Read on for my first interview with Mr. Greg Schifrin, President & CEO of Blackrock Gold (TSXV:BRC). Blackrock recently announced that it completed the initial terms for the option of the Silver Cloud property in Nevada, which is located in a prolific area for gold projects as you can see in this map I made showing a few of the mines nearby. Find out more on the company’s website: https://blackrockgold.ca
Peter Bell: Hello, this is Peter Bell. I’m here with Greg Schifrin, CEO of Blackrock Gold. Hello Greg!
Greg Schifrin: Hello, Peter.
Peter Bell: Nice to be talking with you. Recent news that the company completed a financing and is proceeding with the Silver Cloud property – congratulations!
Greg Schifrin: Thank you.
Peter Bell: Any details of that that you could elaborate on? Was it an IPO?
Greg Schifrin: No, it wasn’t. It was just a private placement as the company was already publicly-listed. We were planning for a private placement for $800,000 but then realized we had a lot more interest, so we notified the exchange and increased it to $1.3 million. We raised approximately $1.3 million, which we closed the week before last.
Peter Bell: Thanks for clarifying. I recall now that the history of this company goes back quite a while. I’ve dug through the old news releases and there’s been some changes over time but there are some stalwarts of the Vancouver junior mining community on the board of directors. You’ve gotten involved fairly recently yourself, right?
Greg Schifrin: Yes. I believe Blackrock did an RTO back in 2016 and they went through some management changes since then. They first approached me to get involved with Blackrock in late 2017. After I looked at the company and checked on what condition it was in, I got involved in the start of 2018 and have been working through the process of cleaning things up, getting the option agreement together on Silver Cloud, and then doing this financing so that the company had the working capital to move forward.
Peter Bell: And it seems like the “right place, right time” for Blackrock with Silver Cloud because of the recent news of Hecla’s acquisition of Klondex and the Hollister Mine. That one is right near you – similar deposit type and everything.
Greg Schifrin: Correct.
Peter Bell: I was digging through the technical report on Hollister and there’s lots of some interesting geological information that I’m curious to talk about eventually. The first point to make is that these are epithermal, low-sulphidation deposits rather than the typical Carlin style gold deposits.
Greg Schifrin: That’s right, Peter. Silver Cloud is an epithermal, low-sulphidation gold deposit, which is similar to the Hollister and Midas mines.
Peter Bell: And is there any kind of genetic relationship generally between the Carlin style and these epithermal systems?
Greg Schifrin: I don’t know if there’s any genetic relationship. Most of my Nevada work was done in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s, we refocused to the northwest and Alaska. I would say that there is probably some correlation between these two types of deposits, but I’d have to dig deeper into it and understand Silver Cloud further before we can make a statement on that.
Peter Bell: Okay – I can sure wait, knowing that it is coming! With the financing in hand, you guys have some runway in front of you here to get to work with the project.
Greg Schifrin: Our first steps right now are to take all the data, re-plot it all, and try to develop a conceptual model of the project. I’m actually scheduled for a Skype call with our team today to go over maps and data later today. Things are happening right now and you’re here with us.
There has been quite a lot of data collected on the Silver Cloud project by various companies in the past. Pescio Exploration has held ownership of the property since the 1990s and has leased or optioned the property out several times. We’ve got all the data to date and started working on putting all that together that last week. It’s great to get to work on it.
We hope to generate at least an initial conceptual model using all the previous data. Concurrently, I have instructed my team to start permitting. Compiling all the old information is an important part of starting the permitting process. At the very end of this process, just before we put the permit together, we’ll conduct a site visit to pick the drill locations for the permit application. I anticipate the complete permit submission will be made sometime before the end of April, which means that we want to have that permit submitted for review within the next 30 days.
Peter Bell: That’s a good timeline. Lots of places for you to start drilling, too. Looking at the locations of all the past drill holes, I see there is pretty sparse coverage of the property as a whole.
Greg Schifrin: Most of the drilling was done by Teck-Cominco and Placer Dome in and around the old Silver Cloud mercury mine. That is where Teck came up with two very good intercepts, one with a meter-and-a-half of 145 grams per tonne gold and the other with 22 meters of about five-and-a-half grams per tonne gold. They found that right in the old Silver Cloud mine area. About two kilometers to the northwest in a place that they called or named Northwest Canyon there was another good intercept by Placer Dome, which intercepted about 12 meters at about five-and-a-half grams per tonne gold.
