White Gold Corp. (WHGOF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where in the world you're signing in from. I know I saw people from at least 8 time zones today. So, I really appreciate you joining us. I've got with me today, for an exploration update, David D'Onofrio, CEO of White Gold Corp; and Dylan Langille, the company's Vice President of Exploration, who's coming to us live today from site. Gentlemen, how are you?

We are great. How are yourself?

Good. Good. Thank you.

We're doing well. Thanks for the intro.

Awesome. Now here's how today is going to work just for the people in the room. I'm going to first throw it to the speakers for a quick update on the exploration campaign, then I have some questions for them. But then I do want to tackle some questions that came in advance via e-mail. But then finally, questions from the live audience here today. So, there is a chat button on the bottom right corner of your screen. You can ask questions at any time during today's event. Now if for whatever reason, we don't get to your question because we either ran out of time or it didn't quite fit with the conversation, don't worry. I'm still going to make sure the White Gold team gets that question. We can get back to you over e-mail. We'll try to get to as many as we can today. The other thing I'll say, just in terms of housekeeping, today's event is being recorded and will be available for replay probably in the early afternoon Eastern time, it will pop right in your inbox and will also be available on 6ix's YouTube channel. But enough out of me. I do want to get into the protein of today's event. So, David, I'll throw it to you for a quick intro on the exploration campaign.

Perfect. Thanks so much. Really, really exciting to be here, very exciting time in the capital markets, especially as it relates to gold and junior exploration stories. So, I'm David D'Onofrio, I'm the CEO of White Gold. We have with us Dylan Langille. He's a recent addition to our team, and we were very, very fortunate to pick him up coming fresh off the Great Bear discovery. He can get a little more into that, but that's one of the most recent high-profile discoveries in Canada. So, great to have a guy with his experience and success profile join the team here. I'm also a principal of the PowerOne Capital Group, and this company was formed by us in connection with Shawn Ryan. He is a notorious prospector who basically grew up into the mining camps in Timmins and sort of really wanted to take that know-how and go find more gold camps. And he is the guy who's single-handedly responsible for discovering millions and million ounces in the White Gold district. He brought this opportunity to us several years ago, and we really, really liked it for a few reasons. So, over the past 20 years since PowerOne has been around, we've been a very active investor in the resource sector. And our focus and our -- what really excites us is this earlier-stage exploration. And we've been very successful over the years to be involved with several very high-profile success stories across many different commodities, going way back, starting with Aurelian Resources, where they discovered Fruta del Norte. That's now the asset in Lundin Gold, which is one of the most prolific gold producers, single asset type companies out there. We've also been involved, fortunately, with Continental Gold with Ari Sussman. That was acquired a few years ago by a major mining company for $1.4 billion. We're now Ari's partner in collective mining. They've made another incredible discovery in Colombia. There's not a resource on that yet, but people are thinking this is going to be 10 million or potentially even 20 million ounce type discovery. Probably one of the most high-profile discoveries that is out there, lithium. We're early into that sector, co-founding Lithium Americas, which has gone on to do tremendous things, working with the same team on Neo Lithium, which is again acquired. And the reason I mentioned that is, over the years, we've been able to sort of dissect what criteria has led to the best opportunities for success, right? This is a risky business, but risk is what you need to take if you want to have big rewards. And through that process, we've built somewhat of a checklist to ensure that opportunities can check the boxes to make it worth sort of really kind of putting our folks because what we like to do, and I think what we've built a reputation for in the market is to be a very patient but strategic capital partner to these companies where we like to be able to bring ideally all the right pieces of the puzzle around the table early to help the companies have as much success as possible if they're successful in their business operations. So, when we had this opportunity come to us from Shawn, it really checked all the boxes. And just for maybe some people that don't have all the background, White Goldcorp, our asset portfolio is in the Yukon in Canada. We are the largest landholder in what's known as the Klondike district. This is the part of the Yukon that was epicenter of the infamous Gold Rush, which started over a 100 years ago and is going on today. I was just in site a couple of weeks ago and almost every creek is still being mined for placer. There's been over 20 million ounces of gold scratched out of those pacer creeks right from surface and literally almost no modern-day exploration until just recently when Shawn went there, applied some very unique methodologies, which were incredibly successful. So, the first box that he checked is, is it an area where the price can be like outsized. And we believe it is. That type of a history, if you look statistically, those type of gold fields, the type of hard rock deposits that were associated with them are enormous. So that was the first thing that got us so excited. B; jurisdiction, like that's always been important to us. In this day and age, as you can imagine, it's even more important. It's in Canada. It's in a territory where they are extremely supportive of mining. We've seen that over the years and we've also seen it not on the regulatory side, but also on the capital side. This territory, along with the federal government has recently