Latest / Financial Survival Network / Gwen Preston Joins West Red Lake Gold’s Top Tier Team as VP – Investor Relations

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Gwen Preston Joins West Red Lake Gold’s Top Tier Team as VP – Investor Relations · Financial Survival Network

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I visited the project last summer, shortly after they'd acquired this Madson mine out
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of bankruptcy, and I was really taken by the opportunity, opportunity that they
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had identified and acted on. I will admit that when they first told me
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the story, like first blush, Okay, this group is going to come
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in and they're experienced operators and they're going to do the thing that the other
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company screwed up. It seemed too good to be true, right, But
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then I'm walking around this project and this mill is beautiful and I know that
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there's two million ounces of gold. I'm looking at it in the wall of
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the underground. This is Red Lake, Ontario, where you know, the
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geology is really prolific. And then the team was the thing that made it
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possible. The Financial Survival Network now more than network, the Financial Survival Network,
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and welcome. This is Financial Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie
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Lutz. We are coming to you with a sponsor update from West the Red
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Lake Gold Mines. And I had the pleasure of interviewing the CEO now good
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friend when Preston you know her, I know you know her as the resource
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Maven is now head of investor relations at West red Lake and gwent. It's
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great to have you on the show. It's great to get a sponsor update
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from you. So the first thing everyone wants to know here, and I'm
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sure you get this question from your subscribers everyone else, is why. Absolutely,
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it's the question of the moment, and it's a valid question. I
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spent ten years writing Resource Maven, which was that subscriber supported newsletter, and
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it was amazing. I mean, I loved helping engaged mining investors find good
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opportunity, understand the mining capital markets and the pressures and the opportunities in that
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the risks, helping people understand geology and make money. We had some great
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wins. It was a heck of a ride. I really enjoyed Resource Maven.
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But I did do it for ten years, which is a nice stint,
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and I got to know the team here at West red Lake as an
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investor. I covered it in my newsletter. I visited the project last summer,
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shortly after they'd acquired this Matson mine out of bankruptcy, and I was
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really taken by the opportunity opportunity that they had identified and acted on. I
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will admit that when they first told me the story, like first blush,
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Okay, this group is going to come in and they're experienced operators and they're
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going to do the thing that the other company screwed up. It seemed too
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good to be true, right, But when I did that trip last July
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to the mats in Line, the reason not I love site visit so much
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is that you get to talk to everybody on site, right, like from
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the person sweeping the floor in the mill through to anybody who works whatever in
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food services or you know, through the chief geologists and the mining engineers and
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everybody in between. You get to talk to them all. And all the
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people on site were mostly people who worked through those Pure Gold days because they're
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the Red Lake locals who want to work at a mine. And every single
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one of them reiterated the story that West red Lake had approached me with,
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which is that, you know, Pure Gold was really driven to build this
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mine on the tightest budget possible to keep themselves attractive to potential acquirers, and
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that when you have not enough money and a lack of operator and mine building
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expertise in management, you put those things together and bad decisions are made.
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And so each person that I spoke with, like I say, from you
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know, the all of the very employees at the mill, all the way
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through the operation, they just reflected to me their own versions of that experience,
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right, all of the things that they'd had to try and manage because
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the decisions were wrong and the leadership wasn't there. But then I'm walking around
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this project and this mill is beautiful, and I know that there's two million
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ounces of gold. I'm looking at it in the walls of the underground.
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This is Red Lake, Ontario, where you know, the geology is really
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prolific. And then the team was the thing that made it possible. Right,
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So bring on Shane Williams, who you know, he is just such
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an experienced mind builder and mine operator, has done so for major companies for
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many years. And then when you have a really good leader, you can
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attract a fantastic team. And that's exactly what he pulled to him, from
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like the VP of Technical Services and Laurie's Mustart, through to the geology VP
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and Will Robinson and you know, to the CFO and the whole team they
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are they provide exactly the mind building and operating expertise that was lacking. The
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previous time. So I loved the story as an investor. And then when
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they started talking to me about whether they might want to come and work for
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them, they had been on that brings us to now. So now they've
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been on the ground for ten months identifying all those mistakes that were made,
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What did those bad decisions, how did they manifest? Identify them, see
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what the fixes put or should be, And now we're at this what I
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think is just a really exciting tipping point where we're going from figuring out what
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needs to be fixed, now we are implementing those fixes. And you know,
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now we're on that golden runway where the team here is driving to get
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this thing into production by the middle of next year. And that when you
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look at share price patterns and junior mining, most of them are full of
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risk and not very reliable. But the one, the one that is the
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most reliable of them all, is that golden runway right where you go from
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spending money to explore, to do studies to build. When you go from
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spending money to making money because you're producing, that share price rerate is the
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most reliable pattern in the junior in mining, and that's the accelerated pathway that
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this company's on, so I get to join at a very exciting time.
