Klondike Gold Corp.

I am just back from five busy days in the Yukon. Visited Victoria Gold, Western Copper and Gold, Alexco, White Gold, ATAC and Nickle Creek and spoke to another eight or nine companies at the Yukon Mining Alliance’s Yukon Mining Conference in Dawson City.

I will be writing about all these companies over the next few weeks and I know that the visits and the conversations will create backgrounds for articles throughout the year. As with any intensive trip, some of the items not on the agenda left lasting impressions. Here are a few.

Putting Peter Tallman of Klondike Gold’s (V.KG) “Guilligan’s Island” tour of the placer fields of Bonanza Creek on an agenda would be great if you could nail him down. Tallman is a keen storyteller and as you drive in the direction of his Klondike property, you learn about how men won fortunes from Bonanza Creek and the creeks which feed it. You get a real sense of the way the first Klondike gold rush created overnight millionaires and you also hear about the modern day “range wars” over disputed claims and placer workings (ask about how “Two by Four” Bob got his nickname). Tallman is a geologist by training but he sees that as including getting the full history of the property and district he’s working in. When you are looking for the source of the gold which filled the creeks you need to know where that gold was found. If you are up in Dawson you can give Peter a call and there is every chance the pick-up truck version of the Minnow will take you up Bonanza Creek and back in the real history of the Klondike. (You can also find out a lot about Murray Pezim who Tallman worked with for years.)

On another axis entirely, it was amazing to meet Heather White, COO of Nickle Creek Platinum (T.NCP). There are very few recent legends in Canadian Mining but Voisey’s Bay Nickel in Northern Labrador is very much one of them. From the Feasibility study to building the mine as the Mine Manager, White ran the project. And she is no stranger to Yukon having been Electrum’s Director on the Victoria Gold Board until last week. It is a hugely impressive career which, to the chagrin of Graeme Jennings, Nickle’s Corporate Development guy, she has to be coaxed into talking about.  The repositioning of Nickel  Creek from a platinum story to a nickel story – same rocks, different concept  – will be driven by Smith’s absolute command of the nickel space and the mining engineering needed to turn the side of a mountain into an open pit producing the right concentrates for the right markets. It is a treat to meet someone this impressive only to discover they are modest to a fault. Like a lot of engineers, White is more about doing than talking but once she gets going you learn the nuts and bolts of nickel mining and processing quickly and painlessly. If there is a mine to be built at Nickel Creek’s Wellgreen Mountain deposit, White’s quiet competence will “get’er done”.

My pal Paul Gray, VP Exploration at Victoria Gold (V.VIT), remains great value. We drove to some of the same spots we went to last year. Where Paul had been pointing to lines of spruce and saying “And that’s where we’ll put the crusher” last year, this year he could point at huge gashes in the forest and really big bulldozers pushing lots of dirt and say the same thing. VIT is now pretty much a construction zone. So much so that Paul and his exploration team will be setting up a satellite camp in the hills behind the Eagle deposit. Explorationists seem to need a level of informality which is impossible, in fact dangerous, in a construction zone.

More or less en passant Paul revealed the not very well kept secret of gold discovery location, “Placer miners are my leading geo-technical indicator.” Which suggests that the Eagle Gold Mine is just the first chapter in Victoria’s Dublin Gulch District. There are a lot of placer operations in the creeks surrounding the Eagle Mine and they are recovering sharp-edged nuggets suggesting that the gold in the streams has not travelled far from the hills Paul is exploring.

Klondike Gold was sent to the naughty corner for the paid article it had OilPrice.com.

“The article is the product of a corporate communicator attempting to encapsulate the news and direction of the Company’s exploration efforts specifically over the past three years as part of an awareness initiative. For greater clarity this article and its contents is not in any way intended as, nor should be confused with, technical disclosure, nor was this article reviewed by a Qualified Person.” Klondike Gold press release 22 August 2017

IIROC, in charge of regulating the disclosures of publically traded companies in Canada can issue trading halts if a company crosses “the line” in producing material which is technical in nature and not properly vetted by a Qualified Person. It is a judgement call. And it only applies to material produced by the company or at the company’s request. So, for example, as Klondike Gold is not yet a MotherlodeTV.net client, if I write that it is going to the moon, IIROC has nothing it can do.

That said, whether an article is paid for or not (and they are all paid for directly or indirectly), it is wise for a junior resource company to resist overly promotional language. When I do an interview or write up a company, I am looking for facts investors can rely on. Of course, I want colour and a sense of who the CEO is and where the project is going; but sticking to the facts avoids any difficulty with IIROC.

Meanwhile Klondike’s price is up $0.12 on the day at $0.47 with over 7 million shares traded. The company has a new press release out in which it promises to drill 40 holes in 30 days for a total of an additional 4000 meters of drilling. Apparently the market has shrugged off IIROC’s “time out”.

Klondike Gold (V.KG) remains halted at 12:00 Vancouver time. Speculation as to the cause of the halt is keeping the bullboards buzzing. However, the one bit of hard fact which may be pertinent to the halt, a paid for article at Oilprice.com, is pretty factual.

Given the significant ownership by Frank Giustra, co-founder of Goldcorp, and Peter Tallman’s – the CEO – track record, this is not your ordinary, pump and dump, junior gold play.

The V.KG story is very typical of Yukon explorers: look for where the placer gold has come from. Do the geology, find drill targets, drill.

So, if it is not a stock scam (and it probably isn’t), and the Oilprice article, while paid for, is generally accurate, why the halt?

Largely because the stock price charged ahead at the open this morning with bids as high as .75 on a stock which closed at .35 on Friday. This suggests that there may be some significant news which has, perhaps, leaked. Which would not be the first time news leaked from a camp or a lab or a conversation which should not have been overheard was.

by David Erfle Friday July 28, 2017

On August 16, 1896, George Washington Carmack and two of his Indian friends found a large gold nugget while fishing in Rabbit Creek (soon to be named Bonanza Creek), a tributary of Canada’s Klondike River in the Yukon. The discovery quickly began one of the most frenzied and fabled gold rushes in history. Since the initial discovery, over 20 million ounces of placer gold has been recovered at surface, with the hard rock source of the gold yet to be found.

Aptly named Klondike Gold Corp (KG-V), a company that today holds 2,780 contiguous claims totaling 524 sq. in the heart of the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush region near Dawson City, has been searching for this source for the past four decades. The firm was incorporated as Arbor Resources Inc. on August 23, 1978. On January 23, 1996, Arbor completed a 10 for 1 share rollback and changed its name to Klondike Gold Corporation. During this time, the company was aggressively promoted and twice had a market cap of over C$100 million, while management squandered many millions of investor dollars on stock promotion without coming up with any substantial exploration results. read more at Junior Mining Junky