Two VMS Projects, One Big Alaska Opportunity: Valhalla Metals in the Ambler District

0:14Sorin Posescu: Welcome back to Mining Stock Daily. Ian Wagner here with a corporate introduction to a new company, Valhalla Metals. Valhalla is a copper, zinc, and silver explorer in Alaska's Ambler Mining District with two VMS projects, Sun and Smucker, and both Tech and Marubini on the register. Sun holds a resource of 1.7 million tons indicated and 9 million inferred, both at 4.2 % copper equivalent. And the 2026 drill season just wrapped up. They trade on the TSX venture under the symbol VMXX and on the OTCQB under the symbol VMXXF. And they host a market cap of roughly$65 million Canadian. With us today to kind of talk about recent developments at Valhalla is Soren Posescu, president and CEO of Valhalla Metals.

1:12Sorin Posescu: Soren, welcome to the podcast. I believe it's your first time on. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ian. Absolutely. So I want to, we were just talking briefly off air about this, but I want you to kind of let our listeners know, because if a lot of listeners maybe haven't heard of Valhalla or certainly doesn't maybe know the background of the story, the projects in the rocks have been explored for 60 plus years or so, but Valhalla has been around for a few years. And then you guys recently acquired a project from tech. So give us a little bit of the corporate background and kind of how you got to where you are today.

1:49Ian Wagner: Yeah, happy to. So we founded Valhalla back in 2017 and acquired the Sun project by staking. We worked that project for about five years privately and decided to take the company public in 2022 with the help of Morabeni. Morabeni is the fifth largest trading house in Japan, So our strategic investors at the time, they invested about 8 million Canadian in the GoPublic transaction. We raised about 10 in total back then. So that's when we took Valhalla Public at the end of 2022. Then we had a drilling program the following year, 2023, at the Sun Project. We had some amazing drilling intercepts. You can refer to the website, but again, very, very splashy numbers.

2:46Ian Wagner: And then we kind of had the company on pause for a couple of years. The reason being, there was a road permitted that would connect the Yom Ramey district to the Dalton Highway. The Biden administration decided to cancel those permits. but then last year in October the Trump administration had the permits back on so that kind of brought a lot of new life in the district. So that was back in October of 2025. This year we acquired the SMACR project from Tech. also Smoker has been worked by several mining companies over the years. The last work there was done by Anaconda back in 1982 so that was when they drilled the last hole at Smoker.

3:48Ian Wagner: Obviously it contains a historic resource so we acquired the Smoker project from tech. We closed that transaction on June 1st of this year and And also raised$15 million Canadian as part of the transaction to give us capital to do work on both assets.

4:10Sorin Posescu: Okay, that's, yeah, that's a great kind of background. So let's focus a little bit on Sun, right? Because that's going to be your flagship. That's going to have the project that's the most advanced. You do have a 43-101 resource for that. I'm just going to read off some of the numbers so audience kind of knows. again, that 1.7 million tons indicated at 4.3 % zinc, 1.48 % copper, 1.11 % lead, 60 grams per ton silver, and a little bit of gold. So very polymetallic, right? How should our audience understand what this resource is and how you are going to kind of attack it, right? How do you want to develop it?

4:50Sorin Posescu: What do you see? Are you thinking of it in the way of the, you know, the Trilogy and sort of the South 32 other assets in Alaska? Like, just kind of break that down for us.

5:03Ian Wagner: Yeah, of course. Yeah. So if you look at the Arctic project, which is our neighboring project owned by Trilogy on South 32, just by way of background, that project was initially acquired by Rick, our chairman, at Nova Gold.

5:21Sorin Posescu: Rick Van Nuenhuis of Contango. Yeah, so, and then that project got spun out of Nova Gold

5:28Ian Wagner: in 2011 into what is today, Trilogy. So we have a few people on our board and management that worked in the region for decades. So we know geology very well. Obviously, we grew that resource at the Arctic project. So the way to look at the Sun project and also Smucker, the same way we look at the Arctic deposit. The geology is very similar. If you take a piece of core from Arctic and a piece of core from Sun, you couldn't tell them apart. So we see a similar scenario to both Sun and Smucker.

6:08Sorin Posescu: Okay, so yeah. So you guys had, you raised money, right? You had the historical resource, I think, had 100 diamond drill holes. You guys had, well, one thing that's interesting to note about historically, right, is that sun has only been drilled to about a 200 meter depth, right? And there is some indications that you may have another 900 vertical meters. You have a pretty long anomaly there. Like, what was the goal of this season's drill campaign and how did it go? What did you find?

