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Shawn Ryan Conquers Both the East and the West of CanadaBob Moriarty Given that I used to travel 65% of the time, I got to meet a lot of people in the industry. Over the course of a career, a geo might work on a dozen projects and meet a few hundred people. I’ve been to hundreds of projects and met thousands of people. It was pretty wonderful for a guy from outside the industry to meet many of the movers and shakers in mining and resources. Since I was an outsider looking in, naturally I gravitate to the few others on the outside looking in. One of the most interesting people I wrote about in 2012 was Shawn Ryan. He was also the star of a New York Times piece that made him visible to the entire industry. Six years has passed since that first piece. The NYT piece managed to catch the very top in gold and we declined for years into a major bottom in 2016. Shawn Ryan vended all of his White Gold district claims in the Yukon into a company then called GFG Resources and now White Gold. They came out with some barn burning results a few days ago including 20.6 g/t gold over 6.1 meters and 5 g/t gold over 13.2 meters. Naturally, the market being the market, the news drove the price of the shares to a new yearly low. Go figure. Shawn Ryan vended his 21 White Gold District projects into White Gold in exchange for shares and an NSR. That land consisted of over 249,000 ha of ground and was 40% of the White Gold District. The district shows production of somewhere between 13-20 million ounces of placer gold but strangely had not been prospected for lode gold until 2007. Since 2007 over 7 million ounces of gold have been discovered. In addition, Kinross Gold vended their White Gold District projects into White Gold for shares and now own 19.9% of the company. With the Kinross ground came just at 1 million ounces of a 43-101 gold resource. In total in the District White Gold has a 1.25 million ounce gold resource. Agnico Eagle is also a 19.9% owner in White Gold. To give you an idea of what gold should be worth in the area we can look at the Kaminak merger with Goldcorp in 2016 that valued 43-101 ounces at $175 per ounce. At today’s price for White Gold, the company is getting $41 an ounce in market cap. That’s absurd. So basically White Gold has vacuumed up the region and put together a wonderful land package with two of the best names in gold mining companies as partners. If he chose, Shawn Ryan could kick back knowing that down the road he can occupy himself clipping coupons once a quarter. I suspect there are two chances of that happening. One is slim, the other none. Ryan is not that kind of guy. So what do you do when you are the most famous gold prospector in the Yukon and the go-to guy when people seek technical knowledge about the district? Do you retire and just watch television or play video games? No, you go do it again. Having conquered the West of Canada, Shawn pretty much tossed a dart into a map of Canada. It seems that the dart landed in Labrador on the east coast of Canada. For fifteen years I flew small Pipers and Cessna aircraft to dealers all over the world. To get to Europe you must fly the great circle route going over Eastern Canada so I know Newfoundland and Labrador well. I have flown thousands of hours over them. Labrador is pretty empty. While I am well aware of the mining history of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia I have never heard of serious mining in Labrador. Someone called me about six months ago and pitched me on a new junior focused on new discoveries in Labrador. I kinda snoozed through the pitch until I heard those magic two words, Shawn Ryan. That woke my ass up. Having done what he was best at in Western Canada and being bored silly, Shawn decided to head to Eastern Canada and do exactly what he did in the Yukon. He did a lot of pure scout work reading through old papers and he prospected. He staked a bunch of interesting ground and then he vended it into a junior, that being Labrador Gold. The three main project areas for Labrador Gold tally up to 1,857 square km or 716 square miles. That’s a lot of prospective ground. It has a good side and a bad side. The good side is that if you find what you are looking for, there can be a lot of it. The bad side is that it might cost you a lot of money to find it. Shawn Ryan is the perfect guy to have as an 11% shareholder in your company. He vended what he thought were his very best projects into Labrador Gold and had done a lot of the basic boring but necessary groundwork. The company has just released what I think might be extremely important information about their work. The advantage to being an outsider looking into an industry is that you are not married to the “but we have always done it this way” nonsense all industries find themselves caught up in. Shawn learned everything he knows out in the bush, not in a classroom with a bunch of other people thinking exactly the same way. He uses the tools that make sense, not the tools taught in some dusty classroom twenty years ago. The industry now uses a magic “Ray Gun” called an XRF. The XRF shoots a beam of electrons at a specimen to determine what elements it contains. It gives you a reading of all of the elements the very narrow beam “sees.” It would be nice to have a magic ray gun that finds gold but an economic grade of gold is in the parts per million. Unless you spotlighted a nugget, you could never measure gold with an XRF because there would be 50 elements with a greater quantity in the rock being looked at. But you don’t need gold to find gold. You can look for the trace indicator metals associated with gold. Arsenic is one. Gold loves arsenic and arsenic loves gold. Where you find arsenic you will often find gold and the amount of arsenic will give you an indication of the grade of gold associated with it. So in their surface samples in Labrador, the company literally bored small holes in rocks, collected a fair size representative sample, crushed it and hit it with the XRF and have found a lot of arsenic. That’s really important and significant. Labrador Gold just completed a $3 million PP and is well cashed up. They are still in the boring but necessary groundwork phase of exploration but the results are encouraging thanks to the technical help from Shawn Ryan. I like both companies a lot. White Gold is selling for the lowest price in almost two years. Given the quality of the backing they have from their partners, $7 million in the bank and a gold resource, the stock is an easy pick for astute investors. The Yukon is going to be hot this year. Labrador Gold is an early stage explorer but by using the tools they have at their fingertips wisely, they have cut out a lot of the fog of exploration. They could be a real winner and are well cashed up. Both companies are advertisers and I own shares in them. Do your own due diligence. White Gold Corp Labrador Gold Corp ### Bob Moriarty 321gold Ltd |
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