Under the Spotlight – Galen McNamara, CEO, Silver47

Rick Mills, Editor/ Publisher, Ahead of the Herd:

Galen, why don’t you give us a brief rundown on your Red Mountain, your Mogollon, and your Hughes, which are the projects that you’re looking at working on in the near term. You just finished a work project on Red Mountain and you’re going to be doing drill projects on Mogollon next and then Hughes in early 2026.

Galen McNamara, CEO, Silver47 (TSXV: AGA; OTCQB: AAGAF):

Of course, I’d be happy to. So, thanks, Rick. Today’s news was us announcing that we’ve completed our summer drill program at the Red Mountain project in Alaska, completed 15 holes up there, and of course all assays are pending, but the results are actually starting to come in now, which is nice.

And the main takeaway for us has been that, hey, we’ve drilled some good-looking massive sulfide, and that’s just code for mineralization in geologists’ language, that we think could look pretty good when we get the assays back.

So, that’s what we’re waiting on right now, but the goal really of the program was to build and grow what I call higher-grade ounces and step out from where we know there’s high-grade mineralization, both within the deposit and outside the deposit, to try to do that. So, so far so good, it’s looking pretty good, and we’re really preparing for a bigger program next year.

Instead of having one rig turning, we’re planning to have something like three rigs turning and really aggressively both step out, prove up the deposit, but also drill some of the 35 exploration targets that are present on the property that haven’t been explored at all. So, we’re pretty excited about that. But in the meantime, next summer is, it’ll be on us before we know it, but it is a long time away.

We’ve got two other projects in the Lower 48. Ones in New Mexico called Mogollon, and the other ones in Nevada called the Hughes project. And what we’re going to do is, starting in November, drill for likely around three months on the Mogollon project in New Mexico, where we’ve already got 32 million in silver-equivalent ounces, split between silver and gold, and a lot of room to run.

A lot of clear, easy step-outs. So, we’re going to start doing that, step out from where we know there’s high-grade mineralization, continue to build ounces. But just for a peek at the prospectivity of that project, our current resource, which is really just a starting line, covers just 2.4 kilometers of one vein.

There’s an additional, give or take, 70 kilometers of vein and prospective structure on the project, some of which has been mined like a hundred years ago. It’s an old mining place, but no real modern exploration.

Therein lies the real upside on this project, the big picture upside, where in my opinion there’s a very good chance that it’s the last good remaining vein field in the United States that hasn’t been mined, certainly in the Lower 48. So, we’re going to try to figure that out over time and drill it out over time. So that’s New Mexico, that’s the Mogollon project.

Then from there, we’re going to rotate the drilling efforts into the Hughes project, which is the eastern half of the old Tonopah mining district in Nevada, and its 4-kilometer extension. We’re going to continue to drill on the extension of the district, where so far, we found some really interesting high-grade veins, albeit generally narrow, but we haven’t really found the main structure yet, where it could possibly be 10 meters wide at 1,000 grams per tonne. If we find that, it’s a total game-changer for the entire district.

And we’re building many ounces very quickly, so we’re going to take a real shot at doing that over the winter, looking for that extension, that 4-km extension of the Tonopah mining district, which by the way, was historically mined over a strike length of 4 kilometers, and has something like 500 million ounces of silver-equivalent total endowment between what was mined before and what’s left remaining, what companies have drilled out. So, we’re pretty excited about our prospects here for the next year.

RM: Well, you’re really on a hunt to increase ounces at all three projects. All three projects have some indicated, mostly inferred ounces of silver equivalent.

GM: There are some indicated ounces on the Hughes project in Tonopah, the remainder is inferred. And my philosophy to that is that we’ll keep stepping out till we get an inferred footprint, and then we can take the best inferred areas and build indicated ounces from there.

RM: It’s pretty exciting to be in the world-famous Walker trend with the Hughes project. That’s a world-class area.