announced that they will be investing hundreds of millions of dollars, specifically to support mining exploration. That type of support is almost unheard of globally. Like, we've been everywhere, we've seen everywhere, and we're really fortunate to be in that type of a position. That actually was announced after we co-founded the company, but that is amazing. The geology, I think the Yukon is now widely understood to be one of the greatest frontiers in Canada from a geological potential perspective that has not seen significant amounts of work. Obviously, there's other camps in Quebec, in Ontario, Newfoundland, where there's been a lot of gold discoveries and other mineral discoveries. But for whatever reason, and part of the reason I think as well, we can get into a little later, this area has not seen the work until recently. And when Shawn went there, along with others and they've done the work, we've now started to see an extremely high rate of discovery. In our district alone, there's been over 5 million ounces of hard rock discovery by Shawn and his team. We also have the Coffee deposit, which is one of Canada's largest critical mineral deposits, billions and billions of pounds of copper and millions and millions of ounces of gold. So that type of prospectivity is very important. And the sort of the other part of this company, which really, really got us excited, and I think this is also what got our partner, Agnico Eagle excited is that we were able to acquire an enormous land mass. We basically own 40% of the district, but this is a district that Shawn has applied his unique methodologies to for over 10 years, and he's cherry-picked the best opportunities, and we've worked the ground and now we've kept where we see the most prospectivity. So, in our view, this company has the prospective to basically own an entire district. And in our mind, it's like going back in time and being able to buy a property package this big, which is 300,000 hectares or 3,000 square kilometers in somewhere like, let's say, Val-d'Or, the Abitibi in Timmins, in the Nevada Gold Field, one of these premier, premier gold camps. And if this plays out like we hope it can, and we're starting to see that it is happening, I can't even fathom to put a value on what that can be worth over time. So, it really sort of checked all the boxes. And obviously, Shawn and his team and the people are extremely important. We're fortunate to have good people along with us. And I really think it's all starting to come together now. We've been doing the work for several years. We've started to drill. So far to date, our success in Shawn methodology has led to the discovery of 1 million ounces of gold in our portfolio. Our flagship deposit today is over 2.3 million ounces at 1.71 grams per tonne. That's one of the highest, if not the highest-grade deposit in the Yukon. It's actually the fifth highest grade open-pitable deposit in Canada at over 2 million ounces. So that on its own is an extremely robust asset. The story is now we're starting to get it out there. These things are few and far between and they're becoming fewer and further between. There's been a real dearth of exploration in the last 10 years, and the producers need more ore to fund their businesses, and the work has not [ gone on ]. So, I do believe companies like White Gold and others will be targets for acquisition or put into development. And that's why I said at the beginning, from a timing perspective in the markets, we're now starting to see that light bulb go off to understand that where is the material going to come from. We're fortunate to have this. A company like White Gold, if you were to go and try and recreate this, it would take 10 or more years and probably $150 million or $200 million. But most importantly, that still would not guarantee the technical success. To have a discovery like this is probably like a 1 in 1,000 type probabilities, and we've done that. So here we are today, we have all this great history behind us, which we think will continue to grow and get much larger, and Dylan will get into that. And we also own this entire district, which we're literally just scratching the surface. We saw what led to the success historically, and we're extremely optimistic it will lead to additional success on the gold side. And then, the third kind of leg of our story, so I think there's 3 parts. There's the defined flagship deposits. There's all this blue-sky opportunity on the gold side. We have some very interesting critical mineral opportunities within our portfolio, which we've done a significant amount of work on over the last few years, and we're continuing to do that today. And we will be looking to sort of package that together and spin it out into a separate vehicle and list that separately so the shareholders of White Gold will also have an interest in that. And that way, we can keep the stories a little bit more focused; one on critical minerals, one on gold exploration and development and look to move those forward. So that's a lot from me. We're extremely excited. From this perspective, I think we are very fortunate to have, I believe, the sponsorship of one of the best, if not the best gold mining company in the world, Agnico Eagle. I believe they share our views on the prospectivity of this land package, and that's why they've maintained themselves as our largest shareholder at 19.9%. We have other very sophisticated people as shareholders within the company. And we're now really engaging to try and get the story out there. And I think it comes at a good time with the Yukon really coming into the focus of prospectivity in Canadian exploration. There's companies like Snowline in our territory, which have done a fabulous job. They discovered, I think it's over 8 million ounces of gold now, $1.5-plus billion type market cap. So, we're seeing that type of success. I think this is what the Yukon has to offer. And I think we are sitting in a perfect position with our properties, where they are, what we know about them and where we think we can take them from here. So, with that, I'll turn it over to Dylan, who can kind of jump into the details and we'll -- any questions, we'll answer them as they come up.

