New Idaho Gold Rush!

Blair Way: I'm great, Gerardo. How are you doing today?

BW: Yeah, so our market cap is hovering just under C$5 million. And it was certainly a little baffling to me… and that was one of the attractions of the company. And I've known a number of other people involved with the company for, again, almost a decade… and that was what drew me in.

And then, of course, looking at what they had and I realized, really, it was probably summed up in one word — and it was “marketing.” And they were busy doing work but may not have been putting enough attention on marketing… getting eyes on the company.

BW: For sure. My original background comes from the implementation and execution of major projects working for the likes of BHP, Korea Zinc… and I've worked in a number of different commodities: nickel, zinc, magnesium, and then into gold and copper.

So in the last 10 to 15 years, I've been focused more on mid and junior players in the copper-gold. And then, the last half decade has also had quite a focus on battery materials with graphite and lithium.

Given the nature of the world today, I'm back and back on to cover gold which has always been sort of a sweet spot for me — and I do enjoy the space. It's great talking to investors that really do understand that space. Battery materials, as you're well aware, has its challenges for understanding what's a good asset and what's not.

But yeah, so I've come from the sort of downstream side of being the operator, the commissioner, or the constructor working my way back up into exploration and, certainly, worked for some companies that many people have heard of. BHP being one, OceanaGold, Ventana Gold was a good success story on the TSX, and a number of other companies; TSX-Venture as well.

BW: For sure. That was a big attraction to me. And this past year has been pretty challenging. And looking back at the space as the year entered in January, at the beginning of the year, I started or commenced looking for interesting projects and interesting companies to join.

I had taken a bit of time and it was a great opportunity for me to look around. And I was looking at property in Australia because I am based in Australia and found some quite interesting properties there and then continued to look at different companies.

And that's what brought me to Gaia Metals. And that's where I learned, "Holy crap, you guys are planning drill programs and things like that!" And I'm looking at the market cap… I'm looking at the structure of the company and 30-odd million shares outstanding and realizing there's some opportunity here to really do something.

And Idaho, as you mentioned, with so many peers almost quite literally next door with amazing growth and assets that are being developed. And we've got Integra, Excellon, Revival, Demetals, Freeman Gold, Idaho, Opher. And we are sitting at the bottom of that list right now, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

We've got this drill program. It really was, to me, just… “We need to move this little program forward that helps better understand the property.” And then, the next drill program, we’ll be able to focus in on what we've learned from this initial sort of… we'll call it almost a recon drill program. It’s not massive but it gives us an opportunity to understand some of the historic information.

And as you well know, Idaho has had gold exploration and extraction for hundreds of years. And some of the data we're looking at… I was speaking with our VP Exploration, he said, "These are documents from the late-1800s!" So it's an amazing area to work in and super exciting for me.

North America is a great place. USA, Canada, Australia are all great jurisdictions. And in these tough times, you need to be in a jurisdiction where you know that you can work with people that will do what they say they're going to do and get it done in a timely manner.

And I've worked in all kinds of different countries, and I've spent a lot of time in those different countries because you need to be there on the ground to make sure it's happening. When we're in a time like we are now, well… that's not such a possibility without sitting in hotels for two weeks at a time every time you want to visit someone.

You need to be working in a jurisdiction that gives you that confidence that you can execute on the ground and make things happen in a timely manner.

BW: Yeah, it was! We did a trenching sampling program without really planning to do it. And that was one of the challenges here. And I didn't truly appreciate it. Again, this is the challenge of not being able to get your own feet on the ground and walk the ground.

I just had in my mind the flatter part of Idaho or maybe a bit further east in the western states. And I just, in my mind, had it a lot flatter. In actual fact, the terrain is pretty rugged, and, as a result, cutting some of the roads was a challenge. There wasn’t a lot of fill-in material so we actually had to jackhammer into the side of the hill and make trails to get to our first twinned hole.

Keeping in mind we're twinning a hole, and, off the top of my mind, I can't recall the age, but it was decades ago that this hole was drilled. So we're pretty confident that we found the collar for it. But again, when there are things that have been hanging around for that long — it's not always 100 percent. But our guys in the field are confident that we have got as close to twinning it.

And so we're confident of being able to see what was previously seen and maybe something more — being optimistic. But yeah, the actual challenge of getting access and building a pad meant we had to do a bit of rock hammering to make the roads. So as a result, we opened up a whole bunch of trench material without intending to. But that's given us a great deal of sampling material as well.

Some of that we haven't put in for assay now… but sort of the more interesting stuff we have. And if we find... because you're looking for a lower grade material, your eyes can help you to identify possible host material. But at the end of the day, it's going to be the assays that really give you the information that you need. And then, we may – depending on what we found or what that reveals – we'll then send some more material as warranted.

But yeah, we ended up picking up a great deal more sampling simply from building roads. And then, we still have our drill hole assay data on top of that. So yeah, it's fantastic. As I said before, it's amazing to be working in a region with information that dates back to the 1800s. It's kind of cool!

