That's commenced. Welcome, everyone, for attending the Strickland Yandal Webinar today. Given the gold price, the U.S. gold price being hovering around $3,050 and the Australian dollar- wise we're at AUD 4,815, there's no better time to be winding up exploration in Strickland's WA gold asset. We can clearly see that the M&A activity is winding up as well. It's a pretty exciting time. Today we've got Richard Pugh, the Technical Director of Strickland, running us through the Yandal Gold Project and the plans going forward. Richard's had 18 years of industry experience. He's been involved in Strickland since 2021 and has been responsible for exploration on the Yandal Project to date, specifically the work being done on Millrose. For those that aren't across what we did with Millrose, Strickland bought Millrose in June 2021 for AUD 10 million.
Over two years, the company spent AUD 16 million exploring the ground. They sold it two years later in June 2023 for AUD 61 million. That is a profit of AUD 35 million over a two-year period. Clearly, Richard knows the ground area really well and he knows what he's doing and he's the right guy to be exploring the massive target of Dusk 'til Dawn. In terms of housekeeping, we have a few questions that we've got lined up that we've got sent through, which we'll ask those. If anyone has any further questions, please feel free to comment in the Q&A box that you'll see on your screen. I'll pass you over to Richard to run through the project. Thank you.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jason, and thank you so much to everyone that's sort of joined the webinar this morning. As Jason quite rightly pointed out, my name is Richard Pugh and I'm the Technical Director of Strickland Metals Limited, and I've been involved since 2021. In 2021, we sort of consolidated the Northeastern Yandal Greenstone Belt. We sort of collected the ground, which is around 30 km to 60 km northeast of Northern Star's Jundee Mill. Also, we had three main resources on our books. We had Millrose, we had Horse Well, and we had Dusk 'til Dawn. It's really been the exploration sort of strategy since day one to really sort of unlock the potential of each one of these key sort of resource areas. We had to start somewhere. We started with the largest of these, which was Millrose.
As Jason quite pointedly writes it out at the beginning of his introduction, we spent two years taking an asset that was pretty unloved and untouched for a long period of time. We drilled it for two years and we doubled the size of the mineralization. We established a three-kilometer high-grade transitional zone, and we also identified high-grade oxide areas closer to surface that sort of transformed this unloved asset that was Millrose and transformed it into a valuable transaction with Northern Star for AUD 61 million. It was great success from the exploration team, and I'm really proud of the team for the work that they did. It's a real sort of tick of success. Once we'd sold Millrose, the next resource area that we wanted to focus on was obviously the second largest resource that we had on our books, which was Horse Well.
We sort of had this asset where previous explorers had looked at it and it had shallow oxide and it looked sort of poddy and it was not really sort of connected. Over the last 12 to 18 months, we have sort of drilled and expanded and identified and discovered new areas. Ultimately, we have demonstrated that it is not just this sort of shallow oxide sort of poddy- looking resource area, but instead it is an interconnected high-grade gold system that has high-grade gold mineralization still open at depth and down plunge across Palomino and Warmblood. I guess more pleasingly, and we are sort of really excited to be sort of able to announce this, but we are sort of just kind of doing the finishing touches at the moment to the updated JORC- compliant resource.
We're sort of, we'll be releasing that to the market in just under two weeks' time. It's another great piece of work. I think it's another great success from the exploration team. It's the sort of second tick of success. We've kind of just targeted two areas so far and both have been really successful. While we've been doing this sort of upgraded resource, we then turned our attention really at the start of the summer period and our focus has moved on to Dusk 'til Dawn, which is approximately 60 km to the north of Jundee. Dusk 'til Dawn has the smallest resource out of what we sort of started with, which is why we've kind of only just started looking at this area now.
Ironically, even though it has the smallest resource, the work that we've done over the last few months, I think, has demonstrated that this has the largest alteration. It has the largest geochemistry. It has the largest gold anomalism, and it has the largest untested geophysical anomalism, not just across the other two resources, but across the entire Yandal Belt. Dusk 'til Dawn has all the characteristics of sort of a multi-million ounce intrusion-related gold system that's similar in characterization and characteristics of the Boddington Gold Mine in the southwest of the state.