Those two areas have good gold grades in drill intercepts, but we have to do a lot more drilling to define any deposits around those individual hits or create a resource estimate. Each company drilled around 10 holes and there’s only been approximately 30,000 feet drilled cumulatively on the project between the various companies that had an option on it over all these years. The most recent drilling done by Teck and Placer Dome was done between 1999 and 2002, right during one of the low points in the market cycles in the mining industry. They were really at a low point with the price of gold and everything there in 2000-2001 before things started picking up a couple years thereafter. The project has been sitting dormant for the last 15-16 years, but the gold is still there!
Peter Bell: Meanwhile, work has continued in the area for the last 15 years.
Greg Schifrin: That’s right. There has been exploration and development work going on all around this project. Lots of companies with positions in the Carlin trend that is in near proximity to us are doing grassroots exploration and that’s one of the things I like about Silver Cloud. I’ve talked to a lot of the long-time associates in Nevada who’ve been working there for the last 30-40 years and the thing I keep hearing when I ask them about Silver Cloud is, "Greg, you’re not looking for a gold system, you’re sitting on a gold system – it’s just a matter of defining that gold system." That’s a real positive when you think about properties and exploration work. We’re sitting on something that is already known to be a lot like the Midas gold system.
I worked on Midas, myself, with at least four different companies. My last time working there was sometime in the mid- to late-1990s with Franco-Nevada. I had been there before with Couer, Lac Minerals, and Placer Dome as a consultant with a service company that I own called Minex. When I worked there with Franco, I worked directly with Ken Snyder. Ken was one of the two consultants for Franco at the project and a lot of people thought Ken was off running a muck there but, lo and behold, he put a drill hole in the right place, drilled further than they had gone before, and capped into what became the Ken Snyder Mine and then the Midas Mine.
Our service consulting company subsequently worked for Newmont on Midas after they took control of it many years later. I have some history in the area. Our company has worked on a lot of projects in the Carlin trend in Elko County over the decades so I’m able to take a lot of that experience and relationships to put to use when working on Silver Cloud.
Peter Bell: Wonderful! The Gold Crown Vein and the Colorado Grande Vein – beautiful stuff at the Ken Snyder Mine.
Greg Schifrin: Indeed. Our hope is to find something similar over our drilling campaigns at Silver Cloud.
Let me give you a little guidance as to what we plan to do. As I mentioned, we have to compile all the historic data to help pick out our drill sites and are going to work on permitting concurrently. We want to submit permits by the end of April so that we can have approval by the beginning of August and can start drilling our first objectives in August or September at the latest.
Once we have the permits and understand where we’re drilling, we need to pin down the number of feet for this first round of drilling and then go raise the capital for drilling. The funding that we just raised will take us through that phase. There was a lot of cleanup that we had to do within the company to get ready to work on Silver Cloud with company fees, attorney fees, auditor fees, and such that needed to be settled. We accomplished all that, but will need to go raise the capital for the drilling. We do not have the capital to go drill, but we will be well-positioned to raise the capital needed for the drilling campaign after we take these first steps with permitting and compiling historic data.
Peter Bell: Okay. There is already a pretty comprehensive data set for the project between the drilling, the soil samples, the geophysics.
Greg Schifrin: Yes, there has been a lot of surface work done between geophysics, geochemistry, and biogeochemistry. A deep target like we’re looking for here will have some leakage of mineralization up to the surface, but we will focus our search at depth. We might consider deploying geophysical techniques that can target depths of 300-500 meters below surface. The depths vary somewhat depending on where you are on the project as I believe it’s deeper out to the west than it is out to the east. All those things need to be sorted out and will be part of our plan upcoming.
Peter Bell: A question for you about the geology at Silver Cloud versus Hollister – the Vinini formation seems to be the key host at Hollister for the high-grade. It’s at depths of 1000 feet, but I don’t think prior drilling has really gotten that deep at Silver Cloud yet. They seem to have found enough gold above the Vinini and didn’t need to go down that far.