6:43Ian Wagner: Yeah, so we had a small dream program this summer. The objective was to try to fully understand the mineralization at the sound project. And if you look at the maps or our corporate presentation, we've done quite a bit of work on that resource. So obviously geophysics suggests that it continues down deep and down strike. And that's the exploration strategy for us. Just chase the mineralization down deep and don't strike at the known resource. So that was the strategy for this summer. But obviously, if you take a step back and look at all the geophysical anomalies at the Sun Project, we have a lot of exploration outside the known resources.

7:32Sorin Posescu: Yeah, and I guess in terms of just capital allocation, do you try to go deeper at Sun first, or do you start testing these new targets or a little bit of both?

7:43Ian Wagner: Yeah, I'll do a little bit of both. Obviously, again, we want to grow this resource. We want to double the resource, and we think we can achieve that. We're also going to draw some holes to test some of the anomalies. Obviously, if we hit elsewhere, then that would be a game changer. And if you look at the VITEM maps, there's an anomaly to the west, a very large anomaly, and we're very excited about it. It's never been drilled. If you arc the ground, it can pick up sulfides on the surface. So, yeah, that's something we love to go there and drill some holes. Okay. Yeah.

8:23Sorin Posescu: And with sun staying on sun, that resource was, I think, an effective date of 2021. And you modeled at, you know,$3 copper,$18 silver, I think, 1300 gold. Obviously, we're in a very different metals environment now. Like, if the resource stayed this, like, how should people think about it? Is it purely polymetallic? Do you feel like a lot of that is going to be a copper deposit? is it going to be more just silver, lead, zinc how are you thinking about that?

9:00Ian Wagner: Yeah, obviously again the resource used dated metal prices and highly like we're going to do a resource update at the end of 2027 use more up-to-date metal prices in terms of obviously within our VMS deposit there are various donations that go on. So, you know, I have to approach to see what we drill off first. But again, at the end, there's going to be the way it works. Five different metals, copper, zinc, lead, silver, and gold. And typically, you do three concentrates, copper concentrate, zinc concentrate, and lead concentrate. That's the way it works. Okay.

9:48Sorin Posescu: Yeah, and just any sense of what you think is going to be most dominant there?

9:52Ian Wagner: If you look at the metal distribution as it is today, zinc and copper are mostly equal in terms of the value they bring to the resource. Combined would be close to 80 % of the value of the resource and the balance of 20 % would be split between lead, silver, and gold. Okay. Okay.

10:17Sorin Posescu: Okay. So let's move to Smucker because you obviously acquired that from tech, right, in exchange for shares. So you've got them on the register now. They own nearly a third of the company. You know, I guess one, is Smucker, you know, just kind of another son? Is it now just kind of that or is there a major kind of differences that you see? And then the second part of that is sort of how do you integrate with tech in that sense? Do they kind of come on board with technical leadership or is it kind of more are they hands off? Hey, we'll give you the funds and the land and you guys go develop it.

10:56Sorin Posescu: Like break that down a little bit. Yeah.

10:59Ian Wagner: So in terms of geology, obviously Smarker is very similar to Sun and Arctic. What's interesting, obviously it hosts historic resources, which we intend to upgrade to 43101 standards. If you look at the resource, the model distribution is slightly different. There seems to be a lot more silver than, say, a Sun, for instance. So again, we're just going to do what requires to get the resource to 43101 standards. standards. And in the end, we have options here. So obviously, our job is to grow these resources and to risk these projects. And either project can be a standalone operation or we can combine the resources from both into one central mill, if you will.

11:52Ian Wagner: Now, switching to tech, obviously, They even entrusted us with the asset, so they've been great to work with so far. Obviously, they provided funding to go drill some holes. They've been, again, very helpful. They want to help us from a technical standpoint as well. We have access to the technical capabilities, so that's a great plus for us. So, yeah, we're grateful for them making that available to us.

12:25Sorin Posescu: Yeah, and I guess, you know, you mentioned that was done by Anaconda. You guys are going to bring that compliant. Are you planning, is that kind of what 2027 looks like, both drilling at Sun and Smucker there? And you guys will focus on kind of dual track there?

12:47Ian Wagner: That's right, yeah. So currently we're trying to locate the old core from the Smucker project, trying to do some re-logging, hopefully do some re-assying, and then next year we're going to try to do some drilling at the Smucker project, again with the goal at the end of 2027 to have a 4311 resource estimate for Smucker. Obviously we're going to continue drilling at the Sump project as well.

