Two Mines in Lapland: Why Valkea Thinks New Discoveries Will Have a Buyer.

Trevor Hall (0:15)

When Agnico Eagle paid about 2.9 billion Canadian for Rupert Resources, it was buying the Ikkari, a discovery made by a small team using a systematic, geoscience-led approach. Several of the people behind that discovery now run Valkea Resources, which holds a 350-square-kilometer in the same belt. In September, Valkea completed drilling at Kari, its first new target, and put a base of till rig to work across its wider Paana property. You can find a new website with lots of updated information at valkearesources.com.

With me is CEO, Thomas Credland. Thomas, welcome to Mining Stock Daily.

Thomas Credland (0:55)

Hi, Michael. It's good to be back.

Trevor Hall (0:58)

Thomas, your deck talks about turning over ground quickly while making timely and thoughtful decisions. You've drilled five holes at Kari, three showed disseminated sulfides. What can you judge from the core, and what are the assays going to be telling you?

Thomas Credland (1:15)

Well, it's always hard to tell until you get the assays. I guess when you're looking for a gold deposit, you're looking for good, suitable host lithologies. You're looking for deformation, and we know that there's gold nearby at Aarnivalkea West.

We're looking for a situation where you have all three of those things coincide. I think there's definitely some interesting new lithologies there which have potential to host orogenic gold. We'll wait and see what the assays are like, but it's one target of 24, so it's early days.

Trevor Hall (1:57)

Kari also gave you a chance to drill test the Regional Moosa Shear.

One, two, three. Kari also gave you the chance to drill test the Regional Moosa Shear. Why do shears matter for the kind of gold deposit you're looking for and what did you learn?

Thomas Credland (2:13)

Well, you're always drilling around these big regional structures because often they're the conduits for the goals.

So, you're looking for defamation and looking for setups where you may host, you may see bigger deposits. But what we can see from some of the new data that we've been gathering, we've got a new Heromag surveys that there's areas of structural complexity to the west of Kari. So, as we cycle through our targets, there's 12 potential targets on the wider Paana property. So, I think it's important to note that Kari was a target that we could access in the summer, where often you have wetter conditions. But really, we expect to build activity levels up from November, when the diamond rings come back and we can access some of these swampier areas. So, I think it's a bit of a proof of concept in terms of our workflows and our understanding of the southern parts of Paana. But really, the exciting bit will probably start in November.

Trevor Hall (3:28)

Now, in your September 22nd news release, you also said that preliminary metallurgical work is underway. Why are you starting that work now?

Thomas Credland (3:38)

Well, we have almost 15,000 meters at the Aarnivalkea West property. There's known gold mineralization there, but we're very keen to understand everything we can about our projects. I think given that we treat Aarnivalkea West as an advanced exploration target, and so it's important to get everything that we can from that 15,000 meters or so of drilling that we have there. It's also important to recognize that in this district, you often have refractory gold mineralization as evidenced at the Kittela mine. Again, we're trying to understand everything we can about our assets.

The MET test work we're doing on Aarnivalkea is designed to really understand whether we have a Kittela star mineralization or if it's more plain vanilla like Ikkari, which is the thing that the deposit that Agnico has just bought with the repack acquisition.

Trevor Hall (4:42)

Your deck compares Aarnivalkea till anomalies to Kittela with values up to 10,600 parts per billion.

You're also retesting that same historical sampling. Why are you doing the retesting right now, Thomas?

Thomas Credland (5:02)

Well, we understand there's a huge variability in terms of some of the historic data set. One of the things that we did at Rupert was to really dial in those base of till rigs. You want to be sampling an area right above the bedrock surface.

If you have a data set that's too shallow, you'll be sampling glacial till, which is kind of, given the number of glaciations that have been through this area, it's really not that effective if you're sampling till versus base of till, to really vector in on a deposit. So at the beginning of the program, it's very, very important to understand what your till thickness is and to make sure that you're getting to the right depth. Otherwise, you can obviously, that means otherwise your data set could be invalid. If you don't have a rig that's powerful enough, it's not hitting the base of till interface.