Yeah, we're really excited and I'd just like to spend the next few minutes explaining the historic exploration that's got us to this point, really the light bulb moment that brought this intrusion-related target out into the forefront, the exploration work that we're currently doing at the moment, and also the exploration that we plan to do. The historic exploration across the northern part of the Yandal, which is the Dusk 'til Dawn gold camp area, can really be packaged in between 2014 and 2018. The work that's really only ever been done in that area was by Doray Minerals in joint venture with Alloy Resources. They went out there and they basically pattern drilled with shallow aircore drilling.
On this map that I'm sort of showing on this slide, each of those gray dots that you can see is a sort of a shallow aircore hole. Each one of these holes was drilled and it's really wide spaced. You're looking at about 100 m east-west by about 200-400 m north-south. With aircore drilling, it's great. You can get sort of through the sort of the top weathered material quite easily, but it can't really penetrate fresh material. What you're looking at there is ultimately just a sort of a geochemical map. The work that Doray did was really good. It was good quality work. They sort of discovered the Dusk 'til Dawn resource, which currently sort of sits at 109,000 oz. They carried out some alteration analysis on some of the chips.
They did a little bit of deeper drilling there to get to that 109,000 oz. They did the alteration analysis and the alteration analysis that was completed on those chips suggested that there's an intense amount of fluid that has come through and altered the rocks. The authors of the paper that wrote about this sort of alteration sort of came to the conclusion that this kind of splay structure, this gray dashed line sort of was there originally, and you had this later gold event, and the gold sort of flooded into this Dusk 'til Dawn, which is where you get the sort of resource. All the sort of evidence from that sort of alteration analysis suggests that Dusk 'til Dawn is a sort of very small part of a very large gold system.
I really like this diagram, and I think it really sort of summarizes why Strickland is in the box seat here. If you look at all the sort of other sort of ASX-listed companies and the sort of the results that they're putting out at the moment, they're all drilling underneath open pits or they're drilling really deep holes to target high-grade extensions to mineralization. I do not know anyone out there across the WA goldfields that has a 7.5- kilometer bottom- of- hole gold anomaly with no deeper drilling into it. It is a fantastic drill target. If I took Millrose and I sort of placed it on this map, this Dusk 'til Dawn sort of footprint is about double the size of what we had with Millrose. And when you consider we transacted AUD 61 million for Millrose, this is double the size of that.
Not only that, yeah, it's just an incredible system. There's no follow-up drilling outside of Dusk 'til Dawn, and we're just really sort of excited to sort of get into it. Doray had done this work up until 2018, and they kind of just parked it. I think the reason they parked it was because they didn't actually understand the implications of what was driving this sort of gold system. To credit where credit's due, neither do we. I mean, we had no idea what we were dealing with. We had this gold anomalism, this sort of alteration associated with it, but we didn't understand the implications of what we were dealing with. It really sort of needed a light bulb moment for this sort of deposit to sort of pop out of this.
That light bulb moment for me happened at the end of last year. In November of last year, I went over to our Serbian project, and I went over there to inspect two of the diamond holes that were drilled into one of our porphyry targets, the Jezerska Reka porphyry target. I went over there with a sort of a doctor of geology, Dr. Dave Cooke, who is an expert in all sort of things related to intrusion-related gold systems. He's seen major porphyry deposits, and he's just a fantastic guy to sort of deal with. I flew over there with him, and we were looking through the drill core, and I think just for the record, I think Jezerska Reka is a fantastic porphyry target.
I can't wait for the guys in Serbia to drill our next hole there, which I think is going to be in about four weeks' time. Anyway, as we were looking through the core and looking through the A, B, and D veins and the alteration, Dave, sort of nearing the end of the trip, was like, "I really want to sort of show you guys sort of a presentation." I mean, it's always sort of fraught with danger, sort of giving the platform for sort of like a doctor of geology to sort of waffle on about geology items. To Dave's credit, what he wanted to sort of show and demonstrate to us was his sort of experience with dealing with these intrusion-related gold systems that he's sort of seen globally.
Throughout the presentation, he sort of showed us examples of South American porphyry types, intrusion-related gold target types. He showed us areas in North America. Each one of these deposits had a similar geochemical pattern to them. It is carbon copy, each one of them. You had this kind of central zone of moly, and then you sort of moved out from there. The next slide is a slide that I borrowed from a guy called Scott Halley. Now, Scott Halley is a legend in the geochemistry space. He has looked at all the largest sort of alteration and big gold systems, Candelaria , and all intrusion-related gold systems. I mean, the poor bugger wants to retire, but he is too good at what he does.