13:16Sorin Posescu: yeah and and i realized i didn't ask kind of a key question so at sun right everything is kind of shallow so far within 200 meters what what does smucker look like are you got in the drilling look like have you guys been down deep is it is it more you know like vms clusters is it vain like what are you guys seeing there just give us maybe kind of a broad overview of what what smucker is

13:37Ian Wagner: um so both sun and smucker they were uh drilled historically and back in the day they they only drill down to a couple hundred meters for a reason being just technical limitations by a helicopter and the drill rigs weren't as light as they are today so they only drill down to a couple hundred meters and we see a huge upside that both sun is marker so in a sense they're both in a similar stage if you will when it comes to the depth of drilling um yeah so again we don't we don't see a lot of differences between uh sun and smucker from that

14:16Sorin Posescu: perspective okay okay and then switching gears a little bit to to your guys's you know land and where you're at i mean both of these are pretty far north so one i mean what is the access there i know you have there is like you mentioned the road um you know and permits how are you guys able to get is this all fixed wing? Do you have a camp? What does that look like? And then do you have concerns, I guess, that if the political administration changes that you may lose a permit or things like that because you're close to that Arctic National Park?

14:58Ian Wagner: Yeah, so the current access is done by fixed wing aircraft. We have an airstrip on site at the Sound Project our intention is to so it's kind of a short runway so we can't land bigger planes but our objective is to build a longer rail strip next year at the Sun project so we can actually bring bigger planes and that would serve a dual purpose strategy for us to be able to bring more stuff in in bigger planes but also can be used by Ada, which is the proponent of the Ambro Road. If you look at the way the road, Sun is the closest project to the road. So obviously they can work off that point to go in both directions when they decide to build the road.

15:57Ian Wagner: When it comes to the actual permit for the road, But obviously, what's changed from when these permits were initially issued, the first 20 miles of the road that would connect from the Alton Highway, those were lands owned by BLM, by the federal government. So what the Trump administration did back in May of this year, transferred those lands to the state of Alaska. So essentially, at this point, the proposed road doesn't cross any federal land. So again, in other words, the permit should stick. That should be over with.

16:40Sorin Posescu: It should be done. Okay. Well, that is good news. Okay. I just have a couple more, Soren. I mean, you guys raised money. You do have two big land packages that need drilling in kind of remote Alaska. Are you guys funded up for what you want to do? or how do you think about the treasury as you know looking ahead into 2027?

17:00Ian Wagner: Obviously we raised 15 million and we haven't spent it all of course we're going to have a healthy treasury at the end of this year. I guess it's going to depend on the markets how the market is going to cooperate in the next few months. Obviously we want to be aggressive and develop these assets quickly, that's the objective for us. We're not going to just sit here and wait forever to develop these assets. So obviously, if the road goes ahead and ADA and the federal government are going to get to the point where they can build the road, we'll have these projects advanced and dearest so they're better positioned to take advantage of the road.

17:46Sorin Posescu: Yeah. And then, so we said kind of at the top, right, the assays are not back from sun. So ideally, right, in a perfect world, right, you get these assays back showing a lot of good results. Maybe you use that to raise new funds for another drill campaign or for Smucker. I guess my last question, just, you know, what kind of can the team, you know, you, Rick, Bonnie, take from Donlan or Arctic or Nova Gold and really apply to this? What are maybe some similarities either that you see or just things you learn that will help you develop these assets?

18:27Ian Wagner: Yeah, obviously, Rick has been working in Alaska for 40 plus years. I've been part of Novagold, had exposure to all these great projects. Bonnie also worked at the Arctic project. So we know the state really well. We know the geology very well in the other VMS belts. So for us, it's straightforward. We're just going to drill Sun along strike and down dip with the objective to double the resource. And when it comes to Smarker, find a similar exploration strategy. Just chase the nominalization to a point where we can grow the resource and double it from historic levels. Okay.

19:12Sorin Posescu: Well, listen, Soren, I appreciate you coming by and giving everybody an intro to Valhalla and what you guys are doing up there. we will look for these assays in the coming kind of weeks. Do you expect those here in Q4, or do you think some will run into Q1?

19:28Ian Wagner: We believe we can release the assays in Q4. Obviously, the labs are very backed up. Everybody had money. The summer, so they're a bit late. But again, we're hoping to get all of them in Q4.

19:43Sorin Posescu: Okay, great. Yeah, we'll look for those and look to maybe catch up with you again as those come out and kind of inform your understanding of the models in each place. Appreciate you coming by. Thanks a lot, Ian. That is Soren Posescu, CEO of Valhalla Metals. They are listed on the TSX Venture under the symbol VMXX and on the OTCQB under the symbol VMXXF.

20:14Sorin Posescu: 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 and connection with the material presented herein please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative