George Salamis of Integra Resources: the Recent Corporate Updates from DeLamar

[00:00:02] It's time for your morning briefing of junior mining and mineral exploration news. You are tuned in to mining stock daily. Now reporting from the Clear Creek Digital Studios in Denver, Colorado, here's your host, Trevor Hall.

Trevor Hall [00:00:20] Welcome to Mining Stock Daily. This is Trevor Hall, your host. This is my final interview from the Association for Mineral Exploration Round Up Conference for 2020, and I'm very happy to be sitting next to George Salamis of Integra Resources, which trades on the TSX Venture with ITR and also on the OTC markets in the U.S. with IRRZDF. Integra Resources is a sponsor of the show, and we will be providing a little bit of a corporate update with George in the next few minutes. George, it's always good to see you. You know you and I solved all the world's problems last night, but now we're going to chat some real business right now.

George Salamis [00:00:52] So we're last. So should I take that negatively?

Trevor Hall [00:00:56] The best for last.

George Salamis [00:00:57] The best for last? Okay.

Trevor Hall [00:00:58] Don't tell everybody else that, though, please.

George Salamis [00:00:58] Got it.

Trevor Hall [00:01:01] You know, you and I will probably have some time to catch up. I'm assuming in Toronto, really somebody from your team, we can catch up at a Pidact. You have some really good drill results coming up. What does Integra have in store for us over the next six, eight weeks?

George Salamis [00:01:19] Well, it's funny, we were talking about results that we put out before Christmas, which were the high-grade results from War Eagle in Florida Mountain. And I literally just sort of come back from the office compiling all the high-grade results that we had over the course of the year. So it just wasn't that one news release where I think we came up with a bunch of high-grade hits over the course of the year. And so we're starting to string these high-grade results together and they're starting to show orientation of these are valid high-grade structures that probably connect up with what the old-timers used to mine underground. And so we're starting to work these target concepts of the high-grade zones, maybe, you know, a meter to three meters wide. And in the case of War Eagle, it was 30 meters wide. So thick zone there. What you'll see over the next couple of months here is it is a pivot for us towards high-grade. And the premise of that really is founded on the P.A. and if you recall the P.A., we were looking at 2000 ton per million scenario in addition to the very large heap leaching operation that we were going to start with.

Trevor Hall [00:02:26] Right.

George Salamis [00:02:28] And that small mill situation was really looking at processing sulfide ore, I can't call it ore, sorry, sulfide mineralization.

Trevor Hall [00:02:37] Yeah.

George Salamis [00:02:37] The regulators hate it when I call it ore. Mineralization from Florida Mountain and that's low-grade feed to that mill. The premise for looking at high-grade is if all of a sudden you start to put together resources, high-grade resources, and you don't need a lot of it we're not talking millions of ounces of high grade, maybe a couple hundred thousand ounces of high-grade that you can get for a quick hit. All of a sudden you start considering that you could be displacing low-grade feed into that mill with feed that's maybe eight, 10 times the grade.

Trevor Hall [00:03:08] Right.

George Salamis [00:03:08] And, you know, we've already started to model that what it could look like on paper. And that does some really spectacular things to the cash flow. So that's kind of that's the motivation behind the chase for high-grade right now.

Trevor Hall [00:03:21] So let's get up to speed for people who maybe have been following the story and just need to get back on track. So you had the drill results from War Eagle. Will there be more drill results coming up from War Eagle? And then when do you transition into Black Sheep? I'm really interested in the Black Sheep.

George Salamis [00:03:35] Yeah. So as we are all because it's kind of the untested big area with all that high-grade potential out there that that's just really never been drilled. But getting to dance to your War Eagle question so we do have another couple more holes to release. We've got a couple more I believe from the DeLamar project itself. There'll be a hiatus and then what you'll see is an announcement of us commencing a pure exploration drilling down at DeLamar. The issues that we have in terms of the drilling season, we can drill at DeLamar because it's 5000 feet of altitude. The snow situation there is manageable. Up towards Florida Mountain and War Eagle, what we're talking seventy-five hundred feet, eight-thousand feet, way more snow, tougher to manage a drill program out there. So we're not going to get back into those areas probably until the spring. But in the meantime, we have plenty of lower elevation targets to test.

Trevor Hall [00:04:30] The exploration drilling at DeLamar basically means you're gonna go deeper, right?

