Solitario Resources Corp.

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Get a glass of water. Mhm. Hello everybody. For those who hadn't met me earlier, I'm Haiku EMD, managing director for Mendelso Mining at HCON, right? It's a pleasure to use, Chris Harold from Solitario, a company we've covered for what, a decade at this point. please go ahead. Thank you, Haiko, and it's a pleasure here to be in, Zurich once again, to present, Solitario's story. It's a little different, I think, than, than most other companies. We're strictly an exploration company. We're a discovery company. We have no intention of actually becoming a producer. Our model is to find it and sell it and and we've done that a couple times and I think I think the story today we're hoping to repeat that maybe even in a bigger way. regular, disclosures, a lot of forward looking statements, and I first wanna talk about, we're gonna talk about 5 projects so it's gonna be pretty fast paced presentation. We think all of these projects have tier one potential to them. the, the primary project that I think most people have been interested in the last couple of years has been our Golden Crest, South Dakota property. It is, it is a really unusual property in terms of new discovery. We have found gold all over the surface there and it's right next to the oldest gold mining. district in the United States, Newmont has been a strategic investing partner. They usually don't invest in juniors, so we think this is a real endorsement about the potential of this project. And then we have two advanced exploration, almost pre-feasibility type, projects, that are zinc oriented. One is with, tech, and that's the lick deposit in, Alaska. The other is with, Nexa Resources, and that's the Florida Canyon zinc deposit in Peru and in the last two years we've added two really unusual properties also and they're quite different. the first one is the Cat Creek molybdenuminium property in in southern Colorado, never been drilled. It has an interesting history. I'll go into that a little bit and the other is the Bright Angel Copper Gold Project in northern Colorado which also I think has an interesting history. We have a really strong, I think, registry of shareholders. Newmont's the largest shareholder with 9.3%. Edgepoint owns 8% of the company. It's a, fund out of Canada. Wexford Capital in the United States owns 6.1%. Conwayve in Switzerland owns 3.2%. And other institutions own 1.3%. Management directors own 8% of the company and all those shares were bought either through option exercise or in the market. Zebra Trust, which is the lending family trust, owns 4%, and then other institutions and high net worth individual own about 20% of the company, so a very good distribution of our shares. Northern Black Hills is host to what was for 150 years the largest gold camp in the United States. There are 4 principal mines there. The big one is the Home State Mine, which is currently owned by Barrick, but Bra bought the Home State Mining Company about 20 some years ago. There's a Richmont mine, 9.9 million ounces, that's being developed or going through feasibility by Dakota Gold. They're our neighbor there. Gild Edge Mine is Agnigo Eagle, 4 million ounces, but we understand there's a lot more that is around that and that it's quite a bit bigger than that. And then finally, the wharf mine, where Coeur Mining is still currently mining there. It's an open pit heat bleach. so when you total that all up, it's a 90 million ounce endowed district. Our land package is, sits on to the southwest of, of the main old historic district. You can see the distribution of mines there. You have the, Gild Edge Mine on the east side, then the Homestake, then the wharf and Richmond Hill, and we're to the southwest of all of that. We started working there in late 2021 and for the first three years we didn't do any drilling, we just did surface work and a lot of it. We took a 48,000 soil samples, which is, I think, by far the most soils ever taken, maybe in the US. a typical soil sampling program might be 500 to 1000 samples. We started finding gold right from the start. And no one had ever explored here because it was covered by a lot of grass and trees, and that's why we took so many soil samples. And the other reason it wasn't explored, it had the wrong rock type. It didn't have the old Precambrian 2 billion year old rocks. It had these younger limestone units on the surface. So we got a new drilling permit just approved in March this year. It's our second drilling permit, and it's, it's by far on the best endowed gold area that we've discovered on this project to date. It allows up to 196 drill holes on 49 different locations. Drilling is scheduled to begin in mid-May. We have contracted two drill rigs to start. and the, the drilling results in 2024 and 2025, 7 of the, 18 holes that we drilled, intersected at least a gram per ton gold, some of them quite good, show a couple of those, and we found also high grade. 