Greg Schifrin: You’re referring to the 2006 technical report done by Geologics, which is the most comprehensive report on the Silver Cloud project that I’ve seen, and it seems to me that the intercepts of gold are right around the contact of that Paleozoic sedimentary formation called the Vinini formation and the tertiary volcanics. I look forward to reviewing all the data with our team over the next weeks but I believe that it will be similar to Hollister in that we’re going to find our target in that uppermost Paleozoic / tertiary volcanic contact zone. That is seen at both Hollister and Midas. The strike length and vertical extent of those two vein systems vary, but that is a common geological feature. We don’t have enough information to draw a strong comparison with Silver Cloud yet, but we believe it’s similar to the Hollister and Midas mines. Silver Cloud is in close proximity to both, but they also have different characteristics from what I’ve read on the literature from both mines.
Peter Bell: Lots of local structural control can cause things to get all chopped up!
Greg Schifrin: And I was more referring to the vertical extent of the vein systems: I think that Midas has a much more longer vertical extent and horizontal extent than Hollister does, but the grades are higher at Hollister. Maybe we will see the best of them both at Silver Cloud, but we don’t know yet. That will come in the future as we start to gather more enough information in the future.
Just to start building a resource estimate at Silver Cloud would be a significant move for Blackrock from our point of view. To get enough drilling done that we could start to put together a resource would be a very positive thing for Blackrock and shareholders.
Peter Bell: Well, it’s mining country. You’re certainly going to be able to get the work done in a professional way.
Greg Schifrin: Absolutely. We’ll sure get the work done, Peter. We will use the best information we have to do our best to pick the right drill holes and hope that there is no structural movement in the vein systems that surprises us after we make our projections and drill to intercept them.
Peter Bell: And you mentioned working with Ken Snyder there at the Midas Mine. That’s great.
Greg Schifrin: I talked to Ken just a couple weeks ago. I haven’t talked to him in probably ten years but we’ve known each other for so long that he was happy I called. I asked him about coming on to help us, but he said that he didn’t know how much time he would have to consult for Blackrock at the moment. He did say he would help me with anything that he was available to help with. He might come on in an advisory capacity, but we don’t know that for certain yet.
Peter Bell: Great to have him take your call, regardless!
Greg Schifrin: He said it was possible. I told him that I’d stop by and visit with him when I got down to Elko sometime after the snow melted.
Peter Bell: Early days for the project and for the company – it’s exciting to be launching something in an area like this that is heating up.
Greg Schifrin: One of the most appealing things for Blackrock is the address of the Silver Cloud project. People say, “You’re hunting elephants in elephant country.” And they’re not wrong. This is an area that is prolific with extremely large gold deposits. If we were 100-150 miles to the east or west, then we might be in a different part of Nevada with some gold occurrences but it wouldn’t be the Carlin Trend. That’s a statement in and of itself, isn’t it?
Peter Bell: Sure is.
Greg Schifrin: Another thing that is fortunate for Blackrock is that this project has been sitting dormant for so many years. I don’t see it as a negative, although I understand why some people might see it that way. I see it as an opportunity. The property was tied up through various option agreements for quite a long time, but the directors of Blackrock and some consultants were wise enough to say that it was a project of merit when it became available and they went after it. They secured an option agreement, which took about four or five months to finally complete because of certain things within Blackrock. We have now made the payments on it and finalized the initial payments on the option agreement last week after our financing. A big part of my job coming into the company was to get things finished and moving forward.
Peter Bell: Good job.
Greg Schifrin: Thank you.
Peter Bell: And it seems like the option terms are not particularly onerous for Blackrock.
Greg Schifrin: They’re reasonable. As is typical, the first two or three years are a bit less expensive, which means we have to do our work to make sure it’s worth paying the costs. As time goes on, it gets more expensive with greater work requirements leading to us buying the land and leaving the current owner with a royalty. Again, that is typical of these option agreements.
We’re not going to sit here and do nothing so that we can hold onto it. We’re rolling up our sleeves and are going to get the work done. We hope to have some very good results to report around October-November this year.
Peter Bell: With all the anticipation that builds up in advance of that – it could be an interesting summer!
Greg Schifrin: That’s part of the business right, Peter.
Peter Bell: Sure is.
Greg Schifrin: Sometimes the mystery is better than history. I’ve done a lot of drilling over the years and sometimes it’s fantastic, but sometimes you hit nothing. And sometimes the fourth times a charm! Those situations where three other people looked at it before you, drilled it, and walked away discouraged – those can be the best wins. I have no apprehension about the fact that several other companies have drilled Silver Cloud before us and walked away. We believe we can be very successful at this project and establish a resources that can be mined eventually. That’s our goal is
Peter Bell: And I think juniors are often better at being hungrier and going after something that other people may have abandoned. They can be very good at putting all the data together and looking at it in a different way from the majors.