George Salamis [00:04:35] Well, so there are some target areas and I'll give you a great example. One of the highest-grade silver hits that we put out last year was this project or this area called Henrietta.

Trevor Hall [00:04:45] Oh, yes.

George Salamis [00:04:46] I think I think you may have visited that site with Max. A really sort of solid, large low grade hit in amongst which there was some of the highest silver grades that we've ever intercepted. So thousands of grams per ton of silver. We're gonna be getting back into those areas first.

Trevor Hall [00:05:03] Oh, interesting. Okay. So, yeah. It's funny when you talk about these targets in sort of those different zones of the DeLamar. Can I get to the part, you've got so many different areas in this project that you got to do a really good job to keep them separate and understand exactly where everything is at. So it can be challenging for people, you know. Obviously. But you can have such a big land pact.

George Salamis [00:05:24] Well, and that's one of the things it's easy for us because we've got these sort of geographical locations bedded down in our own mines. You're quite right. Explaining it to somebody who hears this story for the first time, they, you know, they start their eyes start to roll back in their heads because you're right, it's a massive area. Right? That we've claimed we've doubled our land position since the time of the Kinross acquisition. We're gonna be acquiring more ground again this year. We're in the process of doing that. So, yeah, we really have to sort of nail down these areas, give them a name, target concept, high-grade, low-grade, and then just sort of hit these things.

Trevor Hall [00:05:58] Well, drilling and exploration is not just what you're doing. There's still metallurgical work going on and you're still kind of doing some early PFS type technical studies as well.

George Salamis [00:06:10] Yeah. So what's ongoing now are there is twofold. So we've got one rig that is active collecting sample media for, essentially for the PFS study to be done at the end of next year. But while we're doing that, we're doing metallurgical test work on the sulfide component of DeLamar. That stuff that we didn't include in the last P.A. is 2 million ounces. So it's a lot of material there and that's starting to ramp up now. The conclusion there, we hope, is that a sizable amount of that 2 million ounces that we didn't include in the study is amenable to leaching onsite. And once we demonstrate that, we'll put it into a mine plan. And then what you'll see is an expanded production profile that is kind of leaps and bounds bigger than what we put out on in our last P.A.

Trevor Hall [00:06:58] Right.

George Salamis [00:06:59] So that's the study. We call it P.A. Part 2, essentially. That's the study looking at a production scenario that we might not necessarily build. Maybe somebody else might. But it's going to be much larger than what we put out.

Trevor Hall [00:07:13] Well, you have a very busy year ahead of you. Do you, is there a need to staff up a little bit more onsite or are you doing that now?

George Salamis [00:07:19] We are, we're actively recruiting people at all levels. So we've got more, obviously we're commencing permitting this year. So we're looking for and we're starting to interview candidates for the position of environmental permitting to handle the permitting iterations.

Trevor Hall [00:07:35] I'll put it up on the jobs board.

George Salamis [00:07:36] Yeah? I was going to say, do you want to join?

Trevor Hall [00:07:40] I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing. You wouldn't want me. You couldn't afford me.

George Salamis [00:07:44] Well, I couldn't afford. Yeah, that's what I've heard. And then there's yeah, we're looking for a senior metallurgical engineer as well to report to our chief operating officer and they're a bunch of other, sort of site functions that we're going to need to fill.

Trevor Hall [00:07:57] Well, and I, you know, when you have somebody so talented, like with Tim, who knows that project like the back of his hand. Yeah. And he's so he's got so many good contacts. I mean you could easily bring it's probably top-notch people to fill those positions.

George Salamis [00:08:13] Yeah. But nonetheless, what we are finding is that those individuals, those sort of highly skilled senior-level people are still pretty rare out there despite the, you know, the downturn in the industry. They're rare. And you know, the other thing, too, it kind of gets back to the aging of the of this industry that we're in. Not a lot of young folks with that talent set. There's a big gap. You'll get a five to seven-year engineer type who's got that experience, or you'll get somebody who's 65 or 70, who's retired, who wants to get back in. But there's not much in between.

Trevor Hall [00:08:47] Oh, that's very interesting. That's good. I do want to ask you just kind of about the stock movement behind the company. We had a nice jump early earlier when a lot of juniors were not moving at all, which was obviously nice to see. I mean shareholders, including myself, were welcoming that. But it has kind of came back and consolidated a little bit. I mean, from what you're seeing with that consolidation, pullback, you know, what's going on behind the scenes and you know what's going to be a driver to get that thing backed up over the dollar mark, US?

