A New Era Begins at Alaska Silver

0:16All right, we are wrapping up our coverage here at the 2026 Beaver Creek Precious Metals Summit, and we are going to head up to Alaska with our friends from Alaska Silver. A change at the helm, and this is our first interview with Mr. Kit Mars and new CEO, Mr. Aaron Schutt. Kit, Aaron, important three and a half days here for both of you. There's changes going on. Kit, I'm actually surprised to see you, but it's good to see you. Yes. But, okay, you've had this conversation many times the last couple months, but they paint us the picture of the transition that's happening in Alaska. Yeah, and that's great.

0:55this is something I've thought about for a couple years. I've been doing, working on this project, not steadily, but since 1981. And I think, you know, Joan and I formed the company in 2010. So we've been actively working and thinking about the transition. Our board brought it up a year ago at our last annual meeting. And we're a very special company, a niche company, explorer but really focused in Alaska. Alaska is very different. We're very good operating there. I really see the vision of the company as moving ahead from being just an explorer. We're very successful at that. But it's really the time to look at our major resources, the Illinois Creek Pass Producing Mine and Water Pump Creek, and move into the pre-development world.

1:43and been working on our and Jonah and I in our community relations the last 10 years. A couple years ago we reached out to Aaron then the CEO of Doyon for support of the project. Got to know Aaron a lot better and he separately from our work retired after 20 years at Doyon. One thing came together. Aaron can talk about his view of this but I saw an opportunity there and I was pleasantly shocked when he agreed to help and come into the company. And I think it's really fortunate for me personally, Jonah and I, but really for the company, our shareholders, to have a person of his background and experience.

2:28So at that point, I think maybe I'll stop talking for a while. Aaron, let's do the introduction. Congratulations. You officially start October 1, is that? That's correct. All right, so the next couple days, you take the helm here. So maybe give us a little bit of the background, your experience, and what you're going to take from that, what you've learned that applies to Water Pump Creek. Yeah, very good question. I was born and raised in rural Alaska in the interior, the very far side of the interior on the Alcan, on the Alaska Highway. I worked for Doyon, as Kit said, for 20 years. I started as COO, and last 15 I was the CEO.

3:06Doyon is Alaska Native Regional Corporation, a very large landowner, 12.2 million acres in interior Alaska, heavily involved in the resource business in Alaska. A lot of it is in oil and gas, rigs, camps, own pipelines, build pipelines, permitting, logistics, a whole slew of services. Some exposure to the mining segment and support. We have Camp Medic is a Doyon employee at Illinois Crip. and then on the landowner side we've had a lot of junior companies on Doyon ground exploring over the years and the tectonic flat project is a Doyon project and Doyon's done some investing including in directly in tectonics so I've got a little bit of exposure to to mining exploration in Alaska really excited about this opportunity because it's in my home country my late grandmother was born 35 miles north of our project and I have a lot of relatives in the area some in camp in the summer.

4:04And I very much believe in the potential of the people and the resources in interior Alaska and really excited to try and progress the Illinois Creek past producing mine and the new discoveries in the CRD district. We'll be very careful mixing family with business. Hey, I've been doing it for 20 years. I have so many Doran shareholders that are friends and family. It's the way things work. Well, let's kind of revisit the work on the ground this summer. The drill program sounds this summer like it was progressing really nicely. You were actually ahead of schedule, and you raised a healthy amount of cash.

4:40Maybe give us the lay of the land, what the strategy is this summer, and how things kind of stand here as we enter October 1. Yeah, I think there was a very successful drill program in terms of the meterage and accomplishing the goals. We don't have the assays back yet, but we're encouraged by the amount of work we were able to get done this year. And in Alaska, we all know that the season's short. So the fact that we were able to go from 6 ,000 meters to 9 ,500 meters in the plan in the summer, that's a great success. And thank you to the shareholders that came in to fund that additional work.

5:17That's efficiency rather than the MOBE and DMOBE costs that are waiting another whole year. As we move forward, we'll be assessing the results here in the next three months to four months and putting together a plan for next summer based on what those results tell us the best use of our time and money is next summer. But I would expect at least a similar-sized drill program next summer to follow up on some of the exciting recent discoveries and progress the work in Water Pump Creek and Illinois Creek, two resource-based parts of the project. Kit, the strategy for this program when it was launched was really trying to find the continuation of the resource.

6:02Knowing what you know, obviously we're awaiting assays, but do you feel comfortable that maybe you were successful with this just looking at it? Yeah, we did a lot of drilling both at Waterpump Creek, about 4 ,500 meters, and at our new discovery about four kilometers south at Silver Sage. So we drilled six, one of the efforts at Water Pump Creek was to the south, drilled three or four holes there. We now realize that we're drilling into a down-drop block, geologically called a grobin. So that has moved the target down a little deeper than we anticipated. So we'll have to look at that in the future of how to attack that from a structural geology standpoint.

6:43We drilled to the north on long trend, had some very good indications there. so I feel the system is moving along the Waterpump Creek structure, call it. And then this year, with Peter McGaw's help, we decided to drill two exploration holes west of the resource, and one of those was very successful. We're waiting for the results, but we think we have good alteration information and guidance that we may be finding a new system there. But really the big focus this year, just part of the drilling, the way it works, was silver sage. We discovered that last year. We talked before about the extremely high-grade boulders of Argentiferous galena, found in the trenching only a meter to two meters down.

