Peter Bell’s

Patient Speculator
Deep Dives with the Most
#InterestingExecutives

Jaxon Mining
(TSXV:JAX)

Read on for an interview with Mr. Bruce Ballantyne, Project Manager for Jaxon
Mining (TSXV:JAX). This first interview focuses technical aspects of the company's
work programs on the tourmaline breccia pipes that Jaxon found at the Hazelton
property at the end of the 2017 field season. Pay attention as Bruce describes the
ongoing research program to identify “diagnostic DNA” to distinguish tourmaline
associated with gold and copper, which may hinge on tellurium as a possible
pathfinder for a copper-gold tourmaline breccia pipes.

Recorded May 24, 2018 with Bruce Ballantyne.

Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 1

Peter: Let’s start with a brief discussion of the other companies who are getting some
attention for their work on “auriferous tourmaline breccia pipes”, Bruce. Please tell
me about what Xanadu has in Mongolia with Kharmagtai?

Bruce: I have not seen pictures of them, Peter.

Peter: Do they outcrop?

Bruce: They don't outcrop. They're under significant depths.

Peter: Do they have good targets?

Bruce: Yes, sure. Absolutely. There are multiple targets and they're drilling systematically.

Peter: "We found something!"

Bruce: They raised $10 million to $12 million the last time, I believe. Now they have
resources on three pipes.

Peter: Do they have this “mineralized tourmaline breccia pipe” deposit model in their mind?
It sounds like they kind of do.

Bruce: Yes, they do.

Peter: How recent is that?

Bruce: Fairly recently, I believe. If you read the history on this, then you'll be surprised.
They've made very large exploration costs at these projects in Mongolia.

For comparison, the Soledad deposit is being purchased by Chakana Copper for $5.7
million from Condor Resources. The shareholders of that junior mining company,
Condor, purchased the property 100% and are able to keep a royalty on it. I don’t

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 2

know how much Condor paid for the property, but the market cap of Chakana
exceeds it by a great amount today because of the strength of the Soledad project in
Peru.

The shareholders of Xanadu are doing exactly the same thing, getting that mining
property concessions from Ivanhoe Mines, Ivanhoe Copper, Ivanhoe over the years.
They want to own the ground and are spending millions and millions of to do it.

And here's us at little old Jaxon with 100% ownership after staking over 30,000
hectares of mineral claims on open ground.

Peter: Staked.

Bruce: Yes.

Peter: In BC.

Bruce: Central BC.

Peter: No NSR owned by anyone else?

Bruce: No.

Peter: No option terms? No work obligations?

Bruce: Right. And another thing you will like, Peter, is that this is a new high-grade discovery.
This is our first year on the ground. That's what we're going to show: a new, high-
grade gold discovery. It may be unique globally. I believe it is certainly unique in
British Columbia. These gold-rich copper porphyry systems, in particular. There may
be tourmaline-chalcopyrite-sulphides cementing the edges of the breccia pipes with
highest permeability. I have heard talk of ones with bornite, which is like chalcopyrite

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 3

but has more copper in it. We talked before about the tellurium in the outcrop at our
project, CRTRS. We’ve never seen anything like this in BC before associated with high
grades of gold and potentially copper.

We keep going up to site. We've expanded things and continue to find a lot more
pipes. The area we talked about where we found exposure of 5-10 grams gold or
more at surface has been a great place to start outlining our mineralized system. I
mentioned a story about how some bad weather caused us to go a secondary target
in the helicopter, which turned out to be one of the best areas. A sample from this
area was the first time I’ve ever seen rock in outcrop with over 1 ounce per tonne of
gold. A single grab sample with 31 grams per tonne gold, high amounts of tellurium,
and other pathfinders.

Peter: And it’s not visible gold – it’s these heavily brecciated pipes that are cemented with
sulphides. The best ones have economic metals great abundance! And the
dimensions of these pipes are so interesting, too. I wonder what kinds of sizes you
will find at CRTRS.

Bruce: Yes, Peter. So do I! The size range people talk about in Peru or in the Gobi is 50-500
meters at surface and 1+ kilometers vertically. I think that makes them a lot of fun to
explore for.

We will do geophysics, which will start in mid-July. I expect we will do 16 days of

ground geophysics and then crunch the data for a month or so. By the end of August,
we should have a three-dimensional model of about four kilometers by four and a
half kilometers, extending 400 meters from surface or more.

Peter: Really! Those 3d maps are everything for these deposits, aren’t they? How many
didn’t come to surface? Where are they? All that stuff is just great.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 4

Bruce: Yes. It will be nice to have. Especially with a detailed geological-alteration map at
surface. We will do new sampling, too. We will document the occurrences
exhaustively at surface this year.

Peter: Exactly right.

Bruce: That's the picture.