He sort of keeps offering up his help to sort of other companies, and he's allowed us to sort of give us this diagram. I think this diagram sort of summarizes what Dave was sort of showing me and showing the group in the presentation at the end of the trip. At the base of this diagram, you have this intrusion, and this intrusion is generating all this sort of hydrothermal alteration, and it's altering the rocks above it. All this pale green and yellow in the sort of background, that's the alteration. That's the amount of fluid coming up and altering the rocks. More importantly, as well as the alteration, there's a sort of there's a definite geochemical zonation to these systems.
Where you get to the heart, that's basically the way that the target, where you want to be, is where the pink is, and that's where you get the copper and the gold and the moly. As you move out sort of vertically and sort of laterally away from these systems, that's where you get more like moly, greater than 5 ppm. You get your tin, your bismuth, tellurium, arsenic, and antimony. On the outer fringes of these systems, you get enriched manganese and zinc, which is something I'll touch on near the end of this presentation, but it's an interesting zonation pattern. While Dave was giving this talk, we just started looking at Dusk 'til Dawn.
We kind of were looking at the multi-element geochemistry data that Doray had collected, and it just almost sort of slapped me in the face that this is exactly the same zonation that you see in these major intrusion-related gold systems as to what you see at Dusk 'til Dawn. I packaged up the data, the geochemistry data, and I kind of wanted to make sure that I was on the right track. I mean, I'm not a geochemist. I'm a geologist. I sent the data to a good friend of mine. He's Dr. Nigel Brand. He's a fellow Welshman, which is good. He looked at the geochemistry, and he basically called me up and he said, "Look, I think Rich is sort of onto something here.
It has all the support that it's basically a large intrusion-related gold system. The gold is associated with, I mean, it's a bit technical, but it's moly, copper, bismuth, and tellurium, and then it zones outwards to the silver and the zinc and the arsenic, which if I go back to the previous slide, it's exactly what we're seeing here. All the sort of anomalism that is associated with the gold is this kind of core up to bismuth, and then he's saying there's an outer zone of the arsenic and the zinc. Nigel is basically describing what this image is showing, which is fantastic. Following on from Nigel's sort of input and his sort of analysis, we went back out into the field.
I was out in the field last week just checking sort of bottom-of-hole geology, and there's a clear alteration that's associated with each one of these trends. There's an intense chlorite, there's pyrite, epidote, and also there's a sort of potassic alteration through the guts of each one of these geochemical trends. It's a big alteration footprint. We now have a model. We have the intrusion-related model based off the geochemistry, and we had the alteration. The sort of the final piece of the jigsaw to sort of really tie this all together is, is there anything in the geophysical data that we've got that supports this? I got in touch with a company called Terra Resources. Terra Resources is headed up by an absolute legend in the geophysics industry. He's a guy called Barry Bourne.
Now, Barry Bourne is an ex-Barrick global geophysicist. He has seen many, many big deposits, and their sort of accompanying sort of geophysical signature. I gave Terra Resources data, and I chose not to give them any of the geochemistry or any of the alteration, and I said, "Guys, can you please just carry out an inversion model on this data?" To put an inversion model kind of quite simply, it's where they use all the data points from the sort of the gravity stations at the surface, and they run it through a computer, and then the computer basically generates, does an algorithm, and it generates and it calculates a mass below the surface. You can either have something that's really dense, a lot denser than the surrounding rock, where you get a sort of a density high, or you can get a density low.
The results of this work couldn't have been better, basically. It basically has distinct gravity load features, which are underpinning both the geochemistry and the alteration. If you think back to the Scott Halley diagram of that intrusive at the bottom, this is what we believe these features are that are driving both the alteration and the geochemistry. What's fascinating for me is that we didn't give these guys the data to play with. Where you see that these sort of anomalies get close to surface, that is where you get the peak alteration and the peak geochemistry. It matches the data perfectly.
I went to Barry after I saw this inversion model, and I sat with him and kind of explained the alteration and the geochemistry and the fact that there's no deeper drilling into this system in relation to these sort of inversion models. Barry took one look at the data, and he said, "Rich, this reminds me of Boddington, this large multi-million ounce gold system." He went away following the meeting with Barry. It was a great meeting. He's a great guy to spend time with. We wanted to sort of match up and compare, well, what does Boddington have in comparison to what we've got at Dusk 'til Dawn? As you can see, both sit on the edge of this big mass, which is the Yilgarn Craton.