Awesome. So, I got some questions for you guys, if you don't mind, just to get us started. David, I want to start with you, if you don't mind. Dylan, don't worry I'll get you here in a second. But I'm curious if you could provide your -- just commentary generally on the significance of launching the Phase I and Phase II programs. I'm curious how you think that dual approach positions White Gold and obviously, particularly seeing the strong performance you've seen in your stock price this week.

- That's a strategy we've looked to deploy over the last several years. Like I said, I view this company as having 2 types of asset bases. We have our meat and potatoes, which is this incredible asset, which we think we can deliver extreme amounts of additional value from, but we also have this exciting Blue-Sky portfolio. So, some people are more interested in the Blue Sky. Some people say, "Hey, you have this incredible asset. Why don't you just take that to development?" We've sort of been walking the path of dividing our budgets almost equally for both. And Dylan will talk to this. So, I think really, what you do is you get the best of the both world, you're adding value where there's pretty high probability, you know you're going to have success. And then you're actually now looking for opportunities where, when you make new discoveries, these are game changer type value creation events.

Great. Appreciate that. And Dylan, I'm going to get you in here, if you don't mind. From an exploration standpoint, I know with all your experience, what makes you most excited about the current drilling campaign at Golden Saddle?

Yes. So, when I -- ultimately, the company as a whole gets me quite excited. When I decided to join White Gold, the first thing you notice, as Dave has alluded to and mentioned many times is, the scale of the claim package. So, Shawn Ryan and his team have done a phenomenal job collecting over 600,000 soil samples that have highlighted a lot of gold targets, but also a lot of critical metals targets. So, that's an exciting opportunity. We're going to kind of break those up into 2 streams, and that's where you saw the 2 recent press releases where we've announced 2 separate programs to kind of tackle those avenues. So, the critical metals exploration program with the IP geophysics and then the drilling. To answer your question specifically on why I got so excited about Golden Saddle and the existing deposit and resource, I think maybe I'll share some graphics and then maybe flip between some slides and Leapfrog maybe to give the viewers some context.

That would be great.

So, as it stands today, the existing resource on the White Gold property is 2.3 million ounces, and that's made up of 4 components. It's the Golden Saddle, Arc, Ryan's Surprise and VG. And the thing that caught my eye is, these things are all -- as you can see from the figures on the right, these are all open for expansion. And when you're coming into a new program, you try to look for ingredients that prove that theory. Is it really open along strike? Is it really open at depth? And you start to dig through the data and you hope to find positive indicators that there really is room to add to this resource. So, that's what I started doing. I started diving into the data. And before I get into Leapfrog to show you kind of what I've been finding, I'll just give a high-level overview. So, the Golden Saddle deposit, it's hosted in a sequence of meta-volcanic and meta-intrusive rocks of the Yukon-Tanana Terrane. And this deposit is structurally controlled. And it's associated with 2 key fault sets. And those 2 key fault sets are these east-west striking shear zones and the north striking thrust faults. Those fault systems ultimately act as conduits for gold-bearing hydrothermal fluids and the structures control the geometry of those ore bodies. So, if I flip over to Leapfrog, I just want to make sure you guys can see my Leapfrog project.

Yes, looks great.

So, we're looking down from the sky. We're looking down over on top of Golden Saddle and Arc. And I just mentioned 2 geometries. So, if you tilt this and you look down the depth of the mineralization, the overall -- sorry, I'm just going to grab a pointer so I can point things out. The overall geometry -- oh, that's not going to work. Sorry, one second. You can see my cursor, right?

Yes, absolutely.

The overall geometry of the mineralization envelope is [ striking ] shallowly about 55 degrees towards north. And if you take a slice along the main zone of the deposit, what you start to identify is that internal to this carrot-shaped mineralization envelope, there's potentially these high-grade tabular pipe-like ore bodies that are forming. And that's likely controlled by these structures. So, something you start to recognize is there's 2 holes at depth, this hole at the bottom and this one above that are about 225 meters spaced apart. And they ran good grades. The one at the top ran 2.7 grams over 3.6 meters and the one at the bottom ran 3.5 grams over 2 meters. So those are good intercepts, but it didn't really capture the plunge of this potential high-grade system. The core of this system, these drill holes at the core are intersecting grades like 3.7 grams over 66 meters, including 7 grams over 23 meters. It's really high-grade core. And there's also other intercepts that are 8 grams over 10 meters. So, I think there's a real opportunity to test the high-grade plunge of the system. The other thing that got me quite excited about in terms of opportunities, and we announced it in the drill program is the opportunity to resample and relog some historic core. So, what you can see here in the green outside of the pit shape is the amphibolite, it's the mafic rocks and internal to that where you see a lot of the high-grade occurring in this orange kind of outline is the orthogneiss. So, a lot of the historic sampling really focused on this felsic unit. And if I toggle on and off. So, you see these blue intervals flashing. That's unsampled drill core. And that's represented right now by a 50-meter slice on the highest-grade portion of the deposit. So, you start to question the opportunity around sampling core outside of the felsic, what previously were thought to be containing the high-grade quartz veins and you start to look for opportunities to sample the quartz veins in the mafic. So, a few weeks ago, we had a tour come through with the Yukon Mining Alliance. So, I was out with -- in the field with our senior geologist, Steve, and we were pulling core to show the tour coming through. And one thing we started to notice was, we were opening all these boxes of core, and there's a lot of amphibolite mafic rocks with quartz vein in it that just weren't sampled. So, what we started to look at was, well, where is there examples that this core is sampled and does it run? So, I want to direct your attention to this hole. It's outside of the orthogneiss. It's in the amphibolite in the mafic package, and it's got quartz vein. Unfortunately, this hole was sampled. So, if I just flip back to the presentation, I have an example here. This is the hole. That's that hole sitting in the mafic. It was sampled, and you can see how the grade ran 2 grams, 2.3 grams, 1.7, 0.5 and 5.5. That's a nice composite in what is a rock package that was historically not sampled thoroughly. So, that got me quite excited. It's a pretty low-hanging fruit to go out. It's cost effective, pull all these intervals highlighted in blue and start resampling them. And I think what you're going to start to see is, you're going to have an opportunity to reinterpret the mineralization system, and it opens the door to the understanding that these quartz veins are coming from depth. So, the exist -- this plumbing system that's feeding this gold is open, and we need to drill test that. The other opportunities that exist that are mentioned in the press release are with the hanging wall and footwall mineralization that hasn't been captured in sampling in previous years as well. So, if I go back to a top-of-view looking down, and I flash that unsampled core, you can see pretty clearly that there's a lot of unsampled core in the hanging wall to the north and there's a lot of unsampled core in the footwall to the south. So, the core pulling program and the resampling and relogging is really going to focus on this hanging wall, and we're going to start to see that there's grade there that improves the strip ratio and the economics of the open pit. And I think that we're going to add a lot of ounces once we start diving into the remodeling and wire framing, which controls that resource model. The drill program specifically, if I cut a section along the hanging or the footwall of the deposit, is targeting infill drilling between 2 intercepts that ran around 4 grams per tonne over 12 meters. So, what we want to do is we want to put pierce points between these 2 ore panels, and we want to add ounces that way. So, as you can see, there's a handful of things that got me quite excited about the opportunity at Golden Saddle. And those are kind of just 4 topics. It's parallel zones, so we're going to test those through drilling. It's the relogging, resampling of the historic core. We're going to be doing some metallurgical and geotechnical sampling to advance this to a PEA. And then, we're going to do some wire frame modeling at a lower cutoff grade to hopefully express more continuity in all the mineralization. Hopefully, I was able to convey your question there.

