Yukon juniors Fireweed, Cascadia, Nickel Creek, Onyx vie for investor support

This is the first of two parts on other companies active in the Yukon following a piece on investor darling Snowline Gold (TSXV: SGD; US-OTC: SNWGF) and site visit reports on Metallic Minerals (TSXV: MMG), Sitka Gold (CSE: SIG), Victoria Gold (TSX: VGCX) and Banyan Gold (TSXV: BYN; US-OTC: BYAGF), and Western Copper and Gold (TSX: WRN; NYSE-AM: WRN).

Takeaways from the week of site visits last month in the Yukon included Snowline’s success of high grades trumping concerns over being remote from roads and power, and a sentiment that other juniors with early-stage projects may be undervalued for their strong resource estimates and drill results. In addition, the Tombstone gold belt has become an exploration destination, with the only current hard rock gold plays there being Kinross Gold’s (TSX: K; NYSE: KGC) Fort Knox mine in Alaska and Victoria’s Eagle mine in the Yukon.

All of the above companies (except Kinross) and the four below attended a conference on July 19 in Dawson City, the rustic epicentre of the Klondike gold rush 125 years ago. That’s where these interviews occurred.

Fireweed Metals (TSXV: FWZ; US-OTC: FWEDF), which has the world’s largest high-grade tungsten project, Mactung, straddling the Yukon-Northwest Territories border, is aiming to publish a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) by November and a feasibility study in 2025, CEO Brandon Macdonald said.

“The idea is to really quickly wrap economics around it, reaffirm the economics and use that as a launching point to go straight into a feasibility study,” Macdonald said.

The Lundin family and Teck Resources (TSX: TECK.A, TECK.B; NYSE: TECK) are invested in Fireweed. It has 41.5 million indicated tonnes at Mactung grading 0.7% tungsten trioxide (WO₃ ) for 301.6 million kg of the world’s hardest metal, according to a resource update in June. Inferred resources total 12.2 million tonnes at 0.59% WO₃, containing 72.1 million kg of WO₃. Macdonald says he wants to start building Mactung in four years.

Next door, Fireweed has the Macmillan Pass project with 11.2 million indicated tonnes grading 6.6% zinc, 2.5% lead and 21.3 grams silver per tonne. The remote projects 370 km east of Whitehorse could use government help to upgrade roads and cut duplications in approvals, Macdonald says.

The CEO said upgrading Mactung’s 2008 feasibility study might lower its forecast of a $400 million capital cost despite 15 years of inflation because the original design was over-engineered. It might propose 10-15 years as an underground mine and longer as an open pit, he said. An output port could be Skagway, Alaska.

Cascadia Minerals (TSXV: CAM), a company spun out of Hecla Mining (NYSE: HL) after it outbid Victoria Gold (TSX: VGCX) for the failed Atac this year, plans to start diamond drilling this month on the Catch copper-gold project. It’s aiming to avoid Atac’s mistakes in gold mineralization and access to services.

“With Cascadia we’re focusing on copper-gold, primarily the copper porphyry space, much closer to infrastructure,” said Andrew Carne, vice president of corporate development. “We have learned some of those lessons and we’re seeking different styles of deposits that are much more explorable by a junior and able to find partnerships and investment much quicker.”

Cascadia, which began trading on the day of the conference, also that day reported outcrop grab samples from Catch showing 3.9% copper and 30 grams gold per tonne. Catch lies in an under-explored part of the Yukon about 50 km southeast of Carmacks, a town on Yukon Highway 1. The discovery in 2020 was among the first claims ever staked in the area, Carne said.

“We think it’s a basalt host rock, that at appropriate depth is intruded into and you’re getting a brecciated zone that’s probably concentrating grades, so the porphyry at depth is likely not those sorts of grades,” Carne said. “The average grade of every single rock sample we’ve collected in this area is about 0.3% copper and 0.7% gold.”

The company is targeting a $2 million capital raising this month to pay for the 2,500 metres planned for drilling this year on Catch. It also has the gold-silver Rosy property near Whitehorse and the copper-gold-molybdenum Pil property in northern British Columbia.

Nickel Creek Platinum (TSX: NCP; US-OTC: NCPCF) is poised to release its prefeasibility study on the Nickel Shaw project within weeks and seek discussions with companies that might want to help redevelop it, president and CEO Stuart Harshaw said.

The project on Yukon Highway 1 about 320 km northwest of Whitehorse dates from an early 1970s underground mine that operated for about 18 months, Harshaw said. The new plan is for an open-pit operation, he said. The Toronto-based company skipped a PEA and intends to release a feasibility study in 2025.

In June, an updated resource estimate showed Nickel Shaw holds 436.7 million measured and indicated tonnes grading 0.26% nickel, 0.13% copper, 0.01% cobalt, 0.23 gram palladium per tonne, 0.22 gram platinum and 0.04 gram gold. That would produce 2.47 billion lb. nickel, 1.28 billion lb. copper, 137 million lb. cobalt, 3.29 million oz. palladium, 3.14 million oz. platinum and 545,000 oz. gold.  

Despite being on the Yukon leg of the Alaska Highway, the project lacks a grid connection and would use liquid natural gas for power. Inter-government talks began this year to link B.C.’s grid with the Yukon, but the 760 km of power lines would take more than a few years to build. Meantime, the company plans to explore critical mineral funding opportunities with Ottawa and Washington.

The project will benefit from carbon sequestration tax benefits and acid-free tailings that will ease concerns over long-term liability and site rehabilitation, Harshaw said. Considering the wider mining industry, he said it needs new investors.

“We need a kind of a change in investment philosophy to occur, where bricks and mortar become a bit more interesting again, and people can move away from the tech stocks,” he said. “Everybody jumped on the bandwagon for lithium, but you don’t see long-term investors.”

Onyx Gold (TSXV: ONYX), a company formed in May with the Canadian assets of Alaska-focused High Gold (TSXV: HIGH), begins drilling this month on its King Tut project in the far east of the Tombstone gold belt near Snowline Gold’s early-stage Rogue project.

The Vancouver-based company is hoping to make a discovery in the same type of intrusion-related deposit Snowline has found showing grades this month of 2.48 grams gold per tonne over 553.8 metres from surface including 5 grams over 132 metres from 6 metres downhole.

“Snowline has now shown, they kind of rewrote the book on these systems because they can be significantly higher grades,” president and CEO Darwin Green said. “We’ve had this target sitting, waiting for 12 years and now we’re going to go drill.”

Onyx, which is backed by a 5% investment from a large North American gold producer that prefers not to be publicly named, plans to drill about 2,500 metres in a dozen holes to probe several soil anomalies across the 20-km-wide property. They were found before the project was shelved during the 2012-19 market downturn.

Snowline’s prominence along with other projects in the area such as Fireweed Metals’ Mactung and MacMillan Pass should convince the government to help upgrade roads and power lines, Green said.

Onyx plans to start the second season of drilling at its Munro-Croesus property near Timmins, Ont., in October. Last year it drilled 136 metres grading 0.5 gram gold per tonne including 62.8 metres at 0.8 gram and 4.5 metres at 4.9 grams. The past-producing Croesus mine averaged 93.5 grams per tonne from 1908-36. Onyx also has the Golden Mile and Timmins South projects in the same area.

“There are brownfield veins that we want to chase and potentially make another Croesus-style discovery and these are low-grade bulk tonnage projects,” Green said. “You don’t need much in order to drastically improve the economics.”