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A privately owned exploration company with a high-grade property and a Dryden post office box will be entering the market in December.
Dryden Gold announced it's making preparations for an IPO (initial public offering) some time next month to raise $5 million, of which $2.9 million will go into the drill bit for its 2024 exploration drilling program. The company intends to list on the TSX-V under the proposed ticker of DRY.
In assembling a 48,000-hectare property 30 kilometres east of Dryden, the company’s story is that past mining efforts at the turn of the last century barely scratched the surface of this area’s high-grade gold potential.
In a Nov. 2 webcast, CEO Trey Wasser boldly calls their Dryden Gold Property the “last unexplored gold camp in northwestern Ontario” in an area that president Maura Kolb said bears a strong geological resemblance to the gold mining hotbeds of Red Lake and Timmins.
The company’s property is a narrow corridor running southwest to northeast. It tracks along a gold-bearing geological feature called the Manitou-Dinorwic deformation zone.
Dryden Gold has about 50 kilometres of coverage along that structure and has catalogued high-grade drill hits across the entire property, mainly from older exploration campaigns by other junior miners.
Of the $5 million the company intends to raise, about $2.9 million of that is earmarked for its 2024 exploration budget, which will include two drill programs.
The main exploration focus is in an area of the property called the Gold Rock Camp. It has the most mining history and shows the most growth potential.
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It’s at the site where a handful of shallow-depth mines operated only briefly at in the early 1900s. The deepest mine went down about 140 metres and exploration drilling not much farther than that.
For Kolb, that offers exciting opportunities to drill at depth and test some theories about secondary splays coming off the deformation zone to the east and west that may contain gold.
Dryden Gold is now mobilizing for a fall-winter drill program that’s entirely privately financed. By the time the company goes public, Wasser said he expects high-grade and “super” high-grade results coming out of this structure.
Wasser said if they can show some depth and length to the project, they can put together gold resource “very quickly.”
As a pure exploration outfit, Dryden Gold has made it known it has no intention of bringing the property into production, but intends to sell to a bigger mining player.
Alamos Gold is already a major shareholder in Dryden Gold, at 9 per cent. Dryden Gold’s neighbour to the north, Treasury Metals, has a large, low-grade open-pit project of almost 3 million ounces that’s not yet in production.
Wasser suggested should his company prove up a two- or three-million ounce high-grade resource, “it will make it very attractive to a mid-tier producer.”
Wasser hopes to replicate the success of Great Bear Resources near Red Lake. That junior miner sold its Dixie Project in 2021 to Kinross Gold for $1.8 billion without ever publishing a gold resource estimate.
“This kind of property package and high-grade gold is what the majors and mid-tier producers are looking for these days.”
