Bellavista managing director Glenn Jardine attended the BMO Global Metals, Mining and Critical Minerals Conference in Florida this week, which is widely considered to be one of the best events on the global conference circuit.

Jardine is no stranger to the event, having been a regular attendee as part of his previous role as managing director of De Grey Mining.

Speaking from Florida, Jardine said the mood at the conference was extremely positive around the gold sector.

“It’s interesting, given how enthusiastic people have been already, but there are some fund managers talking higher gold prices than there are now,” he said.

“And what was interesting, there’s some big funds who are saying that they’re still getting pretty sizable cash inflows for their funds for allocation to precious metals.”

Bellavista attended the conference to reintroduce investors to the Pickle Crow gold project in Ontario.

Earlier this month, the company agreed to acquire stablemate FireFly Metals’ 70% stake in Pickle Crow for 60 million shares and 50 million performance rights, and exercise an option to increase that interest to 80% by paying minority holder First Mining Gold Corp C$3 million.

As part of the deal, Bellavista is raising A$25 million at A75c per share.

FireFly managing director Steve Parsons and Capricorn Metals executive chairman Mark Clark are expected to remain substantial shareholders following the raising.

High-grade resource

Pickle Crow has a high-grade inferred resource of 2.8 million ounces of gold at 7.2 grams per tonne, making it the largest advanced asset on the ASX outside Minerals 260’s Bullabulling and the highest grade.

The resource remains open in all directions.

The project produced 1.5Moz at 16.1g/t gold between 1935 and 1966.

Only 170,000 metres of drilling had been previously conducted on the property in the 85-year period from 1935 to 2020.

In only three years, FireFly drilled 157,000m but hasn’t done any work since 2023 as it pivoted to focus on the Green Bay copper project in Newfoundland.

Jardine pointed out that the gold price at the time was below US$2000 an ounce.

“What people understand of the asset is historically high-grade underground quartz lodes, which were mined there back in the 1960s,” he said.

“But what FireFly did while they were there was that they identified a near-surface resource, which I don’t think too many people have picked up on in the current environment.

“Using a half a gram a tonne cut-off grade, which is a typical open pit cut-off grade, that resource has got a million ounces at around 4 grams in the upper 250m and around 2 million ounces at 4 grams in the upper 500m.

“They’re pretty nice numbers in this day and age and that’s probably something that people haven’t really appreciated, and that’s something that we want to go about assessing when we complete the transaction, which we’re expecting in April.”

Bellavista will also acquire 100% of neighbouring tenements and the regional Sioux Lookout project, which is immediately along strike from NexGold’s 2.9Moz Goliath gold project.

Rock chip sampling at Sioux Lookout returned grades of up to 74g/t gold.

Drilling to begin

Jardine will be heading from Miami to Toronto next week for the world’s largest mining event, the PDAC Convention.

“The purpose of that is to get in front of a couple of investors, but also to start meeting with people who can help us on the ground with a potential summer drilling campaign,” he said.

Bellavista has tentatively allocated A$15 million of the funds raised to an aggressive drilling campaign.

Jardine said the initial focus, due to access, would be around the existing resource and mining area.

“So, what we’ll be looking at doing is resource extensional drilling, maybe a little bit of drilling in the current resource where we’ve currently got access and then what we’ll do is also start setting ourselves up for next winter’s regional drilling campaign,” he said.

“We’ll drill close to the surface to try and expand that resource, and then assess it, see what its potential might be for exploitation there and then at the same time, we’ll continue with regional exploration.

FireFly identified many targets that weren’t followed up.