Disseminated on behalf of: Western Alaska Minerals Corp.
Kit Marrs, Co-Founder, CEO & Director of Western Alaska Minerals Corp. (TSXV: WAM), discusses the company’s strong investment potential with high-grade resources, strategic location and infrastructure, and an experienced technical team.
Jim Gordon
- Hi, I’m Jim Gordon, and you’re watching Market One Minute. Joining us is Kit Marrs; he’s the Co-Founder, CEO & Director of Western Alaska Minerals. Kit, it is great to have you back again.
Kit Marrs
- Okay, well it’s great to be here and love having an interview with you guys.
Jim Gordon
- Thank you very much, sir. Good to have you. Okay, let’s talk about the company’s unique investment opportunity.
Kit Marrs
- Well, we’re unique for a number of reasons: first one is really scale. We have the ability to really have a large deposit. And we’ve proven that geologically by drilling. And the second thing is that really what sets us apart is a high grade. So we have the highest-grade silver-equivalent deposit in North America among our peers: 75 million ounces of silver equivalent at really a shockingly high grade of 980 grams per ton. So that is very unique in the business. And another thing is jurisdiction. We’re in the state of Alaska on 100% state of Alaska land. We have no federal lands that we have to work with, and that’s very important in today’s rather rocky geopolitical climate.
Jim Gordon
- And Kit, tell us about the company’s capital structure and ownership.
Kit Marrs
- We’re very proud of both of those. Our capital structure we’ve kept very tight. We actually became a corporation back in 2010, and so we were private for quite a few years before going public in November of ’21. We have a total of about 64 million shares issued in outstanding. And my wife, Joan, and I as Co-Founders of the company, we still have about 18%. And very unusual in a lot of junior explorers today, our total ownership of insiders and management is over 30, it’s 32%.
Jim Gordon
- Let’s talk a little bit about your technical team.
Kit Marrs
- We have an excellent technical team, and that’s really the starting point is the land and the deposit, and then you have the team. So between Joe Piekenbrock, myself, Peter Megaw, one of our advisors, Darwin Green is another technical advisor that’s been with us for years. We have well over 125 years of combined Alaska experience within that group. And we know how to work in the interior of Alaska. We know how to get things done and we’ve done it for decades.
Jim Gordon
- And Kit, you mentioned the project is in the interior of Alaska. Talk to us a bit about the operation window, logistics, and infrastructure.
Kit Marrs
- Yeah, we are about 270 miles west of Fairbanks in the interior. It’s really a great place to work. Our season is really quite long. The summer drilling season is really March through October to November 1st. And the other thing is we have a lot of local infrastructure. This was a past-producing mine. The Illinois Creek Mine was Alaska’s first open-pit heap leach mine. Along with that, we have\Na lot of heavy equipment, 45-person camp, a lot of roads and system. And so it enables us to have some really low-cost exploration for where we’re located.
Jim Gordon
- I should also mention a very important fact: you are very close to the Yukon River.
Kit Marrs
- That is really key to the future of the district. So we’re about 28 miles east of the Yukon. At that point, The Yukon is about a mile and a half wide and 45 feet deep. That’s where all the sternwheelers went from open ocean up to Whitehorse in Dawson back in the Klondike days. We would have an approximate 28-mile all-weather road ultimately, and that’s how the concentrate would ultimately move out and go to the world’s market. You know, the marine highway in Western Alaska is really critical. That’s how all the supplies, fuel and things go to all the villages and local places along the river for about a five, 600-mile stretch. So it’s well used.
Jim Gordon
- And finally, what’s next for Western Alaska Minerals?
Kit Marrs
- Well, everything these days is funding-dependent, but the last couple of years we’ve been drilling four to 6,000 meters a season. We would like to do that. We have the ability to double that with additional funding. Our season is really quite long for the Far North. We can start in in early May, late April, and drill through October without a whole lot of problems. We own our own drill rigs, we keep them on site year-round, we maintain everything and so we have a turnkey operation.
Jim Gordon
- Kit, always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us.
Kit Marrs
- Okay, well, thank you very much.
ABOUT WESTERN ALASKA MINERALS CORP.:
Western Alaska Minerals (TSXV: WAM) is unveiling a prolific 8-km mineral corridor at its 100% owned carbonate replacement deposit, anchored by the high-grade silver deposit at Waterpump Creek and the historic Illinois Creek mine, with significant untapped potential across an expansive exploration landscape. Learn more about them on their website here.