Peter: And who knows what the market might assess the value of that program to be ex
post. It could be anything, really. 500 meters showing at surface is a good area to
walk about. You can spend a lot of productive time there, as you demonstrated last
year.

Bruce: With the little that is known about this style of gold-tellurium-copper-rich breccia
porphyry system, around the world, we are very grateful for the public description of
the recent work done by juniors in the world exploration scene. It has been most
informative to us. We hope to contribute to it ourselves as we build on our discovery.

Peter: And it is a discovery with those gold samples last year. The geochemistry there is
great, amazing to see so much gold. I’ve never heard of a tourmaline breccia pipe
with over one ounce of gold. Have you done petrography on the rocks where you
found that high-grad gold?

Bruce: We haven’t released something like that yet, but thanks for mentioning it Peter. I
think you’ve got the concept.

Peter: Here we are at the end of May, right? It's go time for you guys.

Bruce: Next Saturday, June 1st, we're up there. We'll see what the snow is like. All these
different cirques in this hilltop area have different exposure. Some have southern

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 5

exposure. Others have western exposure. I expect that one area or another will be
melted off.

Peter: I can’t imagine what the weather is like. Glad to hear it’s not your first season. Hope
it all goes smoothly. Are you working below the snow line?

Bruce: Yes, we can get down below snow but the areas we want to get to are above the tree
line.

Peter: Do you helicopter in? Are their roads?

Bruce: Yes, you can helicopter in. We helicoptered in from Smithers. The helicopter is a
relatively big one. We take our pilot and then five guys, six people per load. The
highway is right over here on the map. We plan to have two teams, alternating back-
forth.

Peter: Do you work at night? I’ve been underground in Nevada at night and you could work
there for hours.

Bruce: It’s a lot of work, but this program is simple. Lots of field work.

There are some logging roads nearby, but they're decommissioned and everything
else. They don't get us any place near the alpine zone and our targets. All the white
and red rocks at surface get us excited.

No ATV trails, or anything like that either. It’s fly in, fly out.

Peter: Pretty wild country. Now, a silly geological question: does a tourmaline breccias have
to be mineralized?

Bruce: Some are barren, for sure.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 6

Peter: Do you know if Xanadu of Chakana have found or documented any publicly?

Bruce: Not that I am aware of. They may not want to publish that kind of information as
economic geologists. Please do not think that every one of these is going to be like
the best in the world. Not all tourmaline breccias are ore deposits. There are lots of
barren ones with no copper in them whatsoever.

Peter: Good.

Bruce: And that’s an important thing, Peter. Some have no copper, but others do. Some have
no gold, but others do. What do we know about these things? Some of the copper
ones are already world-class ore deposits known in Chile and other parts of the world.

If you have lots of sulfides and everything else, the rocks turn rusty but you can still
mine them. High-grade can go to a flotation circuit to recover the copper and gold. I
mentioned bornite earlier and it’s known that some of these breccias have different
types of copper mineral in them. Chalcopyrite has copper in it, but bornite has more.
You can end up with high concentrations of bornite cementing the edges of these
pipes.

Peter: Imagine that. Sounds like 8% copper intercepts! And you have gold samples greater
than one ounce per tonne at surface in the red rusty rocks. I’m impressed, Bruce!

Bruce: Beautiful.

There can be changes in the minerals as you go down the pipe, too. Each of these
pipes is going to change as you go down.

Peter: Sure.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 7

Bruce: Maybe the top 200 meters is barren. I don’t think we understand, as geologists, what
determines if that changes as you go down the pipe. Maybe we will get there as we
study more of these things. But think about us up at CRTRS – we have outcropping
tourmaline breccia with high-grade gold at surface.

The thing to do is analyze as much of that tourmaline breccia as possible right away.
We want to know if there is copper or gold present. We sure hope so.

A possible pathfinder for a copper-gold, tourmaline breccia system is tellurium.

Tellurium is a metal which is volatile and goes higher in the system as explosive things
are happening at depth. You may recall how the release of gas is associated with
some depressurization events in the pipe. If you're wandering around the countryside
and find a whole lot of dead-looking tourmaline breccias, then you sample them. If
you have any snip of above-background tellurium, then I'd suggest those should be
probed to depth. I wouldn't call those dead until you evaluated them at depth. That
could lead to a step up in science, too. I believe these gold-rich ones are rare, so the
field of geology stands to benefit from a deep work program on these things like we
have in Jaxon Mining.

Peter: I’m imagining a global exploration program, Bruce. Just go searching for 50-meter
tourmaline breccia pipes with tellurium in outcrop. You mentioned how you are using
satellite imaging technology to search through your project area and identify other
examples of similar things – you could do that in a massive way. Even just starting in
BC around your project area, you could cover all kinds of ground with some pretty
good imaging. And then you could send out a reconnaissance field team!