GM: It is. There are tens of millions of ounces there of gold. I don’t know what the total is, but for perspective, if you drive to our site from Elko, you pass by the Round Mountain mine, and I think over a hundred-plus years, they’ve produced 15 million ounces of gold, which is certainly world-class.

The other thing that surprises me, just driving around the area, is that I still think there’s lots of potential even after all these years. So, that’s what originally got me interested in working in places like Tonopah, Nevada, going back years and years.

RM: In the shadows of head frames. The silver in the Walker Lane trend, a lot of people don’t understand that there is silver there. You’ve got gold, it’s famous for gold, but it’s also famous for silver. And then when you move over to your New Mexico project, the Mogollon, you’ve got a very large grouping of veining just around Silver City, which is another famous old area for silver production.

GM: That’s true, and it’s not really that well remembered, at the time, of course, it was very well known, but there are a few veins around Silver City, we’re about 60 miles north, but I think the real reason that Silver City really took off at the beginning was because of the Mogollon District, and all of the ore came through there. That’s where we’re working now. The analogy that I like to draw for this district, it’s maybe 100 miles north of the Mexican border.

This thing really is akin to the Mexican silver vein fields that the Spanish were mining going back 500 years. It really is. And this one just hasn’t really seen that exploration push, that mining push yet.

RM: I love the fact you are working old ground, the old timers, the OG’s worked, found and mined high grade near the surface but the reality is a lot of the ground you have, a lot of it has never been looked at with modern methods of exploration and you have so many kilometers of known veins to start with. I don’t think I’ve seen such a collection of potential silver ounces in one company. I think maybe Viszla Silver (TSX:VZLA) was close. Do you like the comparisons with Viszla?

GM: Well, it’s funny, I was also a very early shareholder of Viszla, because I saw Mike and Craig’s vision going back to day one on that.

Somehow, I had an intuition that they were going to be very successful, and they were, have been and will, imo, continue to be. There are similarities to the geology, for sure. Absolutely. So, I think we just need to continue to work hard, keep drilling out ounces, and put our best foot forward.

RM: You’ve done some work on the Kennedy Project recently, and I know we were going to talk about three, but I’ve got to talk about the Kennedy. I do like this project a lot. You staked it fairly recently, but you went in, and you did some work. Now you realize what kind of a gem you’ve got. And you’re actually going to go back soon and put some work into it and work up to a drill program.

GM: Yes, we really like Kennedy as well. Going out and first of all, being able to stake something like that in Nevada, in what I call the action area, around where all the big mines are, is very rare. We were actually surprised it was open, which was very nice.

And once we realized it was open we staked it fairly quickly, because it’s an undrilled Nevada vein field, where the work that we’re showing now, when we just go and sample the veins and the old mine dumps, there’s good high-grade gold, to use a cliche kind of all over the place and silver too, you know, a couple thousand grams per tonne silver here and there as well. And these veins, they were only mined down to where there was free milling gold. So down to 50 or 60 meters or something like that.

Past that they weren’t mined and past that they’re not drilled. There’s just so many of these big districts in Nevada, these now big mines in Nevada, that started off like that. Not all of them, some of them turn out to be nothing. But for us to be able to go out and stake something like this and take that shot, that’s just a no-brainer, even though we’re very busy in other places.

So, what we’re going to do this fall, it’s not ready to drill yet. We need to do some field work there. But what we’re going to do is the good fundamental geology, the mapping, the soil sampling, the geophysics that we need to do to let us think in a way where we can try to locate a good deposit there, either in the veins or away from the veins. And we’ll see where we get.

RM: It looks like an amazing project, and it fits well into your portfolio.

GM: Exactly, it’s a good precious metals project, a vein type of project. It’s a little more gold-rich than silver-rich, but an opportunity is an opportunity.

RM: I was a little surprised at the 8.56% copper that you got in the rock samples.