11 g per ton paleo plaster on top of the old rock, so that's a good indication that there was probably Precambrian home steak style mineralization in the not too, distant area. When you look at the old district, there's 6 environments that host gold. In our first, in, in the work that we've done, we found gold in all, in 5 of the 6, and on the 6th 1 we found indirect evidence, which is the home stake style mineralization, we, we have fragments of home stake style mineralization in one of the drill holes. First, two of the first three drill holes, GC1 intersected 32 m of 1.68 g right at the surface. GC3 intersected 26 m of 2.5 g. And when you look at the core mine, the core mine. is currently mining 0.6 g fairly deep in a pit, so they have to go into the pit, blast, and then haul it up out of the pit. And when you look at this mineralization, it's right at the surface, and we think it's a good start of a resource there. And we've not only found it at the surface, but we've also found it at depth, gold mineralization in our drill hole GC 8, we had 41 m of 1 g. The bottom, almost 20 m 19.4 m, had 1.67 g per ton. So really good result there and and we'll be looking at this unit more because that's where the wharf deposit was hosted. OK, Newmont has been a great, strategic investor in us, and, and in the last year we've teamed up with some of their technical people. It's been a, a good relationship. they've had their own, their geologist helping our geologists or assisting our geologists mapping there. they've been doing, interpretation of geophysical results, gravity survey, and also geochem. Last week we had an 8 hour meeting with them, very constructive, and we're going to jointly select some of the drill holes that we'll be drilling in the next 6 weeks. This area is the area we call it geyser. It's where we've had the best drilling, best surface results over about 1 kilometer.5 by 1 kilometer area. Many rocks that were exceeding 10 g per ton, some of them some of them 30 and 40 g per ton, and that one trench that's shown on the right-hand part of this slide here was a trench in an old road. logging road 234 m of 0.82 g, so phenomenal trench, and that flanks the higher grade rock samples. And if we look just at the geyser area., or, or we look at a wider area than geyser. this is our drill platforms going into next year. There's 45 of them on the Ponderosa area, and they're the darker red, circles there. And the yellow and, and purple, the purple colors indicate 1 to 10 g, gold samples, and you can see there's large areas covered with that. And the yellow are soil samples that indicate gold in the subsurface there. So geyser is the focus of this year's drilling, but we also can drill at Wildcat, Top Dollar, Sleeping Beauty, and Moonlight. We think these have a good chance of growing together and it will be probably known as Ponderosa in the future. Now I'm gonna go to a different commodity, molybdenum and rhenium. This property is 100% owned by us, and it, it, we acquired it about 2 years ago. We got it permitted in a year. the data that we acquired came from Anaconda Copper, which, back for, for almost 100 years they were one of the largest mining companies in the world. In 1981981 and 1919892, they discovered this property. They did a lot of surface work, geophysics, geology, geochemistry. It was their number one drilling program going into 1983, and their parent company shut down all exploration in Anaconda. It never got drilled. All that data got put into a warehouse repository in Wyoming. Of all the projects that Anaconda ever worked on, and there's thousands of boxes of, of data there, one of our geologists got into that data. They found this. They saw, they saw it had never been drilled, and it, it looks just like a classic Mali, system. And one of the things that, this is in northern, this is in southern Colorado, one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is Colorado is host to two of the three largest and richest molybdenum deposits in the world. It's the, the climax deposit shown in the upper left box on the right hand side. And the Henderson ore body. These have been in production for 30 or 40 years. They're significant assets of Freeport McMan, the largest copper producer in the world and also the largest molly producer in the world because of these two. And then we show in the lower box the Cat Creek target, and, and the size of that box indicates. The And do a geophysical survey where there's high concentrations of metal and, and so we, we see Cat Creek comparing very favorably to Henderson in size, never been drilled. We have Molly on surface in, in these little explosion vent areas which is similar to what you see at Henderson and Climax. we're, I was talking to some Freeport geologists that work there and. They said, you know, this has all the attributes of a, a good Molly porphyry system, and it's, again, right in the area where there's other molly porphyry. The next one also has an Anaconda history tie, and again all this data came from that warehouse that I'm going to show you. We just recently we picked this up in September. We submitted a plan of operations to the Forest Service in March. We have comments from the Forest Service. We're addressing the comments. There is a chance we can drill it this year, but there's also a good chance that we won't quite make it under the early winter conditions that might originate there. It was really Anaconda didn't discover this. It was a private, individual that drilled 186 little short little 15 m holes and it, Anaconda came in a year after that because there were some good copper intercepts in some of these holes. They drilled 11 drill holes, core holes, deep ones, and there were some good sniffs of copper in several of the holes, and, about half the holes weren't really encouraging. Anaconda's take on this, it wasn't a classic copper porphyry that you see in Arizona or you see in Chile. And, and so they held it for 10 years and then dropped out of it. The property got forgotten. Nothing was ever published at Cat Creek or at Bright Angel in the public venue, so no one knew about these things. again, we