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So what impressed me about Shane is, you know, it's just like doctors.
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When the doctor messes something up and then you go to another doctor,
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they don't usually want any part of it, and you've got to search for
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the one guy that specializes in fixing other people's messes. And Shane like struck
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me as that person. These guys, you know, literally took the golden
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opportunity and flushed it. And now Shane comes in and he's looking at it
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with new eyes and figuring, like you said, figuring out where did they
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go wrong and how do we avoid a fate. Yeah, and he's a
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real leader, and it takes a lot of It's a challenging story to communicate
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too, right, because of course pure gold was it made a bunch of
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money for people, and then low it erased all of that money for a
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lot of people, which is which is soup, which is a terrible story.
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And so it's also a hard story to communicate where you have to convince
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people that the mistakes that were made are fixable mistakes. It's not that the
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gold wasn't actually there it's not that the gold cannot be taken out of the
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rocks. Those things which are complete show stoppers for a mine, those things
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are not the problem. The problems are more specific and fixable. We can
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certainly go through that list if you want, but it's so to communicate that
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and then to just have the focus and drive and team management to be able
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to, you know, step by step go through all of those, identify
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those things and fix them all. For sure. It's a big challenge and
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it takes a special special person to do that right and just on the heels
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of a major financing thirty three million rays so hopefully capital is not going to
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be an issue like it was with the predecessor. Just tell us what are
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the top three challenges that are facing the team. So the key drive in
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our team right now is internally to solidify what our mind restart plan is and
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so we know exactly what, when, how needs to happen for the restart
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to for us to absolutely be able to turn this mine on by the middle
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of twenty twenty five. So we're very close to that. Then we need
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to transition that into a pre feasibility study that we can publish public that we
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can publish put out there, and then we'll be able to actually start talking
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about costs and scales and things like that, right, because you need to
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have a report before you can talk those numbers. So getting to those really
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important moments is the drive. But underneath all of that, we don't want
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to publish a prefeasibility study in November that says that outlines a list of tasks
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that still need to be accomplished that take a bunch of time and money.
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Our goal is to publish that prefeasibility study and for the market to realize that
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the majority of the work that's needed for this restart is already underway or even
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finished. And so while we're advancing these planning studies, we've already because of
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the work that the team did in the last ten months, we've identified those
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critical path items, right, We've identified the things that need to happen on
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site, so that when we get to that prefeasibility study, when we get
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a little bit beyond that, to the decision to restart, it's honestly a
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restart decision. It's like, okay, let's turn it on. We're not
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looking at the need to spend another However, many tens of millions and or
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spend however many months doing such and such. Those jobs are already done,
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so it's real. The biggest challenge right now is the juggling of accomplishing those
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critical path items while also solidifying the sort of formal line plan and then being
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able to talk about those things in the orders that we can so shy.
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When I spoke with him last time, he alluded that there was a lot
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of gold like leftover in the mill that never got processed. I mean,
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this is such an interesting story. Hey. So the lack of mind building
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and operating expertise and the drive to sell the asset that were hallmarks of the
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pure Bold story. One of the things that that created was a lack of
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sort of culture of workplace culture, positive workplace culture. So the Mads and
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mind went through like six general managers in a three year period or I don't
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know, it was about that. So there was an incredibly high turnover of
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even top level staff. Machine, especially a complicated machine like a mill,
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is only as good as the people who run it, and so because and
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then you layered COVID on top of it. They were also trying to build
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this thing during COVID when it was really hard to get particular supplies and whatnot,
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and so they were just mistakes made, a few mistakes made in the
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mill itself, like the liners for the mill. So the mill spins things
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around and smashes balls of steel against the rock to break them up right,
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And you always put a liner on the inside of that mill, because otherwise
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you'd be smashing the rock and steal into the mill itself, and then you'd
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have to rebuild the whole thing regularly. Instead, you take liners out and
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replace them, and that's what you that's how you manage that damage. Well,
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they used the wrong liners, and because the liners didn't fit together properly,
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well, a whole bunch of material, mineralized material got stuck in nooks
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and crannies. The filters, the lots of various processes in the milling system.
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You know, things get filled filtered if you don't have the right fields,
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if you don't clean the filters appropriately or on the right time frames,
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they clog up with As it turns out, gold, there's lots of opera.