GM: We were too, there’s copper, there’s actually a good amount of antimony locally that we haven’t really looked at too hard yet, but that’s there. The geochemical signature is a little bit different than some of the other things that we’ve looked at in Nevada. It’s more potentially like a Pogo, Alaska style of mineralization, not saying it’s going to be that, but that’s how we’re thinking of it from an exploration perspective.

RM: Okay, that’s your model. That’s great.

Let’s dig a little bit deeper into Red Mountain. It’s an extremely large VMS system and at the West End it’s SEDEX. You’ve been putting a lot of drill holes into the VMS system on the east end.

Can you tell us a little bit about what your plans are there for the rest of the year and into next year?

GM: Yes, so number one, we’re compiling data. Our team now has been looking at this for a couple months and really digging into it, tearing it apart. We really wanted this summer to drill some high-impact holes that we thought could add some good ounces within the deposit and stepping out as well.

You know instead of taking the big exploration shots, work up to that because we’re still really learning the geology here. So, throughout the fall, what we’re doing is really detailed geological modeling, it is a big important push for us. Also, we’re target priority ranking the regional exploration targets so that’s also a big push for us because we want to test a number of them next summer for sure.

Just as an example, there’s high-grade copper and zinc on surface in multiple places that haven’t been drilled. You don’t really come across that too often, so we’ve got to pick the best ones and look to drill them next summer.

But also really, we want to push this through. Alright, well, we’ve got 168 million silver-equivalent ounces there now. How do we get this bigger? When do we pull the trigger on an updated resource? And therefore, that will dictate how it leads into a PEA.

When we put out the next resource, that’s a question that our geological modeling and the results from this summer’s drill program are really going to guide us on over the next couple of months. So right now, we’re investigating our options, put it that way, while we prepare for a substantially larger drill program next summer.

RM: Right. And the Mogollon project, same thing. What do you plan to get done this year? And what does that lead to potentially next year?

GM: That one there, that program is a little bit smaller.

We’re planning a roughly three-month, one-rig program for say 3,500 meters, just systematic but aggressive step-outs from our current resource blocks. We’re drilling there because the mineralization is so continuous, we can step out 100 meters and it will still be included in an inferred resource, which speaks to the strength, the continuity of the system.

So, we’re going to do some of that, while we really prepare from a permitting perspective to drill under some of our best targets next year with a very larger program that might be a couple rigs or three rigs to really substantially build ounces there.

Right now, the focus is for us is advancing Red Mountain to the next stage, while still adding ounces as efficiently as we can over the next six months. And I think I might get this number slightly wrong, but I’ll be very close. At Mogollon, we’ve discovered silver for a little under 20 cents an ounce, US dollars in inferred resources.

And I think that’s a really good value proposition. For the holes we’ve drilled, we’ve added something like a million ounces a hole, give or take, that’s a stat that I’m looking to continue with this program.

RM: You’ve got 250 million silver equivalent ounces now, and you’re looking to expand that with these projects. You’re on the hunt for a billion ounces silver equivalent

GM: That’s the aspiration. That’s the goal. And there’s two ways for us to do that. That’s additional drilling on our projects. Hand over my heart, do I think that there’s a pathway there to that on these projects? I mean, things have to go well, but the answer is certainly yes. And it’s going to take a lot of time. That’s fine.

And of course, the other is through additional M&A. We’re always looking for like-minded companies that see the advantage of working together.

RM: Let’s do a little bit of a look at the Hughes project. What are you going to do in in ‘26? And then where do you go from there with it?

GM: We’ve drilled 44ish million ounces there so far, the eastern half of the Tonopah mining district. But the real upside is the eastern extension that we’ve put a few holes into has got some excellent exciting numbers. I think the best hole was 3 meters of 1,500 grams per tonne silver equivalent. So far, we’ve got lots of things that are like a meter of 500g/t a meter and a half of 700g/t, stuff like that, which is a great start.