Greg Schifrin: Absolutely, Peter. And the majors depend on the juniors for that. That’s a big part of the function of the exploration industry – taking a certain amount of capital and investing it in exploration. When they are successful, these juniors either grow up and become mid-tier producers themselves or get bought out by the other mid-tiers or majors. It’s just the natural progression of things in this industry.
Peter Bell: Have you been involved with many juniors yourself before Blackrock?
Greg Schifrin: Yes, I’ve been involved with a handful of them over the years although most of my career hasn’t been involved with public markets directly. I first worked as an employee for the mineral divisions of a large oil company and then went on to start my own consulting company, which became a service company later on. The juniors and a lot of the majors were actually our clients! We worked for Rio Tinto and Kennecott, or Freeports McMoran, Newmont, Kinrosses, and others.
I did a lot of work over the years on many different projects for those companies. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that I got into the management and directorship space of the junior mining companies. I’ve probably been involved with eight or 10 different companies over the last 12 years. Sometimes I worked for a couple at the same time, but when I take on a management position I’m 100% committed to the company. I still own the consulting service company and have the network of contacts and relationships within the industry, don’t participate in the day-day activities for the most part.
Peter Bell: And when it comes time for Blackrock to drill, will that company of yours be able to put in a bid for some of the work?
Greg Schifrin: We’re not a drilling company – we run projects from acquisitions through resource definition and development. We’ve done that for several different junior mining groups out of Vancouver over the decades. That company is at arm’s length now, but I know that they are quality people. These are people who I’ve vetted and over the years. When you’ve been in an industry for many years like me, it’s been over 35 years for me now – you learn who is who. When somebody doesn’t do good work or deliver, you don’t go back to work with them again. I’ve developed my own network of go-to people in the industry and I’ll be incorporating a lot of that knowledge and experience into Blackrock.
Peter Bell: And I think the private companies have a lot of accountability, too. It can really be a crucible of fire there. You have to learn how to get things done there.
Greg Schifrin: Having worked in Nevada in the United States through the 1980s, I’ve learned who the players are and have a good network. I think back to the moment when the Chairman of the Board at Blackrock called me up and asked me if I would be interested in working for the company – he knew a lot about my skillset, who I was, and what I had done. I think he was sending out a lifeline because he needed help at Black Rock. I’m glad I jumped aboard, because it’s been a great ride and we’re just getting started.
Peter: Great, thanks Greg. I encounter a lot of juniors with geologists at the helm, but not many who led service companies. It’s great to hear about your experience managing these exploration programs from start to finish.
Maybe a couple questions to end off here. How about these sinters? This seems to be something that Bob Moriarty is all excited about. Reading the Hollister report, I see mention of them as related to hot springs and mercury mines with gold below them. Do you recall anything like these sinters at the Ken Snyder Mine?
Greg Schifrin: No, I don’t. It’s been many years, mind you, but I don’t recall the open fissures being as prevalent as in the photographs we have shared at Silver Cloud. There are very pronounced different types of rocks at Midas with volcanic flows and rhyolites that I can recall from my many trips to site at Midas, but I don’t recall the same kind of sinter exposure as you see at Silver Cloud.
Peter Bell: And it doesn’t seem that past drilling really targeted those sinters at Silver Cloud, did it? It seemed to be more based on the geochem and geophysics.
Greg Schifrin: Yes, they’re looking for gold deposition much deeper than the sinters at surface. These surface sinters are associated with hot springs at a paleo-surface or ancient surface. The target we’re after is deeper down in the system.
Peter Bell: Okay. And to confirm that you are going after some of the deeper targets?
Greg Schifrin: Yes, we are. All of our targets are going to be deep. There’s really nothing at the surface that we’re aware of with any size that needs to be pursued. Our drilling is going to be a deep drill program.
Peter Bell: Thanks for walking me through the basics. We’re here with you, chomping at the bit.
Greg Schifrin: Great, thanks Peter.
This document contains statements that are forward looking statements and are subject to various risks and uncertainties concerning the specific factors disclosed under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Company’s periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators. Such information contained herein represents management’s best judgment as of the date hereof based on information currently available. The Company does not assume the obligation to update any forward-looking statement.
Peter Bell has not been compensated to prepare and distribute this promotional material.