BW: So the twinned hole is as we expected and it's followed our understanding from that historic hole. The first two holes were a bit deeper and that was a function of ground conditions. And certainly it helped us better understand that part of it. If you look on our map that was provided on the press release, just so people can get the spatial awareness, so one and two are more sort of trending up in the northwest. And three and four were, I guess in a way, our sort of step out ones where we weren't completely sure on what we were going to see there. But what we have seen, and obviously when we cut our trails there, we had all this outcrop, which we did a release on earlier.



So we've exposed a lot more material and certainly we're finding higher grade in that area that we probably weren't expecting to see that shallow. So we're starting to see a trend off to this sort of northeast direction from our gold anomalies and our geochem. So it's really expanded, in a way it's unconstrained our understanding of the property than what we had before. And that's great, because now we consider the benefit now of possibly doing some remote sensing on the property, just to better understand where to step out next to find more gold.

BW: For sure. We actually have quite a stack of properties. But certainly Freeman Creek is our flagship. And then, really, next after that is our Quebec property, Corvette-FCI. And again, that's a great prospect with some really good neighbors nearby: Quebec Precious Metals, Midland Exploration… so there are some, definitely, some indicators of interest. But also, there's been some work done on that ground which certainly warrants additional work.

And back in the day, they weren't really looking for gold. But what we found is some really interesting trends based on anomalies and some soil sampling and the like. And they had some good early-stage discussions with our VP Exploration, and he's very excited about it. And certainly that's brought me into the fold of what we have there and, believe it or not, we've got potential for gold, copper, and lithium.

And I probably wasn't fully aware… when you're looking for lithium, you’re sort of obviously hunting down pegmatites, or whatever, but I never really thought about their occurrence. But here we have pegmatites actually giving us a bit of almost a visual indicator of where we may find some of our gold and copper. So that's kind of interesting.

But it's great ground. It's in an area that is very well supported by both infrastructure and politically for doing this sort of work and exploration. So it's not like certain parts of the country where there are some challenges that you have to work through whether political or indigenous or what have you. This area is definitely well supported, and we look forward to being able to do some work on that ground in the new year for sure.

And then we have a number of other lithium properties and also some silica or mineral sands. So we actually have a big portfolio but we are focusing on our gold. And there is and has been some movement in lithium. So there may be some potential value coming out of them in the future. But certainly we are maintaining our focus on our copper-gold.

BW: For sure. 2021 is going to be an active time. Obviously, the winter and snow slows some of the work on the ground but we've got quite a bit of data to work with on our flagship Freeman Creek property.

We're looking at continuing on that working… taking the data that we have both from the trenching we talked about as well as the expected assays from the drill hole data. That will help us target possibly even some IP work that we might do. So some remote sensing that you can do over the snow which will then help us focus in for spring drilling on both the Gold Dyke and Carmen Creek targets.

And same with our Corvette-FCI. There's opportunities there to do some remote sensing which again gives us some opportunity to zero in on areas that previous explorers – because they were looking for other commodities and heading off in a different trend line – we believe the IP can help confirm what we believe is the case from looking at it on the ground.

So into the first half of 2021, ideally, we've got a couple of drill programs planned out and executed in the spring when the snow clears. And basically from there, we can run with those two prospects and certainly move them forward as aggressively as the market lets us.

BW: Well, you've touched on such an important thing that we're all dealing with. And this is a worldwide issue of not being able to get on a plane and put feet on the ground. And we're putting a lot more trust in the people that we're working with and the properties that we're working with and the people that can work for us on those properties, which, again, is a much more remote process than it is normally.

And I too look forward to when I can get on a plane and see the ground that we're so interested in. But what's interesting, this whole process – and I'll call it a process because we're not really sure what it's going to end up like – but COVID-19 and the changes that it's made to our world and the way that we communicate and the way that we travel has opened up a whole new world of getting things done without having to sit on planes.

I've spent years… or I've been 500-hours-a-year on a plane. It's not good for your health! But having said that, what we're seeing, and this is something I hope to do with my... I did my first President’s Letter, and we're looking at possibly demonstrating how this collaboration works where you're sitting on a Zoom call, you're sharing screens, you're working through as though you're side-by-side in an office. But in many cases, you're tens of thousands of miles away.

And it's amazing that… you know, we're survivors. We all find ways to make things happen. And that's really what we're doing here. And things do slip through the cracks, and that's why you will find companies maybe that have a market cap but good assets. And things just need to be pulled together and we move it forward.

And I see this… as important with Gaia Metals… is that we have some great assets; we've got some great people and a great jurisdiction, and we just need to keep moving it forward and letting people see what and know what we're doing.

BW: Yeah. Thanks very much, Gerardo. I look forward to keeping you and your listeners informed in the coming weeks and months.

BW: Thanks