But the big question is where on that eastern extension of the whole district, where’s the main vein? And if we can find that, then really our target becomes very large very quickly, and we’re on a clear path to 100-plus million ounces there, if successful, and I think in quick time, and now’s the time for us to really go out and test those exploration ideas, because the chances of success I think are pretty good. So, we’re going to go in and take a shot there.

RM: Building ounces is building ounces, you put a drill hole in, and you get so many ounces, but gold started going up in February of ‘24. And you’ve got, $3,900 gold or $3,850, silver’s going to crack $50 here by the look of it. So, you’re building your ounces, but the value that’s being added is basically off the charts with the gold and the silver prices today. That’s got to be a good feeling.

GM: It is a good feeling. It’s nice to see it, all of us in the industry and yourself, we’ve been saying that this is the way it should be happening based on all the macro factors. Now we’re at least experiencing a little bit of it.

But specific to our company, Silver47, I look at us on an EV, an enterprise value per silver-equivalent ounce in the ground. So, what we get per ounce in the ground. We get like 31 cents. All of our peers are over $1.50 to well over $2.50. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do relative to our peers.

I’m not just going to sit here and say, we’re undervalued relative to our peers, like everyone else says, therefore you should own the stock. No, we’re out aggressively advancing our projects as efficiently as possible as well and continue to add as many ounces as we can.

RM: That’s a good point, because you guys are different than a lot of your precious metal peers. I’m not going to call you a pure silver company because you have some pretty exciting gold prospects, you possibly have some economic critical metals, you’ve got some copper, you’ve possibly got the antimony you just mentioned. You’ve got a really good mix of precious metals and critical metals. And the thing about you guys is you’re not stopping like all these other guys, a lot of them have to stop drilling in the winter.

The point here is, you guys have a full treasury, in your news release today you said you had $27 million; you’re all cashed up. And the beautiful thing about it is you’re not stopping drilling, Yeah, you’ve stopped drilling up in Alaska. But now you’re pivoting, re-focusing, and you’re going to be drilling in the southern US, in Nevada and New Mexico, You’ve been drilling, we’re close to assays, your going to start drilling again soon, and you’re going to keep drilling.

And that is what I think separates you when you talk about building ounces, and you talk about peers. Yeah, you are undervalued compared to your peers. But you’ve got $27 million in the treasury and you’re going to be drilling year-round for the foreseeable future. That might fix the unequalness.

GM: That’s the idea here. That’s one of the strengths of why I liked this idea of merging our two companies, Silver47 and Summa Silver, months ago now. That continual news flow is a strength of ours.

RM: News flow is the lifeblood of any junior resource company.

GM: For sure.

RM: I think we’ve covered pretty much everything. Is there anything that you want to bring up here that maybe we missed?

GM: I don’t think so. I think we got a great, great summary, honestly.

RM: Okay, as the CEO of the company, you’re talking to retail investors, why don’t you tell us why a retail investor interested in precious metals should pick Silver47 as an investment for themselves.

GM. Sounds good. A really good question to think about is why own Silver47? I think there’s a number of reasons for that.

First of all, you’ve got access to 247 million silver-equivalent ounces in the United States, in a place where property rights still matter. We’re significantly undervalued relative to our peers. We only get 31 cents an ounce in the ground on an EV basis, compared to peers, which all seem to get over $1.50. And then number three is that we’re really aggressively advancing our project. We’re going to be drilling, for the most part, all-year round, there’s assays pending, there’s more drilling planned. We’re really trying to fire on all cylinders here to add value for shareholders as aggressively as we can.

RM: Awesome. That’s a great way to finish what I think was a pretty comprehensive interview.

GM: Great. Perfect.

RM: Okay, we’ll let you go. Thank you very much.

GM: Thanks for your time. Talk to you soon.

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com

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Richard owns shares of Silver47 (TSX.V:AGA). AGA is a paid advertiser on his site aheadoftheherd.com This article is issued on behalf of AGA.