Under the Spotlight – Rick Mark, CEO Harvest Gold

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

Rick, your CEO of Harvest Gold (TSX.V:HVG) and your company has three projects – Mosseau, Urban Barry and La Belle –  basically sitting on the same geological contact. You are in the vastly underexplored Urban Berry greenstone belt in the Abitibi. You’re going to work on the Mosseau project, you have an option agreement with Vior where you can earn 100%.

I’d like to concentrate on the Mosseau and what you’re going to do with it.

Rick Mark, President and CEO, Harvest Gold:

The Mosseau project is the key and our so-called flagship project.  Urban Barry to the northeast is a fairly unexplored project, La Belle to the southeast is absolutely unexplored.

So, it’s possible, depending on the amount of money we raise this summer, we could do some groundwork on those two exploration properties, and we’d like to do that.

In the meantime, we’re focusing on finalizing drill targets on in the north and central Mousseau areas and raising money to drill those targets.

Our last news release begins to show the market what we have done.

RMills: You published the results of the 2024 soil geochemical surveys, the first of their kind for the central area of Mousseau.

The results were a true breakthrough in understanding the true gold endowment potential of the Kiask River Mineralized Corridor, the KRMC, correct?

RMark: Well, what we hoped would happen, happened. And it’s opened up more opportunities because we now have at least eight target areas in the central area of the project.

What we were interested in was to find out what’s available in the central area and the important thing about the central area, it has this structure going through it called the Kiask Rver Fault, you mentioned Rick that at all three properties are close to each other and all of them are in contact with the granite of what’s called the Wilson pluton and for non-geos that doesn’t mean very much. For those who understand where big deposits lie it’s often on the contact, in this case between the granites and the volcanics and then the cross-cutting structures that go through that contact.

So, when people look at the map of the Mosseau they’ll see a large structure going through the middle or central area of Mosseau and we did mapping, prospecting and geochemistry at the end of last summer, finally getting our geochemistry results out to the market last week and establishing that there are some very interesting targets in the central area.

Exactly what we’d hoped, so we layer historic mapping that was done by the government, all the work that they did to establish the type of rock, etc. There was some IP done by Vior, they drilled four holes in 2017 which gave us a little bit of an idea on one magnetic high, but really didn’t talk to us much about the whole area.

So, as you’ll see in the diagrams in the news release, we were able to sample a good chunk of the central area which matched perfectly with the geochemistry.

RMills: These results from the soil geochemical program, they definitively highlight distinctive gold targets. You had a greater than 98th percentile gold Z score, the extremely high values are clearly defining eights zones in and parallel to the Kiask River Mineralized Corridor, the KRMC.

Three of these gold trains confirm known mineralization. Another five are new, parallel to the KRMC and if they’re all associated with magnetic highs, and geologically you see the diorite and the gabbros, well, that’s a pretty damn good gold target, isn’t it?

RMark: We think so, and I tried to make the point that it was a bit of a revelation to the region, I mean nobody studied it, this is a big property in the middle of Quebec, I had conversation with many who said, “Well hasn’t this ground already been looked at?” “Isn’t this an area that’s well-trodden?”

And I remember Harvest Gold’s Director of Property Investigation Warren Bates talking to me about his first impression of this property and that was, “Nobody seems to have gone much beyond 25 meters off the roads.” This is forestry-driven, things open up and you get a chance to go further into the forest.

RMills: What I’m going to say is that up where we live people moose-hunt all the time, mostly by road-hunting. They just drive up and down the forestry roads and never get out of their vehicle. When you talk to them, “Oh there’s no moose around there’s not a frigging moose in this country.” There’s no shortage of moose; they just aren’t in the middle of the road.

And that’s funny because there is a lot of access, infrastructure and people in the Mosseau area.

RMark: The easiest work we can do is fly the property, and that guides us to where we want to do the work on the ground. Now we wish we could do more of it but it’s really a function of money.

Fortunately, we chose the area that was the most interesting, and the results are fantastic as you described. To have the geochem marry up with all the other information that we’ve been able to put together, so yes, they are exciting targets for us.

RMills: You did the soil sampling program at 200-meter spacings perpendicular to the known ice flow directions. You had sample stations every 25 meters, so there’s no denying the evidence, the defined significance of the anomalies.

Tell us some more about what you’re going to do at the Mosseau, your plans to raise money, how far are you in your drill planning program, when do you expect to get boots on the ground again and be working, just fill us in on what’s going on.

RMark: Well, at this point we’ll gather the geo team next week. We’ll talk about drill targets in our next news release, basically refining information we’ve established, reminding people that we also have targets in the northern area and we’ll refine our priorities particularly in the central area.