Bruce: Yes, but I believe these are rare. There has not been one instance of an economic
tourmaline-copper one yet in BC and certainly not a precious metals rich one.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 8

Peter: Aha! Well, I hope you can take it from zero to one confidently here this season.

Bruce: The copper ones are rare, but the gold-bearing ones are even more rare. And don’t
forget the Peruvian ones have portions with high silver, as well as copper and gold.

Bruce: If you can establish that tellurium functions as a pathfinder for these gold-rich ones,
then you’ll be famous Bruce!

I’ve heard the word tellurium refers to “from great depths”. I believe that refers to
coming from the mantle, right? Just bringing up all the heavies. And you mentioned
a possible correlation between the gold and tellurium in these systems, do you have
a sense if there is causation at all there? Is it too early?

Bruce: I’d say it’s too new.

Peter: That’s fine. I like to hear that myself. Hopefully there’s not some mine you haven’t
heard of though, Bruce. There sure are a lot of mines that I’ve never heard of. I trust
you know what you’re talking about and it’s one of my favourite answers! An
exploration company that is on the cutting edge of the science is always so cool.

Bruce: It's going to be exciting for us to cut thin sections, Peter. We want to see where our
gold is residing. We may see the tellurium-rich metallic parts in detail.

Peter: The crystals and everything – lots to see. Again, I don’t know what it will look like but
can’t wait to find out.

Bruce: We may be able to micro-probe the gold to find out if it's tellurium-rich. That would
be interesting, but we don't know those things yet for any of these systems.

Peter: Not even on a global basis.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 9

Bruce: No. I believe Sillitoe wrote, “they are rare, we don't know much about them, but
they're starting to find some.” That was about the end of it.

Peter: I wonder if these pipes ever get misinterpreted as chopped-up porphyries or clusters
of porphyries? There seems to be a lot of kinds of porphyries out there.

Bruce: Well, people like porphyries. Rightfully so! They are big, as far as alteration halos are.
You can go numbers of kilometers away and find a little bit of this, a little bit of that,
but that causes a terrible vectoring problem.

Peter: Yes, exactly. Never heard it said better, Bruce. Get ready for some drilling!

Bruce: Compare that with walking up a red rusty slope like we have at CRTRS and seeing a
great big black pipe sticking out of the ground to get a vector to a copper porphyry
system with gold endowment!

Peter: Vectoring is not a problem. The pipe shape makes it simple enough! The only question
is whether it goes straight down? There may be post-mineralization faults moving
things around. I am under the impression these things are oriented straight up-down,
however.

Bruce: We’ve got a nice exposed setting. The alpine glaciation moves along through the guts
of the alteration system, which can result in the pipes being exposed at surface. Other
pipes may stay buried. It all makes for a pretty nice situation when you are searching
for the hidden porphyry portion of the system.

Peter: And it’s drill-able?

Bruce: Yes. The stuff in the pictures may look steep, but there are lots of places to drill from
and test the extent of the pipes identified at surface or the 3d geophysical model.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 10

Peter: How much glaciation has there been around here?

Bruce: I could only say based on very limited examination of the Red Spring area on it’s own,
separately from three cirques I told you about. I’ve been to Red Spring and the
topography makes it look like you’re a little deeper in the porphyry system there than
the tourmaline breccias and other rocks that that we sampled at the other cirques.
We have not yet sampled exposures the tourmaline at the Red Spring yet, but they
are exposed in the cirque valley floor.

Peter: Sounds like the first place to start! “Never been sampled”. I can’t wait to hear about
the thin sections of that, too. Comparing things between Red Spring and The Cirques.

Bruce: They’ve never been sampled, Peter. They maybe a good target, as you say. But we
did sample in the Red Spring area – we sampled from the rusty red rocks on the side
extensively. We found one good quartz vein over there, with silver and zinc. It's just
different from the copper-gold that we saw at The Cirques. The CRTRS project!

There were numerous copper anomalies at the CRT, as well. I sampled water from
the Red Spring last year and it has copper. The sulphur numbers were very high, too.

Peter: Good. Weather away, you sulphides!

Bruce: It’s a fact of life around there. When we get to sampling the Red Spring area, we may
find different intensity of alteration. It may give some info on "elevation or altitude
level" within the porphyry system, which is different than some of the other parts of
the system.

Peter: Does that mean in terms of where the rocks are now, or in some paleo setting before
they were moved in some way? I’ve heard about this volcanic activity that was
happening out in the Pacific that got brought over to a continental subduction zone

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 11

and scraped away a bunch of the volcanics, like the Quesnellia and the Takla
formations? I don’t know much about all that.