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There's lots of places like this and a complicated machine where the gold can
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honestly just fall through the cracks, if it doesn't have if it's not built
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exactly right, and or it doesn't have a really experienced operator watching for those
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things and making sure that they don't crop up as a problem. But they
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were a problem for pure gold, and there was a lot of minimalized material
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that was left on the floor, jammed into nooks and crannies, and so
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we hired an expert in milk cleanup, and you know, in his first
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pass he just did one small component of the mill and came up with over
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four hundred ounces of old and then then Shane was like, okay, you
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got to clean up this whole now. Now there's honestly buckets sitting on the
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floor. There was a picture of it in our news release. But you
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know, those those big gallon ten gallon buckets full of stuff that's been scraped
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and scoured out of the mill, and you look in the buckets and it
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looks like sand mixed with gold, because that's what it is. So we're
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going to pour some gold from that too, and we should be able to
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get a full number for that in the next of the while. But it's
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it's going to be exciting, it's going to be thousands of ounces of gold
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that we just scrape out of the ball. That's really amazing. Yeah,
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they were that close, you know, they were that close, and they
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just couldn't couldn't get over the finish line. And so you've got money,
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You got the right people. Now it's just going through the process, checking
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the boxes, getting the checklists set up, and then you move ahead.
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And that's less than a year away, mid to a year away, mid
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twenty twenty five, right, absolutely, And I mean getting to production is
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so important, and it's i'd like it's important because that's the first goal.
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Let's get to production. Let's start making money. Let's demonstrate that this opportunity
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that we saw is valid, you know, is real, is everything that
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we said it was going to be. But also getting this thing into production.
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Once you have a producing underground gold line in an area like Red Lake,
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Ontario, then you have the ability to really look around underground. It's
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very expensive to look around underground if you're not operating a mine, because you
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have to be down there, you have to be maintaining all of the underground
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infrastructure. You can't look deep from surface because those holes are too long and
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slow and expensive. But once you have an operating mine that's making money,
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so and your underground you have the ability to look around and regions like Red
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Lake reward that when you look around underground, so there's lots of scattered drill
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whole drill hits from times past that suggest very good potential for us to find
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war gold off like at depth at the mats and mine. But really the
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way to do that is to be underground and look around from underground. We're
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doing some of that work now, absolutely, and we will do more of
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it as the year goes on. But once this thing is operating, the
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exploration team is just going to be able to go for it and really start
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looking around to see if this thing can become bigger than you know, tapping
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the two million ounces that we know we're there. Shane indicated to these pretty
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upbeat and optimistic about the exploration and upside potential here. Yeah, for sure,
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I mean we could. Shane can certainly go off on that and an
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entire interview will the VP of Exploration, the two of them together in a
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room. It's hard to stop from talking. I mean, it's things like
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the eight zone, right, The eight zone is at the bottom of the
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shaft. The shaft was built back in the first version of the mats In
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line, which was from the mid thirties to the seventies, and they drove
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it almost thirteen hundred meter shaft down to get to this eight zone. Because
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the ore that's down the mineralized material that's down there, the resource today grades
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fourteen grams per time gold right, This is like fourteen to eighteen grams per
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ton gold, whereas the majority of the mats the resource that we've defined in
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the rest of the mats In mine grades a little bit less than eight grams
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per ton. It's way higher grade down there, and that is a tantalizing
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prospect. There's lots of other reasons geologically that that's interesting. It's in a
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slightly different rock type. The red like mine just down the road. That
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made gold corporate to the company that it is. It became it was able
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to increase in size tenfold from a fifty thousand ounce per year producer to a
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five hundred thousand ounce per year producer. When they discovered the high grade zone
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that guess what, was at about thirteen hundred meters and was much higher grade
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than the rest of the mineralized material at the Red Leg Mine and was in
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a slightly different rock type. So right, there's all of these things that
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are very tantalizing, and we really want to be able to pursue those those
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potentials. Just the fact that you're going to be producing in around a year
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is you know, that sets you apart from virtually all of your peers.
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It's it's such a rarity nowt nowadays, and hey, exciting times. I
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know that Change told me it's most exciting opportunity of his life, of his
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career, and it's great that the team is in there that's able to actually
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take advantage and fully realize the potential. So hey, maybe maybe you'll be
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here for the next ten years. So one telling the story, right,
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I hope? So, I absolutely hope so because I think there's a lot
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of potential here in this team and this asset and in whatever else you know
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comes our way, which once you're producing, the world is your oyster and
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opportunities just pour in through the door, that's for sure. So that's right.
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Yes, Well, appreciate your coming on and giving us the sponsor update
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and your story too. It's so interesting. You never know what where life
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is going to take you, but you should go over to Westredlakegold dot com
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sign up for notifications. You'll find out when all these milestones, these catalysts
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are achieved. The ticker symbols in the US w l r GF and of
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course in Canada w r LG Glenn. We'll be talking to you again.
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Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. It was
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a pleasure. The Financial Survival Network