found this, this data, and it's, it's pretty compelling, And what's changed in the last 60 years since this was drilled is there's a new type of copper porphyry that geologists recognize. It's called a pipe porphyry, and it's not this big mushroom porphyry that's 1.5 kilometers in size. It's more of a couple 100 m, but it goes to 1000. It can go to 1000 m in depth, and they generally are very gold rich, way more gold rich than your typical copper porphyry. And that's what matches really the data that that Anaconda did and that the prospector did. It really looks like a pipe porphyry, and pipe porphyry districts can be 20 to 25 million ounces of gold. The Acadia district in Australia that was formerly Newcrest and now Newmont, they're the ones that really developed the model for a pipe porphyry. We like this one a lot. At surface we found a lot of copper. There's some of the numbers and the scale on the bottom. This is about 1 kilometer wide, this view. We think the pipe is probably 20 to 300 m in circumference here. We're not sure how deep it goes, but we're pretty confident it goes a couple 100 m at a minimum. And, and shown on the right hand side of the slide you see a couple just classic porphyry samples. And finally our, our, zinc projects which are very advanced, we have, joint ventured with NEA Florida Canyon. It has a great resource, 20 million tons of better than 10%, a really good joint venture with them. We're carried to production there. they've spent $90 million on this project and, we're carried, all the way through to production. Everything they spend to feasibility, we never pay them back. After feasibility, they loan us the money and we pay them back through 50% of the net cash flow to us. So starting day one, we're making cash flow. It's a very attractive joint venture and it's a really good zinc deposit. We've done a PEA on this. The economics look good right now. NESA is working on getting a new community agreement to allow future drilling. we think we'll get that they have a good relationship with the local communities. And finally, the zinc, lick zinc deposit joint ventured with tech. We spend 50/50 with them. It's only 11 miles from the Red Dog mine, which is, for the last 40 years been the highest grade, lowest cost zinc mine in the world. We think that potentially. The lick deposit could become a satellite mine that feeds the red dog mill in the future. Finally, capital structure. We have 92.8 million shares outstanding. We've never had a reverse split. We've been in business for 30 years. We've never issued a warrant. We have no debt and just under $9 million in cash. So we've operated this company a little differently than most juniors. We've been very strict on capital. We've always kept a decent cash reserve and we've never been forced into. let's say, financings that aren't very attractive and so finally 26 looks like the, I think the most exciting year we've had in my history with this company. we'll drill two projects for sure, one great gold project, the, Golden Crest. The Cat Creek project, if, if we hit, Molly there and it's a Molly porphyryry and it's a typical Colorado Molly porphyry, I think it's a game changer for market perception and also the direction of the company. we may get to drill at, Bright Angel. I hope so, but if not, I think we'll drill for sure next year. And the other two zinc projects are, are, are going forward on a, certainly a community basis. No drilling there this year, but, but there is advancement there. So with that I'd like to thank you for your attention. very pleased to have presented this. You got time for maybe one question? I'll take it then. I mean, we covered the firm, as you, as you well know, the in our view, the market pretty much underappreciates Cat Creek, and I just want to see, you know, in your opinion, you obviously you gotta do a drilling this year. What was the aha moment at site that made you say, you know what, this is the year that we're really gonna put money into the ground there, there, yeah, we, we struggled for a year. Should we drill a May project because we. Really focused on gold, but we had this, this project was handed to us on a silver platter, and all we had to do was permit and drill a few holes, so it's an asymmetric outcome if we don't find anything. We, we spent a half million dollars, not finding something. If we do find, find what we're hoping is there and it, it really looks interesting, you know, this is the type of mine that operates for 30 or 40 or 50 years that Freeport McMan would like to, you know, own or any other Molly company would like to own. So we finally said it's time to drill. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much. Oh yeah. Yeah, could you share some more, I'm sorry, could you share some more light on the Molly? I, I'm not familiar with the material and also what was the second one? Molly radium, radium. I'm also not familiar. Maybe other people are, but I'm not, so apologize for real quickly. Hey, I had to look up what rhenium was used for myself. I knew what Molly, molly hardens steel. It's used in a lot of, appli and, and it becomes makes it less corrosive. And the other thing, radium does about the same thing. Radium is one of the maybe the rarest metal in the world, and it sells for $2.5 a gram, but rhenium even does a better job than molly, so it's used in defense, it's used in aerospace, it's used in turbines, and it's, it's used in kind of high tech applications like drill steel uses a lot of molly because you want it harder. OK, thank you very much.