George Salamis [00:09:21] Yeah. So there are two things that we found sort of our proven drivers of share value. The drill bit and what comes out of the drill bit for sure and especially high-grade results, that seems to really drive the excitement there. The other thing that really drove us a long ways last year was the P.A. study that we put out. So those two things, we'll have a combination of both of those this year as we kind of wrap-up. Yeah. In terms of, you know, what we're seeing in share price movement, you know, there was we had one fund, a large shareholder who went up cap in their investment threshold, which meant that they had to get rid of us and a few other things.

Trevor Hall [00:10:04] Well, that's unfortunate.

George Salamis [00:10:05] Yes, it is. It is. And we did. We were given no warning, but we dealt with it. Which is good news, wasn't kind of death by a thousand cuts over the next six months there. They've been dealt with. But, you know, we had to deal with it.

Trevor Hall [00:10:19] Well, it goes to show when you guys were raising money, I mean, you had the financing locked up quicker than most companies would have had it done. I think it just goes to show how quickly people will come and support you in times like that when it needs to be done.

George Salamis [00:10:30] Oh and the shareholder registry that we have is great. It's the best shareholder registry that I've ever been a part of as an executive.

Trevor Hall [00:10:41] Before I let you go, I do have to ask you about speaking with your friends over at Eldorado. It makes sounds like you missed something before you left?

George Salamis [00:10:51] Yeah, look, I'm really happy for them.

Trevor Hall [00:10:55] There's a big hit.

[00:10:56] Big, big hit there. The core was displayed over there. I don't know if you got a chance to see it. Oh, it's really impressive. It's you know, if you remember at La Mac or at Triangle, you know, we had these flats in these verticals. The flats are typically pretty thin, you know, five to ten feet in thickness. This one is several times that. So that's what makes it really impressive of the series of high-grade flats. I'd be lying to you if I said I you know, I didn't feel it an aspect of filming. You know, why didn't we discover it, but that's great. You know, there's so many cases where a junior sells something to a major and then all the skeletons are found. And then it's no. The rumor goes out on the street that, you know, they overpaid for it or, you know, there was, there's something wrong with it. This is certainly not been the case for Eldorado. And what they acquired from this.

Trevor Hall [00:11:48] Well, in the opposite case for DeLamar is a junior coming in discovering something that the major did.

George Salamis [00:11:53] Right.

Trevor Hall [00:11:54] Which happens more often.

George Salamis [00:11:55] It does happen more often that is the case.

Trevor Hall [00:11:58] Then you're the beneficiary of it.

George Salamis [00:11:59] Right. And, you know, I I've worked for the majors, so I've seen both sides of the fence there. I know how easily and quickly, you know, the majors give away things just because there's a mandate just to get rid of stuff without actually really taking a good hard look at it. So, yeah, that's the niche that we fill in the market.

Trevor Hall [00:12:16] I want to ask you to step away from Integra in you know, we are wrapping up the first three conferences of the year. And just, you know, as an investor, you know, is there anything out here, any new companies that you've got that are maybe surprising you?

George Salamis [00:12:31] Yeah, I've bought a bunch of things. Core mining KORE. How do you know that one?

Trevor Hall [00:12:39] Yes.

George Salamis [00:12:40] I like that one a lot. That's a project that I've looked at on behalf of several major mining companies in the past. And it's a project that I've always liked. It's got a feasibility study done on it. It's got proven metallurgy, metallurgy looks great. Yeah, it's southern California. But it's in a part of the world that, you know, where mines are operating and have been permitted before. I like that project lots. It's a big, big resource with a feasibility on it. Those are pretty rare.

Trevor Hall [00:13:07] Oh, interesting. This is not investment advice?

George Salamis [00:13:09] No. That caveat.

Trevor Hall [00:13:12] Please speak to a licensed professional. George, thank you so much for your time. And it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I look forward to I'll see you probably see you again in Toronto during Pedac. Well, hopefully we can catch up, though.

George Salamis [00:13:23] We're not going to see each other for cocktails tonight?

Trevor Hall [00:13:25] Well, I would probably, probably right? And we won't make plans to. But it will happen, I'm sure. That's George Salamis of Integra Resources, which trades on the TSX Venture Exchange with ITR and also on the OTC markets in the U.S. with IRR ZF.

Trevor Hall [00:13:45] Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented here in.