Definitely, lots to be excited about. David, I'll turn to you on strategy, actually. So, I gather it's from all this but also the press release that the Golden Saddle zone is open in multiple directions, significant expansion opportunities in both that hang wall and the footwall zones. So, I'm curious from a strategic perspective, how does expanding Golden Saddle compare to developing those other deposits like Arc, Ryan's Surprise and VG in terms of timeline to production, capital efficiency, et cetera?

Yes. So, it's a good question. So, one thing that should be clear, like those other deposits are actually all part of the same project, known as the White Gold project. They're very close to each other. Now we have not done a PEA yet, but a PEA is something that's on deck for -- probably gets completed early next year. And that is a very important milestone in the development process for a company like this. And so, Dylan that was an excellent job of sort of talking about one aspect or one area where we think we can see tremendous growth. And maybe this will come up a little bit later, but just to sort of boil that down. So, there is -- the project itself with the 4 ore bodies. In the last couple of years, what we've been doing is not so much drilling this main deposit itself. We sort of knew it was there. We knew it can grow. But strategically, what we said is, let's go look for other zones of mineralization within a close proximity. So, we gave ourselves a 10-kilometer radius knowing that, that would then encapsulate all part of the same project, and we're very successful with that. We discovered the Ryan's Surprise. That is a brand-new discovery. We included that into our last resource update. And it's what's exciting to us. That was a very limited amount of drilling. It held together well. It was high grade. We believe that can expand significantly. And then -- but we then we left it. And we said, okay, let's go find another one. Let's go find another one. And as you see in a lot of other types of deposits, there's often a string or like pearls on a -- beads on a string type thing, and we're seeing more and more along, that's the trend. Now that Ryan's Surprise is on a highly mineralized trend, which has been identified through soil sampling. This was the primary key that Shawn Ryan has used to discover these ore bodies in the past. So this trend now has been outlined for 6 kilometers. It's only 2 kilometers west of our flagship deposit, the Golden Saddle. It's seen very little work and the work that it's seen, that's a great picture of it, has really been very, very prospective. So, strategically, we will continue to work that. So, sorry, back to the original question. So we see opportunity on the actual main ore body itself. What some of these things, ideas that Dylan has brought up, this is brand-new type perspective that we never thought about, and that's the benefit of bringing new eyeballs. I mean strategically, you should always do that in any business that you're in. That's right in the core. Then there's other prospectivity immediately adjacent to these core deposits like the Arc, which has been very under-drilled, like the Ryan's Surprise. along that trend. And then the third sort of level of prospectivity, which is all within this just White Gold project is additional new targets like the Golden Saddle West, where we've added ounces like the Ryan's Surprise, like the QV, where we have about 6 to 10 brand-new targets, the soil has been done, the geophysical work has been done. These look very similar to where we have discovered ore bodies to start to test those. And -- so this year, we've kind of come back to sort of the mothership. We said, "Guys, there's low-hanging fruit here." Let's put these points on the board as we look to bring because now we're at a point where this has the critical mass, we can start moving it down the development pipeline, doing the economic studies. So we've done some of the preliminary work for that and getting ready. And just logically looking at other PEAs that are out there, some of the criteria here stack up very, very well. Number one is the grade. Like the grade is always going to be very important. Number two is the metallurgy on the Golden Saddle. It's just phenomenal. That -- this comes right to surface. It's all in an open pit and its location. So I am extremely optimistic of what this is going to look like when we do the work. And in our studies, we started doing this last year using like $2,000 gold price. I think that's important. You always want to be kind of planning for best case scenario, gold is at $3,000, we'll see where it goes, and that's just going to be gravy for us. So there's sort of 3 levels of very, very significant expansion. We're extremely fortunate that we think that the highest probability type work is going to be very rewarding on its own. So -- and that's, again, just on this one project. And we're extremely excited to do the more work on that. And I think Dylan will walk through a little bit later, is like what would he do to eventually get all that work done and where does it think it gets us.

Yes. I think a good you, you hit the nail on the head, David. I think the thing to remember is Golden Saddle is kind of the most near-term opportunity to add to our resource base, and that's something that we really wanted to tackle this year. We wanted to take Golden Saddle off the shelf, dust it off and show that it's bigger than it's currently modeled in terms of ounces. And there's some really low-hanging fruit and opportunities to prove that. So I think that's where the start is. And then we continue to look abroad on the White Gold property. And from the map that was displayed, you see there's gold and soil anomalies everywhere across the property. So once we tackle Golden Saddle, proved our theories, we're kind of gearing up for a bigger program next year. And I think you'll start to see some exciting opportunities develop from that.

