Yukon Metals Extends Birch Copper-Gold Skarn to 1KM and Targets Source Intrusion

0:17Welcome back to Mining Stock Daily. Ian Wagner here with a corporate update from our friends at UConn Metals. Yukon Metals is a gold and copper and critical metals explorer with projects across the Yukon. They trade on the CSE under the symbol YMC and on the OTCQB under the symbol YMMCF with a market cap of roughly$58 million Canadian. And we last spoke with Yukon Metals at the end of August. So I would encourage any new listeners to go back and listen to previous episodes. We have covered the Yukon story for some time now. With us today to catch up on early drill results or first drill results of the season is the CEO of UConn Metals, Mr.

1:03Jim Coates. Jim, good to see you. Welcome back to the podcast. Absolutely. Thank you, Ian. And it is Thursday, October 1st. You're just coming off a week in Beaver Creeks, but you dropped some news today about some recent drill results. It's really the first drill results coming back from drilling at your birch project, 100 % owned birch copper gold project there in the Yukon. I'll give you kind of pride of place and just tell me what you were drilling for and what you found, and then maybe we can go into the broader context of how it fits into the birch campaign. Yeah, so Birch is, as you mentioned, a copper-gold project in the central west Yukon.

1:46And we drilled this last year and identified scarn mineralization over quite a long strike length and relatively close to the surface. So within tens of meters of the surface, we're seeing intercepts with copper and gold. Over at that point, around an 800 meter strike, which is a large system. And we did this following up on about a 1.4 kilometer gold and copper in soil anomaly. So last year was the first drilling that we did with the diamond drills on that project. And we identified an 800 meter set of copper gold mineralization within Skarns. and the hole that we drilled this year that we just released the results from is a 200 meter step out to the east of those holes from last year and what we wanted to test with this hole was whether the scarn mineralization kept on going and that's partially because we're right at the edge of the existing or the our original claim blocks for birch and we'd staked a lot more claims covering more ground to the east and we just wanted to see if the system was open along strike and it is so that's the big news is that we're now dealing with a scarn that's a kilometer in length and we're just defining the edges of it right now and then we can use more of the geophysics and more of the drilling from this year to zoom in on those areas where we'd expect to see higher grade concentrations.

3:22Yeah. And I think coming into this season, right, the idea, the kind of thesis or the logic was the porphyry, the, the, the, there might be a, the porphyry might be the engine here. The scarn is the wheel or you're chasing down the source of this scarn, right? And so within kind of what you guys, um, released today, hole seven, um, of, and I should note, right, this is the first of six holes for this summer's drilling at Birch. Is that right? And then I'm seeing kind of... Okay. So first here, so we'll have more results to talk about here in the coming weeks. Some elevated gold, sometimes elevated copper, sometimes silver.

4:06So confirmation that it's polymetallic across what you guys have drilled so far. But what... How do I want to say this? Yeah, I mean, just what is this telling you about this scarn's shape, I guess? What have you found? So what we found is that this scarn runs along a ridge, about a 400 meter high ridge. And this scarn is actually visible on the surface in several places. And we're intercepting it with multiple holes along the ridge. So it's long, it's associated with marble contacts. And we're also seeing mineralization with higher grade gold next to fault structures. And so what that says to us is that the scarn is near something that produced the heat and the hot fluids to create this mineralization on this scale.

4:57And a kilometer, that's a long strike in order to find mineralization like this. And so we did a three-dimensional induced polarization and resistivity survey earlier this year. we released that several weeks ago, that showed a IP high about two kilometers south of this scarn. And that's an IP high is what you'd expect to see with a intrusive or some sort of large structure at depth. And that is coincident with some high-grade gold on surface. It's coincident with a radiometrics potassium thorium ratio high that's indicative of an intrusive, mapped intrusives, as well as copper, moly, and gold on the surface.

5:48So all of that evidence is pointing us towards that large intrusive center to the south being the source of the mineralization that's expressing itself along this scarn. The reason that we drill a scarn is that scarns tend to be smaller but higher grade deposits so they make a really good juicy way to start a mining operation but they tend to form close to where there's a larger intrusive that can be a much bigger mineralized body and so that's what we're using is we're using the scarns to gather the information that traces us back to that source intrusion. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the IP because I wanted to kind of reset a little bit on the timeline, right?

6:38When we talked in April, you guys were obviously preparing for this drill, the drill campaign. June, you guys were drilling, doing IP, and now we're looking at those results of that IP survey. You looked at two zones, right, a northern and a southern, and you are able to drill or you did drill, right, in that northern chargeability anomaly, correct? That's going to be hole 12 that you don't have as a yet back, but you kind of expect to know more about before the end of this season, correct? Yes, that's correct. So we put a hole into the one end of that anomaly, which is big. These are kilometer scale anomalies.