And we’ll look at a budget, at this point we’re talking about a $1,000,000 per 5,000 meters. Then we’ll move into raising money, it’ll take about a month to do that.

We’ve got a network of Crescat [Capital]-related investors that helped us with financing recently, we’ve got a European audience that we’ve been able to garner organically, I’ll call it through an interesting group over there who are sophisticated investors in this micro-exploration space.

We’re also talking to both Quebec funds that are related to more junior companies, and we’re looking for an opening to get into the Montreal brokerage community, so we expect to expand our reach in the financing ask and I expect we’ll do some charity flow-through as well.

So, we’re going to take the work we’ve done over the last year and develop it more. I think it’s safe to say we’re drilling sometime in the middle of July, that’s where we’re aiming for.

RMills: I expect a lot of people are going to be paying attention to this drill program. Tell us a little bit more about the northern end, it’s no slouch as far as gold endowment goes, is it?

RMark: No, and there is a small deposit, it’s not 43-101 so we don’t mention it often but there’s some very nice grade and intersections typically near surface and they’re short and we went down 150 meters.

But if you look in the corporate presentation today, we have established some very good targets in the northern area, and we did this without the benefit of the groundwork we’ve done in the central area.

And that means we took all the historical info so if someone were to read through the 43-101 there’s about 10 pages on drilling in the ‘80s.

What Vior did over a five-year period was amalgamate the various property packages, owned by in one case by the government/ SIDEX, and in most other cases by small private owners. So, they took five years to amalgamate that northern drilled area into one project and then had the opportunity to include the central and southern areas as well. And so Harvest ends up with about 17 kilometers of strike length on that property, it’s a camp-scale property itself.

So, we’re the first company after the Vior amalgamation – of course Vior expected us to do this – to look at all that data as a whole and so that’s what’s driven our work, and I think Louis Martin has done a tremendous job in establishing so many areas of interest.

The target areas were drawn up as oblongs, now we’re not going to get to all of those oblongs, I mentioned earlier this is a large property, this is a camp-scale property, we’ve got 17 kilometers of contact. In the northern area we’ve established about five priority targets that relate to past successful drilling. There’s gold in the northern area, there’s 49 known showings, and there’s also all the drill bits and intersections that I’ve talked to you about.

What we hope to do is re-establish the presence of gold in the drilling this summer, maybe expand areas where we’ve had good intersections and begin to learn more about that. And then on top of that the big unknown, the central area along the Kiask River Fault or as we’ve called it the mineralized corridor.

So we have a number of targets and we’re not able to drill all of them to start so I like that, there’s more targets that we can drill at this point with the amount of money we have and I remind investors that we have two other properties of size running along structures that we haven’t even had a chance to talk about yet. So, the company has some interesting assets for sure.

RMills: Yes, more targets than money, a temporary condition, I think. You have 8 targets in the central area – 3 known, 5 new – and you’ve got five up in the north and that’s just on the Mousseau. It’s impressive the potential for a major discovery that HVG offers.

RMark: Yeah, it’s good, one of the reasons we wanted the property, you may recall Rick, the first property brought to us was the less worked-on Urban Barry property to the northeast which arcs right over the actual Urban Barry Belt itself, but we knew, because it really was relatively unexplored, that it wasn’t going to be something we could build a company around.

We were directed towards Vior, who were looking at trying to find a joint venture junior that would take on Mosseau. So given that we had found and secured Urban Barry it made absolute sense to get Mosseau, and so we did the deal with Vior.

RMills: Tell us more about Vior, they are a key part of the Harvest story.

RMark: They are the guys who were running Osisko Mining when Gold Fields came in and took over the company and took over the Windfall deposit and all their property around us. Goldfields effectively now owns almost the entire belt.

RMills: Harvest has these three large properties in a belt owned by Gold Fields; it is remarkable and very much to shareholders’ advantage. How involved are Vior with Harvest?

RMark: Vior’s vice president of exploration and the entire team over there at Vior are very supportive. Our deal gives them a large stock position, cash payments and of course the work we do on the ground while they go and hunt for more and bigger targets. So, we’re very fortunate to have an established player as our partner in Quebec.

It’s obviously in their best interest to see us succeed, so they’re doing everything they can.

RMills: Harvest has a substantial portion of the greenbelt tied up.

RMark: If one looks at the map and sees the position that Osisko had and Gold Fields now owns, you’ll see they effectively own the belt. Gold Fields owns pretty much everything west of their, new to them, Windfall Mine, except our three properties.

Those properties are big Rick, they’re substantial and when one looks at them surrounded by Gold Fields you get the sense that we’re in the right neighborhood,

RMills: And Harvest Gold is now the unofficial junior exploration arm as it relates to Vior and Mosseau?

RMark: Well as it relates to Mosseau, absolutely, this is the deal we struck. We have an obligation to the requirements of the deal, but I think what’s exciting for us is that this group has explored this belt for 10 years. You can imagine the experience and what that means to helping us make good decisions on our drilling, for example.

RMills: They built something that was good enough to get bought by Gold Fields, a major South African gold miner looking to expand out of SA.

RMark: Correct.

RMills: Vior did a lot of staking and added the newly acquired claims to the existing deal with HVG.

RMark: They looked for open claims available and staked them, they didn’t keep them for Vior, they kept them within the agreement with Harvest Gold.

As we announced we’ve extended the property along the Kiask River mineralized corridor to the southeast all through Vior’s good work of staking those claims.

Again just pointing out that we’ve got a good strong partner, and now with that management team you couldn’t have more experience in the belt than the management team that we get to work with now, so not being shy, I’m not at all unhappy asking for their ideas, their involvement, I think it’s just a remarkable thing that we get that kind of experience to give us a hand as we make the important decisions of drill targeting.

RMills: You were talking to Gold Fields as well?

RMark: We did meet with the Gold Fields geo team in December, it was interesting because their VP was another Osisko mining guy, he said, “We certainly couldn’t help but notice you guys,” and of course he’s pointing out again the size of these properties in their belt.

So yes, they’re aware of us but at that point Rick in December they were very much just getting their feet wet. They were putting a management team in Canada, a South African company trying to sort out the transition between Osisko and Gold Fields, so I haven’t gone back to them, but we’re getting there.

RMills: Anything else you want to add Rick?

RMark: The depth and excellence of our existing geo team is already a major strength of our company, now we add our Vior experience so I think we’re going to be making as good decisions as we can with a deep geo team.

This is a high-risk enterprise, drilling for gold, drilling for any commodity is a challenge. You want to have a high degree of confidence that all the work, every possible piece of evidence has been integrated into the work you do before you make your drill decisions. I’m very comfortable to say that our geo team does and does that well and our shareholders can be confident of that. 

And I cannot overemphasis the importance of Quinton Hennigh and Crescat Capital being on our side. Crescat continues to keep up their 20% share in the company which is testament to their confidence in our team and our property package.

RMills: Quinton Hennigh knows the Mosseau.

RMark: Quinton’s interest in the project is based about on the structures running through these properties, Rick. Remember these structures are where the big ones hide, that the gold gets trapped in.

Everybody understands that and then you look for the cross-cutting structures and that’s where the gold can as I say get trapped. It’s still a challenge, you’ve got to go find them, the drill is really the best detector to teach us exactly what’s going on below the surface.

RMills: We’re not going to be waiting long for the drill programs to start.

RMark: That’s correct, we’re targeting mid July. If you’re looking for junior opportunities, we’re in the Abitibi Belt, we’re in Quebec, we’re on the Urban Barry Belt surrounded by Gold Fields, we have a very strong partner on Mosseau, our flagship property which has 49 gold showings in historical drilling in the north and now wide open in the central area along one of these major structures.

I mean the story already stands out, and even more so when you include the Abitibi, Quebec, known belt, Gold Fields, Osisko Mining, Vior and Crescat.

And the last thing I’ll say Rick, the drilling costs are so low because people can drive 15 kilometers from the nearby town where they sleep so no camps, no helicopters, no huge costs, we get far bigger bang for our money than if you’re investing in companies that are up north, that are isolated, that need helicopters, that need to build a camp, that don’t have a partner down the road building infrastructure around a mine, so we have a lot of advantages in the variables that ultimately one decides whether a deposit becomes a mine.

We’re cheap in terms of our ability to save money along the way, it’s inexpensive, we’re in a place where infrastructure means can you mine 1 million ounces, or do you need 2 million oz? Well in the case of our location we’re going to be on the lower end of that, which again means success is more likely in a high-risk business.

RMills: And your cheap in that your market cap is very low. Harvest has started to write an interesting story with all the potential to turn it into a great story. Thanks Rick, I really appreciate the talk, it’s been an eye-opener.

RMark: Thank you Rick.

Harvest Gold Corp.
(TSX.V:HVG)
Shares issued: 88,136,342m
Market Cap: $4.8m
HVG website

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com

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Richard owns shares of Harvest Gold Corp. (TSX.V:HVG). HVG is a paid advertiser on his site aheadoftheherd.com

This article is issued on behalf of HVG.