Sorry, one other thing I should add, and if I'm getting ahead of future questions, you can ask those or not ask those later. In terms of the catalyst, we're going to have a significant amount of catalyst in the very near-term. Part of that is going to be a resource update for work that has been done before everything we've been talking about so far in this call. There's been an area identified in and around and adjacent to the Golden Saddle for the area for future exploration. It's about 10 million to 12 million tonnes grading somewhere between 1 and 2 grams. And with this like reevaluation with the modeling and the wire framing, we believe that is going to be able to add additional ounces. So that's like historic done. That is going to come in for a catalyst. We're going to have all the work from this year as a catalyst. We're going to have sort of the spinout that we've been talking about, I think, is a catalyst, and then we're going to have the economic PA to follow that. So a lot, a lot of information is going to come out, and I really think it's going to be very impressive to the market. And fortunately, in a very good time when these types of projects are coming into focus amongst the investment community.

Yes, it's a good year for that kind of news flow. That's great. I do want to zoom and talk about critical minerals. I've got a question for each of you there. Dylan, I know you touched on it already. The Phase 1 focuses heavily on copper, moly, tungsten targets. Given the current market dynamics for critical minerals or critical metals, which of the 3 properties, Bridget, Guilder or Mount Hart, to you represents the most immediate development opportunity and why? You're on mute, sorry, Dylan. I make that mistake once a day.

Sorry. It's a good question. It's a tough one to answer, and I don't think I can narrow it down to one. With the portfolio of properties that we've got, there's numerous critical metals targets. And that's why we've narrowed it down. We've done our best to narrow it down to 3 for this year, and that was put out in the press release. And I'll just share my screen and I'll cover them quickly. So, the first property, all these properties present as copper, moly, tungsten, tellurium, silver, anomalies in soil. So, what we decided to do is run IP surveys on them. So, we're going to run broad gradient IP surveys, and then we're going to follow those up with selective dipole surveys to give us that 3D look at things. So the first target that we're tackling is the Mount Hart target on the Nolan property. And if you look at the figures on the right, it represents a large-scale bullseye zoned multi-element geochemical anomaly, including elements of gold, silver, copper, tungsten. And the way that it presents with that bullseye kind of pattern, it tells us that there's the potential for a porphyry system to exist at depth. So the distributions lie within a strongly silicified and locally clay-altered conglomerate. And the rocks observed on surface are a series of biotite-altered or blend diorite plugs with potassic alteration. So, mapping strongly suggests that there's a porphyry at depth and the alteration at surface suggests the same thing. So, we're doing a 34-line kilometer gradient survey on that as we speak. The other exciting opportunity in the critical metal stream is the Bridget target on the Pedlar property. So that's a 3x3.5 kilometer anomaly. It's quite large. And that sits just 20 kilometers northeast of Western Copper and Gold's Casino deposit, which is a significant deposit in the region. And the tungsten anomalies are quite high. So we see tungsten anomalies upwards of 101 ppm with a lot of the samples frequently above 30. And those are overprinted by both copper and moly soil anomalies. And the soil -- the copper anomalies are commonly greater than 100 ppm and the moly anomalies are commonly above 300 ppm. So we're running a 40-line kilometer gradient survey over this target, and that's actually complete. So we're about 50% complete our geophysics program as of today. And then the third target is known as Guilder on our Loonie property. And again, this is a high copper and moly soil anomaly target. And it sits on, on strike from Lucky Joe target. So it's structurally controlled. It points to an already known copper anomaly. So we're running a 22-line kilometer gradient survey over that, and then we'll follow it up with a selective dipole-dipole survey. And I think what you'll start to see is that we're putting these 3 key targets in a pipeline for drilling. And as David mentioned, we're going to try and spin out these critical metals targets into its own company so that we can focus on these 2 different avenues more specifically.

And just one thing I'll add, and this is very important in mining statistically, your best chances of finding a deposit is near an existing deposit. And so where we are, especially that Bridget target, that's right down by the Casino. Also Newmont's Coffee project is right there. And the Coffee project is north of $2 million. The Casino, like I mentioned, I think it's the largest copper gold porphyry in Canada, still undeveloped. This is elephant country. And we have these targets that are not very dissimilar. They've just never seen the work for one reason or the other. So the opportunity is there, if they were, they're big. And that's why we also want to split this because these things need the focus, they need the time, they need the work, and that's going to help us do that.

Awesome. And David, I'll stick to you actually while we're on critical minerals. You mentioned in the PR arranging accretive corporate opportunities for critical mineral projects. Just looking to see if you could elaborate on what types of partnerships or deals you're considering or looking at?

Well, the main thing is, what we've touched on is to now take -- those critical mineral properties, isolate them and move them into a new vehicle. Exactly how that's going to be structured is in the process that currently as we speak, that's something we're looking to execute on in the near-term. But the theory or the strategy will be like shareholders in the company today or when the deal -- it is announced, how it's announced, will become shareholders in this critical minerals company. So you'll now kind of double your investment, double your exposure and be benefiting from increased work and focus on both streams here, which I think are both incredibly exciting for us.

Awesome. There's one question from the chat that just because it's right on topic, I'm going to throw in right now. Ken asked, how far is Coffee from Saddle?

I can answer that. I think it's about 30-odd kilometers. What's interesting is -- so this -- I mentioned earlier, infrastructure. There's -- the main project is called the Resource Gateway program. That's 3 main roadways that are being built in the Yukon to support this mine exploration. One of those -- actually, 2 of those touch our projects. One comes from the south to go to the Coffee. It comes right on our Betty property, which is a very exciting project contiguous to Newmont's Coffee project. We've had extremely high-grade discovery there in last few years. We're hitting 20-gram type of material. We're hitting -- some of the other 50-plus meters or 3.5 grams, all from surface. So these are company makers on their own. And frankly, there's other stand-alone companies out there with properties that have less success than that and probably trading at very significant market cap. So this is like a treasure chest of opportunity. And as we continue to advance them, I think we got to bring them to the forefront. And this is -- it's an hour call whatever it's going to be, but this sort of shows you like how much stuff we have packed into White that we're probably not going to be able to touch on half of it. And that's fine. I just want to keep -- the message here today is, we got 3 big things we're focusing on with this incredible deposit that we think can get a lot bigger and move down the production path. We have incredible blue-sky opportunities on the gold side, and we have these really interesting critical mineral projects, which we're going to spin out. But you asked the question about the Coffee. So if you look at the green line there, it goes from the north of Dawson right down to the Coffee project. That's about 100 kilometers. You see our Golden Saddle, the star right on top of it. It's in the vicinity of 30-odd kilometers. Now there is existing today a roadway that's used by the plaster miners. There is like tons of plaster activity, like I mentioned, I actually got photos 2 days ago from a plaster miner 400 meters from our camp showing little nuggets of gold they're getting out of the Creek just by plaster mining in the old way. It's crazy how much gold is everywhere. Anyways that road is going to be upgraded. So you can today drive from our project to Coffee. That's all going to be upgraded as part of this resource gateway project. And what's so incredibly fortunate for us, that basically comes right through our entire land package and gives us road access to anything. And that is the beginning steps of the evolution of a mining camp, because now once you have road access everywhere, you don't not need to discover 2 or 3 or 4, 5 whatever millions of ounces. Basically, anything you find within, I don't know, 50 or 60-kilometer radius that can be trucked to one of the different facilities. And that's what you see in Timmins and Val-d'Or and everywhere else. And we basically own all that real estate because I think the Coffee, that project is fully permitted now. That's going to go. That will be a heap leach. We'll have our mill, depending on what type of ores you have 2 of the options that you need, and it's all going to work. So it really, really increases the economic prospectivity for everything that we have is very, very important to us. And I think people are now just becoming aware of how significant that is for our district.

Awesome. David, one thing I'm going to bounce off something you said earlier in today's chat is you started to work -- preparatory work for a PEA. I'm curious if you could give us just some more color on that for folks in the room.

Listen, we've been working like this project for -- looking down the line, when you move a project forward, there's a lot of steps, a lot of different milestones and a lot of different work. So a lot of times, you see the drilling, you see that sort of what's the obvious, but you want to make sure you're advancing that part for a deposit to be a mine, you want to make sure it's economic at the end of the day. So in that, there's engineering studies that have a lot of different analysis of different things, the situation of the deposit, the metallurgy of the deposit, where the facilities will go, what the infrastructure is, what the power is. And so we've started to do all that investigation, that takes years to do. And we've done most of that. And then -- and actually, internally, we do have our own study today. And now we're looking to take that to the next step to make it 43-101 compliant and be able to announce it to the market. And we're actually fortunate that the Coffee project nearby had recently gone through that process, and we were able to work with a lot of the same consultants that did that. So they had very accurate up-to-date information that we're able to use, which is kind of what got us really so excited even at much lower gold prices of how robust of a project this can be.

Awesome. Dylan, I'm going to throw it to you, and I'm going to ask if you don't mind just to kind of zoom out and sum up a little bit. That's really -- my question is, in your mind, what kind of potential do you think with all your experience that the White Gold project has in its entirety? And what do you think is going to be required to get it there?

That's a good question. I think the only way that we're -- I think there's a lot of opportunity to grow the resource base on the White Gold property. And I think the focus of that is going to be the Golden Saddle and the Arc. These are high-grade systems. The Arc on its own is only drilled to 100 to 150-meter vertical depth, and it represents right now about 250,000 ounces. So it's an easy target to add a whole bunch of RAB drilling and add ounces to your resource. But first, we're going to do some metallurgical test work on that to prove that the recoveries are better. So that will be kind of Phase 1 of the program. But if I could quickly flash because one thing you do when you come in is David asked me, well, what is the potential and what would you hit this deposit with in terms of drilling? So I'll just share my screen again. Please confirm you can see leapfrog there...

Yes. That's good.

So ultimately, we want to -- we're getting back to Golden Saddle. We want to prove some of our theories for improved economics of mineralization, looking for parallel zones. We're going to drill into the footwall breccia. We're going to add ounces through the hanging wall mineralization and remodeling. And then ultimately, we want to gear up towards a program kind of depicted here in leapfrog. So we want to put a series of holes into Arc, and we want to put a whole bunch of drilling into Golden Saddle and we want to add ounces. And this is kind of what -- if the program is bigger, this is kind of what we would do, and that's kind of what we're geared up towards for next year and the year after.

