The beginning was 1979 when I found the “Dino” vein for Cusac Industries in the Cassiar region. That vein was small but very rich, the first sample ran 80 oz/ton gold over two feet—Cusac stock subsequently rose from $0.20 to over $10.00 a share. After that I was hooked on prospecting, but I didn’t want to work for anyone, I wanted to find things on my own.

The first thing I did was extensive “research”, lots of it. I went to the library and read everything: geological reports, government publications, periodicals, maps, even microfiche copies of old newspapers. That told me where to look. Then I went out in the field and staked some properties based on what I had read. Two of the properties became major gold discoveries.

Exploration always started with taking stream sediment (silt) samples. Back in 1984-1985 at Treaty Creek (70 km north of Stewart, BC) the first thing I did after staking was the collection of a large silt sample at the base of Treaty Glacier. It ran 0.51 g/t gold, a very anomalous result suggesting a gold source up-glacier. It took a while before we got any kind of gold values in rocks to explain that highly anomalous silt sample--the property was farmed-out five different times—but it eventually happened. In 2016, the property was joint ventured to Tudor Gold, headed by Walter Storm, the German financier who had had outstanding success at Osisko Gold. In 2019 he hired Ken Konkin, award-winning geologist, to head up his program. Now, two years later, Ken has delivered a resource at the Goldstorm/CB zone of 19.5 million ounces of gold equivalent—one of the world’s largest gold discoveries in the last ten years.

A similar thing happened at Red Mountain, 15 km east of Stewart. I staked that property in 1988 and then took a number of samples from a creek draining a large gossan at higher elevation. The samples all registered very high values in gold, silver, copper and zinc, suggesting a large mineralized source upstream. That source was discovered next year in 1989 and now, 31 years and over $60 million later, Red Mountain is awaiting a start-up decision from owner Ascot Resources. The deposit received provincial and federal approval for production in 2019 and has a measured and indicated resource of 783,000 ounces gold. It is smaller than Treaty Creek but higher in grade.

You could say that the same reasoning lies behind Silver Grail’s Pacifico property. The British Columbia government completed a regional geochemical survey of northern Vancouver Island and then published the results, showing high values in cobalt and manganese. I was fortunate enough to be the first person to recognize the potential and stake the ground. Afterwards we have collected many more silt samples from numerous streams, recording cobalt values right up to 2,500 ppm. As was the case at Treaty Creek, it is taking some time to determine the source of the anomalous results, but we are only in the first few years of exploration. Because these results are so high and cover so many streams, I believe that we are dealing with a substantial source or sources. Stay tuned.

I could also say the same about several of our other properties in the Golden Triangle region. For instance, there are some very strong silver, stream sediment anomalies on the Tonga property that have yet to be properly explained. The Tonga is situated between Goliath Resources’ Golddigger property (to the west) and Fury Gold’s Homestake Ridge property (to the east), both of which have active exploration programs this year. Now that silver is much higher in price, we will be having another go at the Tonga in 2021.

-Dino Cremonese, P.Eng, President & CEO