7:18And so once we get the information back from that hole, we'll have a much better idea of what this mineralized system looks like in three dimensions because we essentially have a line of holes along the birch scarn and then this most recent hole is at 90 degrees and about two kilometers to the south so then we'll be able to model that see where those mineralized fluids likely flowed and whether this is a fault controlled situation or or what kind of mineralized, I guess, source package that we're dealing with. How are you thinking about that southern chargeability anomaly? That sits at 400 meters.

8:00Is that going to be a 2027 priority? How are you kind of modeling the follow-up here? Or do you stay in the northern zone, I guess, for a while? Or what's next there? We are waiting on all the assays in order to do a full data analysis. The IP survey was tremendously helpful in showing us what the structure looks like under the south end of this property. so then once we've got the assays we can cross correlate those with the ip and create a full picture but uh absolutely that's this uh ip high is it's a very uh it's very interesting target it's big yeah it's there's obviously something there so now we just need to find the best places to drill yeah yeah i noticed remember when you were talking i mean it seems like everything is kind of lining up in those areas right between when you when you when you factor in um the ip the magnetics right they're all kind of pointing you to the same spot or series of spots that next then the next step is really getting that drill to is that is that accurate that's accurate so we've got multiple overlapping lines of evidence now pointing us towards the source zone for the mineralization that we've already drilled.

9:24And essentially every drill hole is an arrow that points towards better mineralization or away from it. And so we put all those together and then that way each drill program has a much smaller target area than the last one. And we can zone in on that where the highest likelihood is of a deposit. And now that we're into our, this was our second year of drilling at Birch and really only our third year of getting a handle on understanding this property. Now we've put together a very comprehensive data package and have a much better idea of what's actually there in order to target the next round of drilling.

10:05Okay. And then one last one on Birch before I ask you another, before I let you, before I move on. So five holes left to get assays. What's the timeline or cadence you kind of expect there? so we've got some of those results already but we need to have everything in order to release them um we're hoping as soon as possible it's uh right now it's just a few results that are holding us up but uh especially if we're drilling in new areas such as that hole 12 that targets the intrusion we want to ensure that we've got the complete data package so we can understand what we're seeing before we uh go and produce an interpretation of those results Yeah.

10:47Okay. And then we just maybe just a little context around AZ or AZ, depending on which part, which, you know, part of the world you're from. I know you were drilling a couple thousand meters there to, you know, haven't haven't had any essays come in. I don't think unless I miss them this year. What what what are you seeing there? And when do you sort of be able to, you know, communicate that to the market as well? So again, that's coming up relatively soon as we receive those results. We did drill three deep holes. So one of those holes was over 800 meters deep that were on a induced polarization target from last year, as well as a soils target.

11:25We actually spent a lot of our time this year working at EZ or AZ, doing soil samples across the property, bigger drone mag, magnetometer surveys, more induced polarization in order to refine those targets. And we're looking for porphyry style mineralization there, and that's accompanied by SCARN. So we're following the same technique that we're using at Birch, which is identify the scarns on the surface. They tend to be high grade. They're highly visible. They're smaller, but they're a great place to start. And those act as a arrow that points us back to where the formative mineralized package of a porphyry or a big intrusion would be.

12:12And so it's the same methodology, same techniques, and just every program gets you closer to that mineralized center. Awesome. Well, we'll look for those in the coming weeks. I have one last small one. I know I kept you a little longer. What was one thing that stood out to you from Beaver Creek, just since we're coming on the heels of it? Anything that you took away from sentiment or one thing that you were hearing from people as they were talking to them about UConn or what's one thing that kind of you left with? Everybody's talking about tungsten. That was the one metal that stood out to me.

12:46That's probably just because UConn Metals does have a tungsten portfolio. But that's what I probably talked about more than anything else. And that is connected to the geopolitical reality of the world that we live in right now, which is conflict, uncertainty, trade barriers, all those things that make an absolutely critical metal like tungsten suddenly be in short supply when it was quite abundant a few years ago. And so I'd say probably half my discussions focused not just around tungsten itself, but the other niche or exotic metals that you absolutely need to have to make a modern society function.

13:25So then in early 2027, we may be talking more about, is it tumble? Is that the part of the portfolio? or you've got a few different projects in the tungsten world? Yes, we have RISB, which is our fully drilled tungsten. It's a historical resource, so that's one that we're in the midst of updating. We have CLIA, which is another property that was historically drilled. And we just staked TUML, which is quite a large tungsten property in the central part of the Yukon. And so we're expanding that tungsten portfolio. Okay. We'll catch up on that a little later. Well, listen, Jim, thank you for coming by.

14:08I appreciate the time, and we'll definitely look to catch up as some more of these essays come in for both Birch and AZ. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Ian. Yeah, that is Jim Coates, CEO of UConn Metals. They trade on the CSE under the symbol YMC and on the OTCQB under the symbol YMMCF.

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