Just to jump in for one thing. It's like this is sort of a semantic definition thing when Dylan says improve, that's more like make even better. This is already great from what we're seeing, but it's adding like gravy and icing to the cake here. Just to put it in sort of a capital markets mindset for people to understand it.

I appreciate that perspective. David, I got one last one for you before I jump into questions over e-mail. I know with 300,000 hectares across 21 properties, how -- just trying to get in your head strategically, how are you prioritizing capital allocation between expanding known resources versus exploring the greenfield targets? What's driving those decisions?

So strategically, like I touched on before, we've taken the approach that we want to kind of split the pie. We're going to have our meat and potatoes. We know there's like low-hanging fruit value that we can add there, but we also want to swing for the fences on a new thing. When does the work get done? Shawn has developed this incredible protocol that's led to all these discoveries in the district. I really do think we've cracked the code. And now we're starting to apply that protocol to all these different properties. And it's systematic. It takes time. It's based on data. Like we have now, I think, the largest geochemical database in the world. And maybe there's even an opportunity to put that into AI and God only knows what's going to get spit out after that. But I think we have between Dylan and Shawn's pretty good computers that have been so successful to date. And then once the work is done and as it checks the box, okay, the soil geochemistry is there, okay, this type of geophysics are there, the next type of geophysics is there, now it's drill ready, right? So they go through that system. And what's really nice now is we've been in the background working up all these different properties. If they don't meet mustard, we don't -- we get rid of them. But look, we've been able to keep now, I think we have 27 highly prospective properties. We've talked about 3 today. And once they're ready, that's when they get drilled. And what's very exciting for me is that we're now at the point where the majority of these are drill ready. So these are targets that can act, and that's the most exciting time of any exploration coming when these projects are -- and a lot of guys will drill too early, but these ones have all checked the box. Now we have several others, we'll continue to work up and we'll have a pipeline for years and years and years to come. Like I said, this is a very early stage of what we believe a Tier 1 mining camp in Canada, but that is how we need to allocation of reverses.

Awesome. So I'm going to move into some of the questions that came in, in advance over e-mail. First one is a quick one for whichever of you is interested in answering. How are fire conditions around property this year?

Things are fine right now. We've got a lot of rain in the last few weeks, those isolated thunderstorms that like to roll through in the mid-afternoon. In early July, there were some more fires in the Dawson and surrounding area. So we did have some smoke through camp, but there's nothing threatening right now. I think the fire is minimal right now.

Great. Thank you. There's one question which I know we've already sort of tackled, but I'll just do it as kind of reiteration, make sure we get to it. Somebody wrote in to say, recent press release highlights impressive multi-element targets, data-driven approach using historic data revealing blue sky potential. Curious, how do you plan to unlock value from these discoveries alongside expanding gold resource? Like I said, I know we already tackled it. David, if you want to just touch on.

Yes, I think part of it is -- there is a lot of stuff. People will ask me like, hey, how about the Betty? That was a lights out new discovery. We're not working on that today. You know what, listen, there's a strategy and over time, as I think we get bigger budgets, we'll continue to work on those. But we're going to focus right now where we think we have the immediate opportunity to add the most value. And I think what we've outlined today is going to do that. So it's really exciting. But those are all very, very important projects, and they will all get the work they deserve.

Awesome. Dylan, I know you had extra thoughts, so I'll turn it to you real quick.

No, I was just suggesting like we've identified this year the 3 key critical metals targets that we're going to get to the drill-ready phase. And I think once that copper or that critical metals spin-out company gets formed, I think you start to strategize and put everything into a pipeline. And I think that will kind of help us advance all these portfolios forward in the 2 different avenues, whether it be gold or whether it be critical metals.

Perfect. Now there's a couple of questions over e-mail and one in the chat. So I'll combine them all kind of together. That's really, do you expect to offer any private placements anytime soon? Or do you have upcoming capital raises?

This program is fully funded. So we raised some capital last year, and we're fully funded here.

Perfect. There's a couple of questions in the chat from Alan. I'll try to summarize them all into one, which is really what is timeline to production? I know we've touched on it, but just for some clarity, for the flagship project, what's the overall timeline to get to a poor?

I think a lot of that will come out of our PEA. We're going to sort of be embarking on over the course of the next several months. If you look at different places around, what we're very fortunate is to have a project in our backyard that just went through the permitting process. So it's a known process. All the parties are engaged. If you look at how long it took to permit the Coffee, I think a few years, that's probably a similar type of a timeline we can pursue, assuming that we do the work, which I think now in this market, we definitely in this type of environment, we will definitely be doing that because I think this is going to be an extremely exciting opportunity and a great mine at some point in time in the near future.

Tarek from the chat asked, I know you've already touched on this, but just again for clarity, asked any spin-out plans?

Yes. I think Dylan touched on that. It's -- I think it's a huge value creation opportunity for shareholders that's just not known or well understood.

Awesome. And if you have a ballpark, Tarek, also want to know how much cash has gone into the ground.

