Vancouver, British Columbia (July 8, 2024)
Dear Fellow Shareholders,
It’s hard to believe that we’ve only been a publicly listed company for just over three months now.
I want to inform you of our progress.
As you know, the stock was halted for a couple of weeks. We’ll get to that shortly. First, I want to reassure you that, even while halted, the business of exploration was going on. We are excited to drill the first holes at Cristinas since the high-grade copper discovery in 2014. That work is going on right now!
Cristinas Project Drilling
The drillers mobilized in last week and began drilling. The photo below is the first hole. Our target is the extension of the high-grade copper mineralization hit in the 2014 drill program. Our target is 100 meters deeper into the system.
The current plan is a 1,500-meter drill program to test the depth and breadth of the copper mineralization identified on the surface and in the 2014 drill program.
The second part of the program will be the geophysics. This is another critical step to unravelling the mystery of Cristinas. This tool lets us see deep into the earth by mapping sulfide layers (which contain copper in the 2014 drill holes).
We chose to use an advanced tool, the InfiniTEM XL configuration. In standard electromagnetic surveys, the tool uses a single loop to “see” into the ground. That can limit both the depth and the resolution of the survey.
The InfiniTEM XL survey uses a double loop technology to “see” up to a kilometre into the earth. It significantly improves resolution down deep. It’s like having binoculars for looking into the earth. And we want that detail at depth because this region boasts some deep ore bodies.
At the nearby Plomosas mine, the ore body extends an incredible 900 meters, as you can see in the image below:
While we don’t know what Cristinas holds, we know this kind of potential exists just 20 km from the project. The Plomosas Mine is a great example of the potential of this region. It’s currently being mined by Impact Silver.
British Columbia
The team took multiple trips up to the British Columbia projects earlier this year – Princeton, Big Kidd, and DOT. We performed some community engagement, simple mapping, and detailed core review.
We plan to move ahead on the drill program at Princeton later this year. The Princeton project has two simple drill targets (Bud South and Knob Hill) as well as a complex target at Aura.
Of the three targets, Knob Hill is the one I’m watching closely. This is an undrilled target with a 300 m geophysical anomaly. Historical surface samples encountered copper, gold, and silver anomalies. It remains undrilled. As you can see from the photos below, the area is ideal for a simple drill program.
Our team drove right to the target area.
One of the B.C. site visits included porphyry expert Alan Wilson. He joined Chris Lloyd (V.P. Exploration), Roy Greig (Q.P. and technical advisor), and Charles Funk in Merritt to review core from the Big Kidd project.
The result was an interesting and exciting report. It will help us locate our drill holes in the exploration program there next year.
Stock Halt
Now, let’s address the elephant in the room…how could we be halted before we traded for three full months?
The short version of the halt was that we failed to file a quarterly financial report due to a mix-up of our year-end dates. And the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) takes financial disclosure very seriously.
That was quickly resolved. We were halted on a Thursday, we filed the forms, and the BCSC quickly revoked the cease trade order. We had good communication with them. We had the information at hand. We apologized and promised not to do it again.
Unfortunately, the TSX Venture Exchange review of our reinstatement application took longer than we had anticipated. After our second clean bill of health, we are back up and trading again.
However, the long delay and uncertainty of the share price forced us to postpone our planned capital raise. In our press release announcing the cancellation of the financing, we also announced the fact that our team are on the ground at the Cristinas project.
The plan, right now, is to drill Cristinas. We are working up a plan to be on Princeton later this year. That should give us some material news flow throughout the summer and fall. At the same time, we are working through the permitting process for Big Kidd and DOT, so that we can explore and drill them in early 2025.
I hope you find this reassuring. I know that it helped me ride out the halt. To me, this is the real work of Quetzal Copper. We need to explore in order to make discoveries. And we are (finally) doing that.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Matt Badiali
