Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Aben Resources (TSX-V: ABN) CEO Jim Pettit on Dual Drill Programs at the Justin Gold Project in Eastern Yukon & Forrest Kerr Project in BC’s Golden Triangle

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Aben Resources (TSX-V: ABN)(OTC: ABNAF), Mr. Jim Pettit. Jim, how are you this morning?

Jim Pettit: I'm great. I'm just glad to be here.

Gerardo Del Real: You're busy. You just back home. You've been on the road.

Jim Pettit: Yeah, I got back last night from Montreal. Good investment conference there as well as the F1, what do you call it? The Formula One race. I went and saw that and that's pretty incredible.

Gerardo Del Real: It never hurts to be able to work hard in the daytime and play a little bit in the evening, right?

Jim Pettit: Oh yeah. Yep.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's talk work. You've commenced drilling at the Justin Gold Project in Eastern Yukon. Gold is holding up pretty well. We're sitting at about $1,325 this morning. This drill program actually started a little bit earlier than you anticipated. Can you give me the details on it?

Jim Pettit: Yeah, we are. We started drilling on Saturday, which is great. I thought it would be a little slower because to get the drills there. I thought the RAB drill, the smaller drill, was going to show up and we'd get that done first. But the diamond drill showed up, which is great. Now we're drilling away. The first hole's done. We're on our second hole already. These holes are going to be down 200, 250 meters. And then when the RAB drill shows up in the next week or so, those will be all 50-meter holes. The next level up from trenching. That's the kind of work we get from the RAB drill. It's an interesting new concept for drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. And this is going to be a combination of both. You mentioned the RAB drill and the diamond drill. So the way I understand it, it's going to be approximately 600 meters of RAB drilling and then 1,350 meters of diamond drilling. Is that correct?

Jim Pettit: Yep, yep. The RAB drill will be pretty consistent. We're going to do 20 holes in that 600 meters. That's the whole idea, you do fairly shallow holes. Then on the diamond drill side, we'll do 6 to 10. We may go over a bit because if we're going to do the 200-plus holes, and that's going to be based on what they see in the core. That'll be variable, let's call it that.

Gerardo Del Real: Got it.

Jim Pettit: In terms of how many holes we get.

Gerardo Del Real: Perfect. Now I understand that you're testing, there's two distinct mineralization styles in this system and I understand that you're trying to get a better grasp of that and trying to figure out whether a younger system or an older system was remobilized. Can you explain that to those that are not as familiar?

Jim Pettit: Yeah, what you get a lot in the Yukon are intrusion related systems, gold systems primarily like Fort Knox over in Alaska is an intrusion system. What we found up there back in 2012 on the Justin is an intrusion. It's sitting there exposed at surface, kind of expressed as a scarn but it's there. It's big. It shows up in the geophysics and then as you get away from it, you can start getting fracturing in the older rock that the intrusion came up through. That's what we're looking at now with the Lost Ace, which is just beside the POW Zone, which was our discovery of this intrusion system.

You have a younger event happening that's coming up through the older rock and the Lost Ace is orogenic, so it's much older. We're thinking there might be some remobilizing of fluids. That orogenic system has got very high grades associated to it. 3 Aces is next door to us, not very far away. That's Golden Predator's system. And that is orogenic in nature and it's very high grade. What we've found in our trenching on the Lost Ace is very high grades, up to 82 grams in some of the samples.

It's also expressed at surface. If you look at some of the pictures on our website, you'll see it's all over. That's why we're going to use the RAB drill. It's close enough to the intrusive system that it could be influencing what is showing up there, which would be awesome because generally intrusion related systems are big tonnage, bulk tonnage, lower grade like what we've hit there before. 60 meters of 2.5 gram material rather than the really high grade, what we're seeing on the Forrest Kerr. They're different systems.

If one is over printing on the other, that's great. That'll be great. This is a thesis we're working on right now.

Gerardo Del Real: You mentioned Forrest Kerr. I understand that this program at Justin should take about three to four weeks to complete and then you pivot immediately to Forrest Kerr. Is that right?

Jim Pettit: Yeah, that's for sure. We're looking to start right at the end of the month at Forrest Kerr and this should end right about then too. It's going to segue right into the other where we've got the guys working hard getting Forrest Kerr ready. Cornell McDowell, VP of Exploration, he's working hard. We've got the crews lined up. Everyone's ready to go. I think we could easily be boots on the ground right around the 28th and then drilling starts shortly thereafter, probably the very first week of July. And then we'll be wrapping up, up in the Justin, because that's a different crew.

We'll start getting all that information probably back from the lab by the time we start these first holes, we should start getting assays results back and hopefully we're going to have some good news flow because that early stage stuff up in the Justin should start coming through all through July and then once we start at Forrest Kerr, beginning of July, we'll start getting that back in August at the beginning. And then it starts slowing down as everyone else starts drilling. But I think we can get out of the chute like we did last year as one of the first groups up there drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: That's a lot of news here in the following weeks and months. Not a coincidence, I don't think, that the stock has firmed up and is catching a good bid. Jim, anything else you'd like to add? I get the feeling we're going to be talking here multiple times over the next couple of months.

Jim Pettit: Oh yeah, I think it's going to be a busy year. I think the fact that I added this other drill program on, there was some heated discussions about it but I think by adding an extra month of drilling, we really seriously have added to the news flow. If you remember last year, we started drilling and then it took a while for news start coming in. I think we can start having news flow towards the latter part of June and then coming in through July. I think it's a good move, to be honest with you and I think they're both very high-grade potential.

Gerardo Del Real: Well phones ringing, Jim, is a good thing as opposed to the phones not ringing. Let's hope that you get a lot more of that ringing phone over the next couple of months.

Jim Pettit: I have been here since 6:00 this morning and the phone's been ringing. It's good.

Gerardo Del Real: Fantastic. Jim, thank you so much. Look forward to chatting, can't wait for the results.

Jim Pettit: Thank you very much.