking recently with ATAC you've kind of arm-waved that it's either a high-selfidation epithetermal target or it is some sort of cryptic alcoholic porphyry signature. The presence of boronite is interesting. I'd be keen to hear if they find more boronite and what the what the zonation looks like. Yeah, that's what they had identified in there. They've got a recent post on linked and that says that but I don't know. You never know until the assays come in. We'll just have to wait and see what the results like. What does their program look like? It sounds like it's a fairly large program with a lot going on but. They're basing their operations out of the nearby community of CarMax so there's an airstrip nearby in a staging area so they're just visiting the property daily to and from as well as doing crew changes daily with the helicopter. Right. And the crew is just staying in CarMax then at like a campground or something? Yeah, they're staying at a local hotel there. Okay. I saw last summer that the cool mine campground was being sold. It's still there. What's still for sale? You can move up from Vancouver anytime I'm in. It's a flip burger. That would actually be a pretty sweet job. Those burgers are good and that spot on the Yukon River is beautiful. Yeah, it is. It's really nice. And then what about your other property that we spoke about in April? The base metal is one that's a bit more sort of enigmatic and had all those different mineralized zones. I've done any work on that this summer or you've mostly been just working full-time. So that property was option as well? Really? Yeah, to a company called Transition Metals. So they're based, they're a project generator that's based out of Sudbury and they really were again interested sort of by that five kilometer stretch of varied zones and mineralization. They've done a phase one field program. I think the assays are still pending so they need to wait until they have results in hand before we have a conversation about the next steps but they're also out there working that project as well. So it's been a really good summer for me which is kind of contrasting to the to the broader markets right now. Yeah, things aren't really looking so hot on that front. So yeah, I don't know. I've got a bit of patch of good weather. That's super exciting. And so if you have any other areas that you're interested in going prospecting, you seem to be doing pretty well for yourself with these two properties. Well, both the deals are only in year one. So the deals would have to continue on until year two or three before I really start to see a tangible personal benefit from the options. But I always have a list of areas that I want to go and see. I've actually gone out this summer to two different areas and the projects I think need a little bit more data before they're ready to put out to companies to see if there's any interest in them. Yeah, of course. If you had like a word of wisdom to aspiring prospectors, like what would you say to someone who who's listening to this and thinks I want to do that? Yeah, I mean, I think you really love geology and want to test your own ideas. It's amazing that this Y-Met program exists to help offset the little costs that you incur during this preliminary phase of prospecting. If you're spired, I guess, that you'll find a way to make it happen. I like that. Especially if you live in the Yukon and you have live up. Exactly. It helps quite a bit. Awesome. Well, thanks again for doing two interviews for this podcast. I'm definitely excited to hear about what happens with the catch and the Pike Warden properties going forward. Maybe we'll do another follow-up episode sometime next year. Yeah, that would be great. Thanks for having me on again and I'm glad that the field season's been going well for everyone so far. So it's a good part of the job. Yeah, definitely. Thank you for joining us on the Discovery to Recovery podcast. I am Halle Kevil, one of the hosts of this podcast series. Please join us next week for another prospecting episode. This time with Sean Ryan and both Jessica and Katarina Bjorkman of Bjorkman prospecting. I will also host next week's episode. You can access past episodes on scgweb.org/podcasts. Be sure to follow the scg on twitter, linkedin, and other social media channels to get notified when the next episode comes out. A huge thank you to Scott Castleman, Jack Milton and Ryan Burkey, who generously gave us their time and insight for this podcast episode. This episode was written and produced by myself, Halle Kevil of Anglo-American, with editing support from Ann Thompson, Aisha Ahmed, Sam Weatherly, and Britt Lumell. Our theme music is Confluence by Eastwinds from their album Confluence. You can check them out at eastwinds.bandcamp.com. Thanks for listening to this week's episode, and we'll catch you again next week.