Marathon Gold: Step by Step to Gold in Newfoundland

Phil Walford, CEO of Marathon Gold (T.MOZ), has been working on mining projects for four decades. When he looks at a flow sheet he can spot the potential bottlenecks.
Phil Walford, CEO of Marathon Gold (T.MOZ), has been working on mining projects for four decades. When he looks at a flow sheet he can spot the potential bottlenecks.
I spoke to Bayhorse Silver (V.BHS) CEO Graeme O’Neill (pictured above) as he was getting ready to fly down to Oregon to spend time at the Bayhorse Silver mine over the weekend. It’s a frequent trip. Vancouver to Boise Idaho and then an hour or two driving to get to the mine site on the Oregon side of the Snake River.
Towards the end of our interview, Robert Mintak CEO of Standard Lithium (V.SLL), laid out Standard’s criteria for evaluating lithium opportunities, “You have to get the right project,” he said, “There needs to be infrastructure. You need a workforce. You need to access to water and reagents. You have to consider the jurisdiction and the permitting rules. Utilizing modern selective extraction, you need to not only pump large volumes of brine, you need to know if you will be allowed to re-inject the processed brine.”
How can an investor find a company which has real potential but is trading at a knock down price?
The Abitibi is one of the world’s premier gold camps. Whether it is deep beneath an old mine or a fresh look at a former exploration site, the Abitibi offers tremendous opportunities for creative gold explorers. A fact which Steve Roebuck, CEO of Enforcer Gold (V.VEIN), is fully aware of.
One of the extraordinary aspects of Canada’s junior mining sector is just how international it actually is. Millennial Lithium (V.ML) is headquartered in Vancouver, is advancing two lithium projects in Salta province in Argentina but its CEO, Farhad Abasov is based much closer to the lithium markets in China. Abasov’s last project, Allana Potash Corp, was a deposit in Ethiopia which was eventually sold to Israel Chemicals (ICL) for $170M in 2015.
When the gold price crashed to less than $300 an ounce in the late 1990s many gold mines in Canada went into “care and maintenance”. And when that price failed to recover these mines were, effectively abandoned.
The name “Argentina” comes from the Latin term “argentum”, which means silver. For AbraPlata (V.ABRA) the silver (and a good deal of gold) is found at the Diablillos property, which contains a Ag-Au epithermal deposit called Oculto, located in the far south of a province called Salta located in the northwestern part of the country.
Mining Victoria Gold’s (V.VIT) Eagle Gold Project at Dublin Gulch in Yukon literally means taking off the side of a small mountain. That mountain hosts a National Instrument 43-101 compliant Reserve of 2.7 million ounces of gold at .67 gpt. Operating costs are estimated at US$550 per ounce and the mine is designed to produce approximately 200,000 ounces of gold per year in full operation.
“I am not your typical CEO,” said Brian “Griz” Testo. “I was a prospector/developer during the Alberta diamond rush. One year I was flying down to PDAC and I met Pam Strand. She introduced me to Mike Dufresne. They told me if I wanted to develop properties the way I thought they should be developed I needed to have my own company. So with their help I started Grizzly Diamonds. Other opportunities came along and we switched the name to Grizzly Discoveries (V.GZD).”