I mean, there's quite a lot of technical stuff to run through, but it's basically the amount of alteration is similar between both sort of deposits or both styles. There's a complex faulting network. There's a strong correlation with moly and copper and bismuth, which relates back to that Scott Halley diagram. There's alteration, intrusion alteration, overprinting, the original sort of biotite and silica alteration, and also they share similar sort of geophysical attributes as well. One of the interesting points about this is that when a lot of analysts and a lot of geologists are sort of looking at the greenstone belts, the sort of the general rule of thumb is that the thicker and wider these greenstones, the most likely chance you are of getting a sort of a multi-million ounce gold system.
If you look at the greenstone belt associated with Boddington, I mean, if you can squint, you might be able to see it, but basically the Saddleback Greenstone Belt associated with the Boddington gold mine is so minute, you can't even kind of see it on this diagram. When you're dealing with these sort of intrusion-related systems, it doesn't really matter about the width of the greenstone belt. I think that's kind of why there's been a bit of hindrance with the exploration, particularly at sort of our Yandal Belt, because the greenstone belt is generally quite thin. Like I said, if we do have a Dusk 'til Dawn sort of intrusion-related gold target that's similar to Boddington, then who really cares? This is, yeah, very sort of strong analogies between the both.
One of the significant things about Boddington, and also I'll touch on in the next slide, is that this outward geochemical zonation of silver, lead, and zinc. This is something completely left field, but I just thought I'd share it with you nonetheless because I think it's quite interesting. We don't know the answer to it. It's just an observation at this stage. We did some drilling back in 2023, and we were testing Iroquois. This is the Earaheedy. There's a level of sort of carbonate mineralization that we sort of drilled previously. We did a diamond hole to try and test this sort of the carbonate position next to what we sort of interpreted as being these sort of mineralized feeder structures. We ended up drilling the basement. We ended up drilling into the Archean rock and tagging one of these structures.
The structures had massive sphalerite mineralization. We intersected basically 4.3 m at 27% zinc from 226.7 m, which is fantastic. Interestingly, associated with this structure is, again, potassic epidote-chlorite alteration, and that was associated with a feeder structure. Each one of these red lines on the right image is what we've interpreted to be one of these feeder structures. They all trend outwards from this kind of, if I can do that, Liz, point it. For comparison, this region in through here is basically where that eastern trend is. All of these feeder structures are feeding off where we're interpreting this major gold system to be. The question I'm posing is, is Iroquois basically marking the outer edges of this large gold system?
I mean, you get the alteration that's the same, and also you're getting this zinc and lead enrichment, which we know is the outer edges of both Boddington and what we're seeing here. If it is the case, the amount of fluid that is taken to alter these rocks on such a large area, it means that it has the potential to be an extremely large gold system. What are the next sort of steps for us at the moment? We were really interested in pinning down these inversion targets with these intrusives. The current gravity spacing is 200 m, which is just a little bit too coarse. Atlas Geophysics, there's a couple of the guys, a couple of the Italian guys holding the gravity meter.
They're currently on site at the moment, and there's another team as well that's just joined them, and they're carrying out a high-resolution 50 m spaced ground gravity survey. This is going to sort of enhance the modeling process to make targeting a lot better. That's going to be completed during April. I went out into the field. That image on the right is basically me collecting 170 bottom-of-hole samples. When Doray did the drilling, they did a handful of elements that they analyzed for. We're sort of quite keen to sort of run this through a comprehensive mineral characterization, to figure out the alteration and map it a bit better. That will sort of enhance drill target testing too, as well as do a full multi-element suite of elements. These results, again, expected in April 2025.
We've sort of penciled in sort of an eight-hole diamond hole program. It's all sort of going to be dependent on the results of this infill gravity survey and the alteration. I think given the size and scale of what we're dealing with, I think eight holes is the minimum amount required to sort of fully test this. As I mentioned, it's to test key areas of geochemical and alteration and geophysics. I've kind of just put a few planned holes in relation to the current inversion modeling. The geochemistry there, you can see from the historic aerial drilling, that's the kind of the moly and the bismuth. It's a fantastic target. Once we've had this result and once we can sort of nut down the drill planning, we'll sort of release it to the market in due course.
Jason, that's all I've got. Back over to you.
