Fireweed Zinc Corporate Update from Boundary Zone Drill Results

Trevor Hall Everybody, welcome to the mining stock daily and a video version of this corporate update. Today, I am joined with Mr. Brandon Macdonald. He is the president and CEO of Fireweed Zinc. Fireweed is traded on the TSX Venture with the symbol FWZ and also on the OTC markets with FWEDF. Good to see you, man. We just wanted to give a quick corporate update based on the results from the boundary zone that you released yesterday. You said this was the final hole of 2019, the Boudary returned exceptional grades on the wider interval, 4.14% Zinc over true width of 230 meters. But won't you walk us through narrowing those intervals down and getting into what you actually called very high grade sections, quote unquote, into the into your news release?

Brandon Macdonald Yeah. Now, I think that there's the broader envelope there. You know, that Boundary zone is always kind of been known as broad intervals, but low grade four point one percent, zinc over 230 meters. True width is just 300 plus meters intersected. I would call it that's approaching mid grade for a zinc deposit, if not mid grading. Look at the average head grade, a basic deposit in the world. That's probably actually slightly higher or comparable to the average grade. But what was particular interesting was the first about average just under 8% zinc, which is definitely good grade. Within that, you did have some other intervals. You had nine meters intersected, including the width of about 40% zinc. So we're finding these high grade shoots being clusters and veins within the broader interval that are really elevated. The overall grade, the residual grade when you take those out, still quite healthy. So what we see here is there's two things to pay attention to. One, a massive envelope of low grade mineralization. Second within that, some very high grade systems that it's clear we need to get a better understanding of what drives them, where they're located, where they're going, etc..

Trevor Hall One thing I do want to ask you, because even in those first two bullet points, the second one you actually wrote, the Boundary zone has potential to be mined in a low strip, open pit and up and to be upgraded through low cost ore sorting technology. You and I, along with Fred Earnest from Vista Gold talked about ore sorting over during the Beaver Creek summit last month. So I don't necessarily want to talk about that. What's really caught my attention, though, is really your company's kind of forward progress into actually looking at mining this and extracting it like it was like you took a jump from exploration into really thinking about this long term. And tell us as an investor why that is important. And we're not just talking making more discoveries. You're actually looking at building this thing out.

Brandon Macdonald Yeah. You know, we had talked before about how our exploration is what we consider engineering led exploration, which is to say keep the engineering realities of in your particular zone in mind as you're exploring there. That includes both. What's the margin on the zone and about mining costs, processing costs, et cetera. But also, where does it fit into the mine life? You know, if you've got a a long, healthy underground mine life and you're adding stuff that it's got a peer, because at depths in the later years, it doesn't move the needle on NPV. Right. So why are you investing a lot of energy in that? Particularly RPA showed a potential 18 year my life. Adding to that is not a great way to spend money. You know, cash challenged a market like we have. So what we wanted to be is like, OK, everything has got to be about what does this mean for the NPV at Boundary zone when we would get the additional sorting passed and we acquired enough, for that to me is starting to test. It was all about, you know, this could be a bolt on. This could operate in parallel with Tom and Jason. Either the the the materials coming all as they're processed or you campaign through the metal. But the key thing was, is that it has to be done in parallel, because having that the end, there's no point investing energy in something that's that's going to appear at the end. So that that sorting said, OK, look, this low grade material actually can be pretty concentrated to a very high degree before going to the mill, which the single most expensive part of the process for boundary because it is open pit because it looks to be low strip is going to be the processing. So processing. 2 to 3 percent zinc material is you're losing a lot of your margin in that step. Now our sorting suggests we can upgraded substantially before processing and the sorting is a almost order of magnitude cheaper. First step, instead of jumping right to the middle. That's kind of where our head was at. You know, when we when we jump into boundaries on, it was always about what does this mean for the mind? I think the law. What a geologist. Geologist led companies tend to fall in love with their deposit. It's about the geology and these geological problems. But at the end of the day, we're not building. This is not about, you know, science or some science for a project. This is a mine that's built to make money. And it has to we have to know what the mine looks like. So that's always been at the forefront of our methodology.

Trevor Hall Well, one of the things that needs to be done as you can decide what that mine looks like, obviously is some sort of mineral resource estimate on the boundary zone. In the news release, you did write that the current resource estimate at Boundary zone is not included in that. But then I was reading a little bit more into the news release. I mean, you have historic 24 drill holes that you have available to kind of start putting some data together. So do you expect to put some sort of resource estimate on boundary or what needs to be done more as far as drilling and step out and definition drilling to be done before an estimate could be done?

Brandon Macdonald I don't think we could get our estimate with our current data. Yeah, those 24 drill holes, but that's over a one point five kilometer strike length. So. So most of the time is just too far between them. The core where we drilled has has almost 10 holes that are pretty heavy, not tight, tight, not the right word, but tight enough that maybe you could get an inferred resource on it given the the broad nature of the minimization. But I guess when that core zone or when we just demonstrated that there's great potential beyond what was previously estimated and when we know it's basically open in every direction except to the south where it comes to surface. Why would you do that now? Right. Because it's like you haven't you haven't really defined it. Now, we may after next year, drilling still not have a defined but may choose be like, well let's let's put a number on it anyways. Particularly we feel like people are going to be really impressed with that number. Certainly are internal thoughts on what Boundary looks like that it's really big.

Trevor Hall What about any other news outside the boundary zone? Could be coming out for Fireweed? Anything else from Tom or Jason or what can investors be expecting before the end of the year?

Yeah, you know, there's not going to be a lot. I'm going to lie before the end of the year. We've got all the drill results out next technical work, which would be, you know, the the upsized sorting study, a boundary zone. We will look to put out a news release that kind of summarizes the exploration thesis at the broader part of the property, particularly headed out west as we head to Boundary and that area and include some new data that people haven't seen. Graph, metric surveys, geochemical surveys, that sort of thing. But, you know, this is this is the nature of a Yukon play, is that when winter comes around, that the news flow is not quite what, you know, we'd all love it to be. We can't we can't drill twelve months there, but just say we can't drill twelve months the year without serious cost inflation. And when you're running out of money before you're running out of time, as we are in these these markets, you might as well confine your work to the peak of summer when your costs are the lowest.

Trevor Hall All right, Brandon, and we'll thank you so much for that update. We look forward to catching up with you this winter, hopefully in Vancouver during Roundup. And we'll be sure to do another update with you then. Until then, have some good holidays and we'll catch you. Take care my friend.