Ridgeline Minerals (TSXV:RDG) - C$33M Sale Funds Hunt for Transformational Deal in North America

Chad Peters (0:00)

Hi, my name is Chad Peters. I'm president and CEO of Ridgeline Minerals. Ridgeline is a precious and base metal hybrid explorer focused in Nevada. We trade on the TSX under RDG, and the OTC under RDG-MF.

SPEAKER_2 (0:13)

Chad, good to see you.

Chad Peters (0:14)

Yeah, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_2 (0:14)

Beaver Creek, how's it been?

Chad Peters (0:16)

It's been really good. Yeah, I think I chatted with Misha, the organizer, and he said it's like 600 more investors than have ever been here before. Yeah. Like largest, highest ever attendance, yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (0:25)

No, I bet they've done a really good show.

Chad Peters (0:26)

Yeah, they do.

SPEAKER_2 (0:27)

Fantastic. Look, last time we spoke, you just made a sale to Nevada Gold Mines.

You got a chunk of money, was it $33M or something like that?

Chad Peters (0:36)

$33M. Okay.

SPEAKER_2 (0:38)

I think a great place to start would be for you to describe how that deal came about. What did you build for them to want to pay that kind of money? Because that kind of encapsulates the model.

Chad Peters (0:50)

Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good point because it wasn't a straight line getting here, I guess.

We initially brought in NGM on our Swift project, which was a very strategic large chunk of ground directly adjacent to their pipeline mine. It's a pretty easy sell, right? Hey, guys, there could be continuity of mineralization onto this project. But then we also did another deal on our Black Ridge project, and the structure of both these deals was essentially a two-phase earn and totaling $40M across both projects, US. And if they hit the various triggers, it would go all the way to a 75% stake for NGM, 25% with Ridgeline. But the difference is that 25% was fully carried to commercial production. So the deals were very much front-end loaded and that money had to be going in the ground fast, which is what happened. We saw $16M US being spent over about a four-year period. We had some pretty good success, but nothing that ever like kind of hit that critical mass discovery that kind of took off. But without a doubt showed there was a big gold system.

And so what was happening was, is we were getting to the end of the first phase earn-in at Swift. And what was really starting to bother me was just the amount of energy being spent on the four-mile deposit, right? So NGM obviously was a partner, Barrick was the discoverer of that. Obviously with NGM being controlled by Barrick, it was taking a lot of the kind of oxygen out of the room. And so we kind of had a strong feeling that by year five, once that earn-in, first phase earn-in was gonna be done, we were probably gonna see our project get shelved, not forever, but I asked the team, I said, well, what do we need to see for drill results that could see us get aggressive at Swift? And they were like, I don't know, maybe 40 meters of 40 grams or 30 meters of 30 And I was like, are you kidding? And they're like, well, that's what we're drilling a four mile. So if you want us to reallocate a rig away from that, it better be pretty damn good. So we kind of realized, all right, we need to do something. We don't just wanna be a hanger on minority partner in a basket of JVs with NGM. So we went back to them and we said, we would be willing to do a cash transaction. We'll throw in a couple other projects we've shown interest in and do a four project deal. And that's where it ended up getting to. So, I mean, to get 23 million US., 33 Canadian, for a bunch of early stage assets with no resource, not even, I would say, not even a discovery hole, right? That's a pretty good return.

SPEAKER_2 (3:03)

It's a pretty good return. And it says the model works to a degree, right?

Chad Peters (3:08)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (3:08)

And we'll get into Selena. And you'll deal with South32 in a second. But when you get money like that, because with your kind of hybrid model you've got, you know, cash comes fleetingly, and then you put it in the ground.

Chad Peters (3:25)

It's typically a bootstrap type of operation. Right.

SPEAKER_2 (3:27)

Now you've got a big chunk of money sitting in front of you. You've got to take the time to sit back and go, well, what do I do with this?

Chad Peters (3:36)

You must have done that. Yeah, it's been like a month and a half since we announced the deal, right? And we've been pretty quiet, and I've had a lot of shareholding. It's almost like making me a bicycle clown, right? Shareholders are like, come on, show me something.