I got -- that's a good question. Maybe I'll get back to you guys on that. It's like -- it's well north of $100 million. That's something I touched on earlier. This is the exciting thing. And this is now the market -- we're in a gold cycle here, right? The gold price started going up about a year ago. And as has happened in all the gold cycle, the money capital is first going to go to the producers, the Agnico of the world. Agnico has had a tremendous -- it's gone from $60 to $175. And I think it continues to go higher. They're just such an amazing mining company. Then the capital look to say, okay, well, what's next? Okay, the mid-tiers, okay, what's next to developers? What's next to these exceptional discovery stories like collective. And here we are today, so now -- so the capital really hasn't come to this, I'll call it, next subset, which is companies with good assets in good places until I feel just recently, we started to see a little bit of interest. Like my phones rang more in the last like 2 months than it has in the last 2 years because people are saying, all right, well, we've had these returns and maybe let's try to figure out where that next piece of leverage is. And when you look to it, and it makes sense because now like I said, to go and recreate this, you're going to take for sure, more than 10 years and for sure, more than $150 million, probably $200 million or more in today's dollars. So it's well north of $100. It's a lot of time. But most importantly, we've had the technical success, which is a very low probability to do. And that's a kudos to the team. And what we're really so excited about, we've seen the signature that led to that success. We see what we have in the balance of our portfolio, and we expect to be able to do that over and over again here in the coming years.

Just to add some context, it's not so much dollar figures in the ground, but I have some stats on the current resource with those 4 deposits with Golden Saddle, Arc, Ryan's Surprise and VG. So it's -- we've got about 80,000 meters in the ground across 300 holes to give you some context. So that there's not a tonne of drilling. It's a decent amount, but it's only down to a vertical depth of 500 on Golden Saddle. So I think that tells you a lot.

Yes. I think one thing that Dylan sort of opened my eyes on is when I was at Great Bear, my job was to take that thing from discovery up as many ounces as I could. And he started at 2 rigs, you can tell and we've never had that. There's never been that type of investment. I think that's some good context. And maybe Dylan could share like...

Yes. That was coming into joining White Gold, that was kind of my key priority was to convince Dave and the team that we should get back to Golden Saddle and we should grow this thing because there really is more opportunity. And I hope I've been able to convey that today on the call. We're going to have drill results coming out soon. We're going to do the updated resource modeling. You're going to start to see more mineralization from the unsampled ore string together better than you didn't previously see. So I think growing this thing is a key strategy for White Gold at this point.

Awesome. I love when people are on site and get helicopter noises, it's very authentic. I think it's cool.

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I got one from -- No, no, it's good. Honestly, it's fine. Feltus from the chat asked, just looking for your perspective on recent share price appreciation for White Gold.

I think we've gone -- started to tell the story, right? It's -- we spent a lot of time with some new personnel, get everyone up to speed, get our program plan. So we've sort of been really head down on that. And it's just really over the last few weeks, we've been out there to tell the story. And fortunately, it's resonating. It is really a very unique opportunity. And I think it checks a lot of boxes for investors, too. There's a real resource, lots of growth, incredible blue sky opportunity and most importantly, a market that's receptive to this type of opportunity.

Awesome. Ian from the chat says, notes he's a shareholder and the juniors have had a tough time in the last couple of years, but with resource prices, free cash flows, majors are starting to sniff around. So he's really curious, Dave, for your perspective on how are you seeing the M&A action heating up? And how would you describe the interest from Agnico specifically?

That's a really good question, right? Like from a capital markets perspective from an investors perspective, like you're driving value in certain ways, what is the market like to see? And I think for the last couple of years, no one has disagreed that these juniors were undervalued, but there was really no FOMO, right? Like why would I -- I can buy something bigger and they're sort of bumping along this multi-multiyear bottom for people that aren't -- the basket of juniors has basically been at near or at all-time lows for the last several years, even with gold going up to basically all-time high. So there's this huge delta, which hopefully will come to close. And as the interest comes, I think it accelerates upon itself. One of the factors that does drive that historically is M&A. And that has started. We're starting to see it. We're starting to see better and better gold prices paid. There was an M&A event 2 weeks ago, where I think the price is about USD 160 an ounce. So you kind of take that as somewhere in an earlier stage in M&A cycle and hopefully grows from there, that would give an incredibly robust valuation to White Gold with only what we know today. What's that going to look like when we put out our resource, we do the work, and we can double or even potentially triple our deposit size. So I think that's going to drive it. We're starting to see it. And from being kind of in base rate in the flow, I know there's a lot of activity in the sector where these companies now, they're at all-time highs, a lot of the producers. So they're looking to take that leverage and increase -- and they need to though, they really don't have the supply to fund their production profiles in the future. So I think there's going to be this kind of awakening at some point in time here where -- and once it starts, it's sort of snowballs because then you get a little FOMO amongst the producers and the majors like, okay, well, that asset has gone, this asset is gone, we need to get some more assets here.

Appreciate that extra context for sure. I know we're running towards the end of the hour. So I'll just end with one comment from the chat from Ken. Which says, let's make this project the next Great Bear. I think that's fun and exciting considering Dylan is on the call.

Right way to do it.

Yes, there you go. But Dylan and David, thank you so much for running through all these questions. Thanks, everybody, who joined the room. I know there's a couple of questions we didn't get to. But what I'm going to do is send all those questions to the White Gold team to make sure that they can get back to you over e-mail. So don't worry if we didn't get to a couple of questions we couldn't today. But thanks so much for joining us, and we can watch the replay if you'd like coming out this afternoon. David, Dylan, thanks so much. Hope you have a great afternoon.

Okay. Thanks so much, guys. And yes, maybe we got to do another one as we could dive deeper into some of these opportunities with get the geos on and going. And listen, I hope everyone understands why we're so excited about this and follows us. I think we're in for a great journey here in the next coming years.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Have a great afternoon, folks.

Bye.