7:30So we drilled 27 holes there. 24 of those were fairly shallow. The area is totally under cover. So those are designed to test structure, geology, stratigraphy, mineralization. We're going to put those together this winter, and that'll guide the drilling for next year. And I really hope that by the end of 2027, we have enough information for a new third resource. Okay. So let's talk about the, you know, Water Pump Creek has, it's due for a lot of love, right? Yeah. And I don't know if 2026 was it, but it feels like it's a much better place than it was in 2025. But because of the market we're at, because we see capital available at favorable metals prices here, with Water Pump Creek looking ahead, is it more continued incremental growth, or is it something you feel an urgency to quickly grow as best as you can strategically?

8:29Well, we're looking at that from two ways. is we'd like to increase the tonnage. That's always a factor. We're trying to look at moving the company also into the pre-development world. So from that standpoint, Waterpump Creek needs geotechnical work. So we have a couple years of geotechnical to figure out really what is the best mining plan, and it'll be an underground deposit. So at the same time, with gold and silver prices, as we all know, have been quite good lately, we're shifting a little bit of our focus to Illinois Creek and I'll let Aaron you know finish this up but I do want to say we just two weeks ago shipped a one-ton bulk sample from the center of the Illinois Creek pit of mineralization that was sent to Dan Kappas at Kappas Cassidy in Reno they're the pioneers in oxide gold metallurgy extraction heap leach and they have a lot of ideas.

9:29They have a pilot plant size Merrill Crow plant and one of the things I want to see is doing modern metallurgy to come up with some modern processing for the silver recovery and possibly bringing in copper into the resource. I've met with Dan today and that's something that we're going ahead. I'd like to have Aaron and the team start looking at possibly some economics at Illinois Creek without having really good processing information to get your costs going forward. You know, that's what we need first. And then with Aaron's background, he very modestly did not mention he's got a master's degree in civil engineering and be the first engineer as part of our team.

10:11And Aaron, I think you think there's a lot of potential there. Yeah. And I like to build things. So we have to make the right decisions and we don't have all the information to make those right now but we've started that process and that won't take that long to get more good information on this very well-defined existing resource and those are rare in Alaska where you have all the historical data where you have some infrastructure and you have a favorable regulatory climate with the state of Alaska and a favorable metal price environment so I think the conditions warrant the work to decide whether or not how far to push this pre-development into possibly development in the next few years.

10:52And I'm really excited about that. Aaron, I'm going to put you on the spot here. What is your vision for this company that obviously there's a lot of alignment, there would obviously be a lot of alignment, but what's the vision that you have for the company that maybe is a little bit more outside of the box than your predecessors may be considered? Well, this CRD districts tend to be big and we have probably two in the current claim block. So there's a lot of opportunity within what we already have. I think I would love to be in mining production and, you know, the five to whatever time, five year time frame or so that supports a local economy in rural Alaska that provides cash flow to grow these other resources and get them into that pre-production and production scenario and then you know spending my time at Doyon where there's 12.2 million acres there are lots of targets that things all go well here 10 years from now maybe we're moving some of our exploration to other areas okay very good So if you're kind of staging the idea of pre-development work, obviously we mentioned some economics.

12:10Kit mentioned pushing the team to look at those numbers. Is a PEA something that potentially is something on the block here for 2027? It is, and we applied for a road right away from the state of Alaska from Illinois Creek over to the Yukon River as well. And that's a process that'll take us probably another nine months or so. And then really do some on the ground to truth some early preliminary engineering estimates we have on that route to support both the possible restart of Illinois Creek, as well as all the work that we need to do on these other water pump creek and silver sage and anything.

12:49When you go into the pre-production, you've got to have infrastructure and that's going to be a part of it. So we have a lot of work in front of us. it'll be exciting to do that work and see where these numbers take us on the PEA, possible PEA. Can you just quickly brush over where the political landscape is for mining right now in Alaska? Alaska, the state, is a very supportive jurisdiction. And we have a governor's race here on the ballot in November. But I don't expect that environment to change. We're all on state land here. 100 % of the claims, the road right away, there are no federal lands involved.

13:24There are no native corporation lands, so it's a very clean land package. The state has a very supportive structure. They have a large mines permitting team that we've already engaged that will help us with all aspects of Illinois Creek and or anything to follow. And again, there's not political resistance. There's political support for resource development in general and the oil and gas industry they spent the last 20 years in, as well as mining. And I expect that to continue. Okay. Hopefully we'll touch base maybe a few more times before the end of year. I hope we can do that. But maybe give us a general sense as you wrap up 2026, obviously a huge transition in front of us.

14:02Where do you think the book, the bank account stands at the end of the year? How much cash are you going to have to start planning for next year? You know, we don't report on that except on the quarter, and that'll be out in a few weeks here. Just say we know we're going to have to do a fundraise to support a drilling program next summer, and we have plenty of cash to tide us through the wintertime and expect a fundraise probably late first quarter or so of 2027. Okay. All right. Kit? Is this bon voyage, my friend? We've done this so many times for so many years, I kind of feel like I'm saying goodbye to an old friend here.

14:39We'll be turning over the day-to-day and the true management operations to Aaron. The time is very right for that. I will continue on as chairman of the board. Jonah and I are still some of the largest single shareholders in the company, along with Crestcat Capital. So we have a vested interest. I want to see this moving ahead, but Aaron really will be taking over the leadership. and I'll be around to answer questions and get in the way every once in a while. But really looking forward to this transition. I have a great feeling, a vision of success for the company going ahead. Well, the microphone and the chair is always open to you.

15:21Okay. We will miss you dearly. Aaron, we're excited to hear more from you, see that vision really play through. We'll touch base next couple weeks or months, but thanks so much for your time. Thank you. All right, everybody. That's your Alaska Silver corporate update and a wrap from us here at Beaver Creek. Alaska Silver does trade on the venture with the symbol WAM. Have yourself a great rest of your week. Safe travels, everybody, and we'll see you again with your regular scheduled programming. The information presented should not be considered investment advice. Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein.

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