President’s Message

President’s Message 

79North Ltd. is a Canadian gold exploration company headquartered in Toronto, with gold exploration projects in Suriname. The Company was incorporated in August 2016. Over the past 20 years of a 35-year career in mineral exploration, I have had the pleasure to be the founder and manager of several junior exploration companies that have discovered gold deposits in west Africa and in the Canadian Arctic. In addition, I have constantly worked to build a database of gold exploration opportunities worldwide.  My “brand” is to identify geological terranes or jurisdictions that are permissive for gold deposits but that, for one reason or another, have been denied thorough exploration and resource development by well capitalized exploration companies. The reasons for this may be as simple as remoteness, for example the Canadian Arctic, or as complicated as politics (Burma), war (Iraq), terrorism (Syria), or indifference (French west Africa prior to about 1990). Such terranes and jurisdictions are very attractive to me because they are in the early stages of the exploration and development cycle that starts with a period of rapid discovery and development lasting for twenty or thirty years, depending on the size of the terrane or jurisdiction and the level of cooperation by government, and ends in maturity with few discoveries when most of the large deposits have been discovered and mined out. 

I first visited Suriname in 2016 because I knew it was in a very prospective geological terrane, the Guiana Shield (also spelled Guyana Shield), and I surmised that the country was in the early stage of the exploration cycle. This is what I learned on my first trip to Suriname in July 2016: i) the country is remote (a 15 ½ hour trip with multiple stop overs to get to the capital Paramaribo from Toronto), ii) the eastern part of the country is underlain by a large domain of “greenstone belt” of the Guiana Shield which hosts a large number of gold deposits in Guiana and Venezuela including the Las Cristinas-Brisas deposit with 26.82 million ounces of gold in the measured and indicated category and 25.39 million ounces of gold in the inferred category (https://ir.goldreserveinc.com/news-releases), iii) Newmont was finishing building a new, modern open pit mine and mill at the Merian deposit ( 5.1 million ounces of reserves at 1.2 grams gold per tonne) (https://www.newmont.com/newsroom), and Iamgold had been producing large quantities of gold from the Rosebel Mine since 2006 ( 4.8 million ounces of past production, plus 5.5 million ounces of reserves @ 1.0 g/t, M&I of 9.1 million ounces @ 0.95 g/t gold, and 2.7 million ounces of inferred resources @ 1.0 g/t gold) (www.iamgold.com), and iv)  the eastern part of the country is absolutely overrun by informal miners washing gold from creeks and hillsides over hundreds of square kilometres of area, and even though this informal mining is widespread, and directly associated with the large gold deposits at Rosebel and Merian, it was very apparent to me that most of the areas of informal mining had not been explored by drilling because there were very few properly organized and properly financed exploration companies in the country apart from Iamgold and Newmont. In fact, at the time, I couldn’t name a single junior exploration company that was working in Suriname! In addition, working in Suriname is difficult because it is at an equatorial latitude and covered by dense jungle. It is not for the faint of heart, in fact, working in the sparsely forested parts of west Africa is much easier than working in Suriname. Nevertheless, on my first trip I was pleased to meet several very competent and experienced geologists that are quite capable of working in this terrane and those people would quickly become the backbone of our workforce in Suriname. In summary, Suriname was just the jurisdiction I was looking for! Accordingly, I incorporated 79North the following month and I immediately set about organizing and financing the company to make it the premier junior gold explorer in Suriname.  

We will keep investors well informed with regular press releases and an up to date website. And one last thing, I am a very hands on and technical CEO because I am a practicing exploration geologist and I intend to be involved directly in the exploration of our properties in Suriname. We can’t let the employees have all the fun, now can we? Plus, I really think malaria and other tropical diseases should be shared to the highest level of the organization! Readers of our press releases will find them very detailed and technical, however, I will summarize things for non-technical readers in all our press releases. Readers will also find this website “stuffed” full of data because I think it is better to publish everything on the website rather than to have investors ever think that we are being misleading by selectively publishing data. Finally, if you are a shareholder, want to be a shareholder, or want to stop being a shareholder, please feel free to contact me any time, I am always happy to talk or text (+1-416-786-6348) or respond to emails (jon@www.79north.ca).