Thanks, Rich. It's all pretty exciting. The next few months will show us a lot of things. I've got a few questions here. I'll start off with one I submitted earlier. Can the company please expand on the nature of the gold mineralization at Dusk 'til Dawn? Reports say the min is different to the rest of the Yandal project. Is this a positive, negative, or neutral factor when considering potential sale or production?
Good question. Yeah, I think with that question, I'm not too sure whether they're referring to the Dusk 'til Dawn resource, but I mean, as I explained during the presentation, the Dusk 'til Dawn resource is a lot sort of different. It's a different setting.
The shear developed for the mineralizing event, so the late intrusion-related gold event, which we're sort of alluding to here, the gold basically migrated into that shear structure. That is slightly different to what we get across basically Millrose and Horse Well. They are more orogenic systems. They are related to this kind of potassic alteration, radiological contrast between, I guess, two rock types. That is a simple sort of gold system. What we are dealing with at Dusk 'til Dawn at the moment is mammoth. I mean, in terms of production and scalability, it dwarfs it. Really, this is the kind of target that at Strickland, we are looking for. We are not looking for incremental increases in ounces. We want to try and find a big system, and this is what we believe Dusk 'til Dawn is.
To sort of talk about the mineralization style, I mean, there isn't any deeper holes into the Dusk 'til Dawn area. It's all just been clipped at the top part with aircore drilling. I'm not too sure how to respond to the actual mineralization style with the intrusive related because we haven't drill tested it yet. Certainly, the Dusk 'til Dawn resource of 109,000 oz, that definitely has a lot of potassic alteration flooding through it, an outer zone of magnetite. It just signifies that it's just a lot of fluid that's pumped through Dusk 'til Dawn, and it's just a smaller part of a bigger picture.
Thanks, Rich. Next one I've got here is, is there any likelihood in selling Horse Well to Northern Star and repeating the Millrose deal?
I mean, obviously, I can't talk about stuff that's not out into the market, but I think corporately, we're just reluctant, I think, to sell Horse Well or do any deal with Horse Well. I mean, given the fact that we've kind of just uncovered and identified a massive gold target on our sort of tenure, the work we've demonstrated to date with Horse Well, and obviously, we'll sort of be updating the resource in just under a couple of weeks' time. That oxide is so valuable. I mean, it's so relatively cheap to process and such high margins. I mean, if we end up even getting a fraction of what we potentially think is there at Dusk 'til Dawn, this oxide is just going to feed into that scenario.
I mean, if we do tag something at Dusk 'til Dawn, like I expect we will, given the success we've had at Horse Well and Millrose, yeah, it's just going to feed into a production scenario. We're not going to be talking about transactions or anything. We're going to be moving into the realm of production. What's the strategy or thinking behind applying for the mining license at Horse Well? Is it Northern Star related, or is there some other idea? It's not Northern Star related at all. When we did the deal with Millrose, we didn't have a mining lease in place when we transacted with Northern Star. It's purely, as I just mentioned, I guess in the previous answer, if we do tag a massive gold system that we think the Dusk 'til Dawn gold camp is, then these are valuable oxide ounces.
These are going to be the first to be mined and the first to be processed in a production scenario. That is why we want to square away the mining lease.
Just a few more. Are you suggesting that the Iroquois basement base metals mineralization and the Dusk 'til Dawn gold mineralization are genetically related and therefore the same age?
Yeah, the event, I believe. I am not saying categorically that it is all derived from the gold event. I think there was definitely some base metals in the Iroquois, but I believe that it is just interesting in the Archean basement to get a similar alteration that you get across the eastern and western trends in this Dusk 'til Dawn gold camp. I do not know the answer. All I am doing at the moment is kind of just painting the picture of what potentially might be going on there. Potentially, I guess, is the answer to that question.
Will Bronco- Konik area be part of the upcoming mineral resource?
Yes, it will. Yep.
Easy one.
Easy.
I think this is probably the last one given the time. Mr. Pugh, comment on Great Western and any other connection with Dusk 'til Dawn?
We're still sort of going through the analysis of Great Western. There's definitely, yeah, elevated sort of pathfinder geochemistry associated with it, but it's still just sort of early days in terms of the interpretation on that side of things.
That's all the questions we've got time for. If anyone has any further questions, feel free to email JPP or email Richard directly. His details would be on one of the announcements, or reach out, and we'll be sure to get in contact with you. Rich, thanks for your time.
It's pretty interesting, really exciting next few months. I look forward to following it. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks, Alex.