I am posting some feedback and photos (see end of the post) from a trip I made to Golden Range at the end of last week.
Warriedar published a couple of photos about the same visit on LinkedIn this week.
I’m a retail investor with a significant stake in Warriedar, paid for with profits made on Spartan Resources. I bought about 95% of my shares on market over the last 12 months, adding more through the recent placement.
The views below are my own. I am not an expert on junior explorers in any sense. Obviously, I want the share price to go up.
The visit was 2 days/1 night. We drove into Golden Range from Perth, which took about six hours. After an overnight stay at the Fenix Resources camp, we flew out the following afternoon from the airstrip at 29M’s plant at Golden Grove. The flight back took about an hour.
On site I was accompanied by Amanda and her exploration team (Tom, Peng and Brad were the geos on site, it was a changeover day for their shift pattern).
I got a great tour of the processing plant, the tailings dam and the company offices on site.
More importantly from my perspective, we visited M1, Windinne Well and Ricciardo, with the chance to watch the diamond rigs in action at M1 and Windinne Well.
I also watched core being cut in the yard. The geos showed me new and historical core and explained what to look for in identifying potentially interesting samples.
In a few days time I will post a fuller account of my conversation with Amanda, Tom and Peng about the exploration effort at Golden Range (particularly in the Golden Corridor), based on notes that I took during my visit.However, here are three general observations about what I saw last week.
Sense of scale
I had seen photos of the Golden Corridor targets in Warriedar’s presentations. But they do not give a true sense of the scale of the deposits along the Mougooderra Shear Zone.
The pits are huge, particularly the complex at Ricciardo (see photos, including one that I took of Ricciardo on the flight out).
M1, Windinne and Ricciardo are hundreds of metres wide and deep. Ricciardo, which is actually an assemblage of a number of pits, is about 3km long. It took us a few minutes to drive the length of it in the Hilux.
I hadn’t expected this sense of scale, which really underpins the potential of Warriedar’s ground, in my view.
The tailings dam is also impressive. I struggled to see the far side of it from my vantage point above the mill. There is plenty of levelled-out ground in and around the processing plant and the company’s offices nearby (four or five well-appointed portacabins). It isn’t hard to imagine a rapid build-out there, should that be the direction Warriedar takes.
Surrounding infrastructure
I had never been to the Outback before and I was expecting complete isolation at the Warriedar site. But that wasn’t the case.
The drive into Golden Corridor from Perth is long but manageable. The initial 3 hours is through farmland but the landscape then starts to dry out into scrub for the rest of the journey. The entirety of the trip was on bitumen road, even the final stages.
On the way to Warriedar we passed signage for a number of other projects, including Capricorn at Mount Gibson.
The Warriedar plant and pits do not feel like they are in the middle of nowhere. When we were standing at a high point on the tailings dam, we could see the lights of the Fenix iron ore mine behind us. In the other direction you could make out the plant at Golden Grove.
I had a look at the crusher and conveyor belt, the CIL tanks, the ball mill and the power unit at the Warriedar processing plant. I can’t offer much of a view here as I have no expertise in any of this kit. Some of it looked a bit battered and rusty, although that seems to be the standard in photos of many mills I have seen. The plant at Golden Grove, which we drove past the following day, didn’t look hugely different in terms of condition.
Amanda also told me that an operational expert has visited the Warriedar mill and wasn’t discouraged by what he saw.
The haul road from Fenix to the port at Geraldton already passes directly alongside the Warriedar plant. When I watched the drill rig at work at M1, there were road trains from the iron ore mine thundering along the same road about 50 metres away.
The overnight camp (formerly owned by Warriedar but now operated by Fenix) was only a few minutes’ drive from the plant. It seemed pretty well-equipped, including a big canteen and bar. It only took about half an hour to drive from this camp to the airstrip at Golden Grove, where there is a much bigger camp for FIFO workers.
These are very basic observations but it never felt like Warriedar was operating on the frontier. There is already a lot of activity and infrastructure in and around their ground, with a range of suppliers, contractors and potential partners in the area as well.
Plenty of options on how to move forward
Another of the themes that came through strongly on my trip was that Warriedar has a lot of potential routes to success.
Indeed, I came away wondering whether there might be too many alternative paths, making it even more important that the board is clear-minded in the direction that it decides to take.
In part that is a function of the neighbourhood. Like I said, there is a lot of available infrastructure nearby, including processing plants at other projects.
The range of questions is extensive. What are the options to toll treat Warriedar ore? Which mills would be the best partners? Should Warriedar choose to refurb/improve its own plant? Is there an optimal plan in which Warriedar processes oxide and sulphide ore in different phases at different locations? What does that mean for cashflow? What are the implications for capex and fundraisings?
The optionality is similar in the exploration effort. Is the priority to prove up gold ounces (from oxide or sulphide ore?) or antimony tonnes over the remainder of the year? Should Warriedar focus the drill bit on the Golden Corridor (and Ricciardo in particular)? At Ricciardo, is the priority to chase the high-grade shoots at Ardmore and Silverstone? How about M1, which is right next to the processing plant? Should they test there for strike extensions of open-pittable oxide ore or drill deeper in the hunt for high-grade sulphides? How much time do they spend on Windinne Well, which has its own free-milling, high-grade resource? What about Azure Coast, where they have reported some tantalizing antimony hits? Away from the targets in the Golden Corridor, how much spend should be allocated for greenfield exploration elsewhere in Golden Range?
A lot of these decisions will need to be taken over the next 12 months. However, my conversations with Amanda highlighted that the exploration effort is now going to accelerate, funded by the recent placement. A new geologist has also been added to the team to lead the work on prioritizing targets. And the results from the next few months will inform the studies on processing and partnering strategy, which will extend into next year.
Link to trip photosTrip photos-compressed.pdf
(20min delay)