Yukon Metals Extends Birch Copper-Gold Skarn to 1KM and Targets Source Intrusion

Ian Wagner (0:18)

Welcome back to Mining Stock Daily, Ian Wagner here with a corporate update from our friends at Yukon Metals. Yukon Metals is a gold and copper and critical metals explorer with projects across the Yukon. They trade on the CSE under the symbol YMC and on the OTCQB under the symbol YMMCF with a market cap of roughly $58 million Canadian. And we last spoke with Yukon Metals at the end of August, so I would encourage any new listeners to go back and listen to previous episodes. We have covered the Yukon story for some time now.

With us today to catch up on early drill results or first drill results of the season is the CEO of Yukon Metals, Mr. Jim Coates. Jim, good to see you. Welcome back to the podcast.

Jim Coates (1:06)

Absolutely. Thank you, Ian.

Ian Wagner (1:09)

And it is Thursday, October 1st. You're just coming off a week in Beaver Creeks, but you dropped some news today about some drill results, probably the first drill results coming back from drilling at your Birch project, 100% owned Birch Copper Gold project there in the Yukon.

I'll give you kind of pride of place and just tell me what you were drilling for and what you found, and then maybe we can go into the broader context of how it fits into the Birch campaign.

Jim Coates (1:39)

Yeah. So Birch is, as you mentioned, a Copper Gold project in the Central West Yukon. And we drilled this last year and identified scarn mineralization over quite a long strike length and relatively close to the surface. So within tens of meters of the surface, we were seeing intercepts with Copper and Gold.

Over at that point, around an 800 meter strike, which is a large system. And we did this following up on about a 1.4 kilometer Gold and Copper in soil anomaly. So last year was the first drilling that we did with the diamond drills on that project. And we identified an 800 meter set of Copper Gold mineralization within scarns.

And the hole that we drilled this year that we just released the results from is a 200 meter step out to the east of those holes from last year. And what we wanted to test with this hole was whether the scarn mineralization kept on going. And that's partially because we're right at the edge of the existing, or the original claim blocks for birch. And we'd staked a lot more claims covering more ground to the east. And we just wanted to see if the system was open along strike. And it is. So that's the big news is that we're now dealing with a scarn that's a kilometer in length. And we're just defining the edges of it right now. And then we can use more of the geophysics and more of drilling from this year to zoom in on those areas where we'd expect to see higher grade concentrations.

Ian Wagner (3:22)

Yeah. And I think coming into this season, right, the idea, the kind of thesis or the logic was the porphyry.

The porphyry might be the engine here, the scarn is the wheel or you're chasing down the source of this scarn, right? And so within kind of what you guys released today, the hole 7 of, and I should note, right, this is the first of 6 holes for this summer's drilling at Birch. Is that right? And then I'm seeing kind of... Okay. So first here, so we'll have more results to talk about here in the coming weeks.

Some elevated gold, sometimes elevated copper, sometimes silver. So confirmation that it's polymetallic across what you guys have modeled so far. But what... I don't know why I don't want to say this. Yeah, I mean, just... What is this telling you about this scarn's shape, I guess? What have you found?

Jim Coates (4:23)

So what we've found is that this scarn, it runs along a ridge, about a 400-meter-high ridge. And this scarn is actually visible on the surface in several places. And we're intercepting it with multiple holes along the ridge. So it's long, it's associated with marble contacts. And we're also seeing mineralization with higher-grade gold next to fault structures. And so what that says to us is that the scarn is near something that produced the heat and the hot fluids to create this mineralization on this scale. And a kilometer, that's a long strike in order to find mineralization like this.

And so we did a three-dimensional induced polarization and resistivity survey earlier this year. We released that several weeks ago. That showed a IP high about two kilometers south of this scarn.

And that's, an IP high is what you'd expect to see with a intrusive or some sort of large structure at depth. And that is coincident with some high-grade gold on surface. It's coincident with a radiometrics, potassium-thorium ratio high that's indicative of an intrusive, mapped intrusives, as well as copper, moly and gold on the surface. So all of that evidence is pointing us towards that large intrusive center to the south, being the source of the mineralization that's expressing itself along this scarn. The reason that we drill a scarn is that scarns tend to be smaller but higher-grade deposits, so they make a really good juicy way to start a mining operation.