Bruce: Again, I will say that nobody has found one of these in BC before. We know these
exciting deposits, like Xanadu, that the tourmaline is intimately associated with the
mineralized portions of these systems as part of the broader porphyry copper system.
They are on top of each other, really close. I, myself, look forward to when they start
to get down to the massive intrusive parts of these copper-gold porphyries – they
might be nice deposits themselves.

Peter: Do we have a sense for the age here?

Bruce: I wouldn't guess even what the age of this is, but I would be surprised if it was older
than 100 million years.

Peter: And the host rock?

Bruce: It is much older, it’s the ocean floor. Most of our porphyries are Tertiary or
Cretaceous, as they call it. We can get age dating done as it's required. As the word
gets out about this, I think we'll be run off the map with people from the world of
economic geology wanting to work on the project.

Peter: Being in BC, there's a lot of good work between industry and universities. Science is
respected here. the support for the science is all here and everything so ...

Bruce: And Jaxon Mining is a supporter of science. We have a PhD student working at
Laurentian University, who is doing a PhD thesis on tourmalines.

Peter: Very cool.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 12

Bruce: He's doing trace element analysis of tourmaline. I have sent our samples to the lab
and said, “What you need to do is find a diagnostic DNA to distinguish the tourmaline
that are associated with gold and copper, versus just copper or nothing.“

We know already that intrusive tourmalines have different diagnostic characteristics

compared to tourmaline that is associated with gold in known deposits that formed
deep underground in Archean rocks. They are different again from tourmaline that is
found associated with lead and zinc in the Sullivan deposit, as well.

Tourmaline is a boron gas that is stopped in many different environments and is

associated with many different types of mineralization over time and around the
world. Why does it occurs sometimes, and doesn't occur other times? That’s not well
understood yet.

Our PhD student is doing this finger-printing, something like you would with garnets
for certain kimberlites and stuff like that. Check the trace elements for garnets and
see if you can tell whether the thing is one type or another. It’s effective as an
exploration tool.

We've given the university some of our tourmalines with gold and they are studying
them. I talked to another company who is giving them tourmalines, too. There’s really
only one exploration company talking about gold-rich tourmaline breccia pipes right
now. There are few copper ones out there, but few gold ones.

Peter: I love to hear about universities, Bruce. Good for you! It’s a great fit to do that with
a project in BC and a university in Quebec. I wonder if they are doing anything like
this in Peru or Mongolia. I hope they do!

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 13

Bruce: I’m sure they will, Peter. I hope they release good geological research on it publicly.
Tourmaline can also appear in pegmatitic dikes, which are interesting. Tourmaline is
a semi-precious stone and it happens in a lot of different environments.

The DNA for it is different in all of those settings. The GSC is interested in this, too.
They’ve partly funded this work at Laurentian. There might be good information to
be shared about what to look for those doing heavy mineral concentrates of tills in
BC or looking at overburden. There may be some techniques that are effective for
finding mineralized pipes that are buried, or even tracing them back over long
distances with regional programs.

If you do a heavy mineral concentration of till or stream sediments and tourmalines

show up, then that’s interesting. You can separate the tourmalines out, like you
would with garnets if you were looking for diamonds, and microprobe them to
generate a diagnostic DNA of the trace elements – did they come from deposit type
X?

Peter: Great, thank you Bruce.

Bruce: And that may lead to a good work program for Jaxon Mining. It would be a simple
thing to do in British Columbia: search for certain tourmalines in heavy mineral
concentrates from small alpine valleys. If you get the right tourmalines, then you have
a target nearby. Do that and then spend more substantial amounts of money trying
to find the tourmaline breccias that are buried but indicated by geophysics.

Peter: Auriferous tourmaline breccia pipes! To ask again, did any of the samples from last
year include tourmaline? I guess so, if you sent some to Laurentian University.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 14

Bruce: Yes, absolutely. I can point out a few locations on the maps. There's a ridge with a lot
of dots, which is the one with high-grade I told you about. The sample you’re asking
about came from right by the lake.

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com
Bruce Ballantyne
Auriferous Pipes
Page 15

Peter: Interesting! Makes me wonder about that lake. Maybe there was a depressurization
event one last time that caused that depression where the lake formed. That’s
enough for now – let’s take a break and come back for more, Bruce.

Bruce: Sure, thanks Peter.

Disclaimers

This document contains statements that are forward looking statements and are subject to
various risks and uncertainties concerning the specific factors disclosed under the heading “Risk
Factors” and elsewhere in the Company’s periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators. Such
information contained herein represents management’s best judgment as of the date hereof
based on information currently available. The Company does not assume the obligation to update
any forward-looking statement.

Peter Bell has not been compensated to prepare and distribute this material.

Find this interview online https://ceo.ca/@Newton/newtoninterviews-bruce-ballantyne-project-

manager-jaxon-mining-jax

Use #NewtonInterviews on CEO.CA @Newton and Twitter @PeterNBell

www.PatientSpeculator.com