Calico Resources CEO Bill Wagener talks about the Grassy Mountain Gold Porject on Midas Letter Money

James West: Hi I'm James West, this is Midas Letter Money.  My next guest is developing a precious metals deposit in the state of Oregon.  Bill Wagener is the President and CEO of Calico Resources, trades on the TSX Venture into the symbol CKB and on the OTCQX under the symbol CVXHF.  Bill, thank you for joining us today.

Bill Wagener: James, thank you for having me.

James West: Bill, this has got to be the one of the fastest moving projects that I've seen in a long time.  You only went public recently, you still got less than 30 shares outstanding, yet you're already at an indicative resource of 1.27 million ounces of gold and 4 plus million ounces of silver.  Tell us a bit about the project.

Bill Wagener: I just want to say we're very proud of our team.  It's the dedication and commitment of the team that's really moved this thing forward.  And the fact the we've worked together before that always make's it nice.  When we picked up this project in June, which is when we received final approval of the TSX due in 2011, it already had an indicated resource of over 900,000 ounces. 

We were able to put together a drill program in a very short order, get in to commence drilling in August, and finish up at the end of October.  We took the drill program from 2011 and amalgamated it in to the historic work and then raised to as you said, to 1.0 over 1.25 million ounces.  We're really excited about that and possibly for the first time, identify the silver resource of over 4 million.

James West: So tell us a bit about the past production here your timeline, where are you going to start and how are you going to start?

Bill Wagener: Well, in where we're at right now is, this is a viable project as it is already.  It is a deposit not an occurrence, so we're treating it as such.  We've commenced the permitting process, we've began our discussions with the state of Oregon in October, and that has culminated in us filing our official papers to start the permitting process.

The states assembled its team, and so we're headed forward on the permitting.  And as you would know, the most important thing in any permitting process is the hydrologic monitoring.  Fortunately previous operators already installed the monitoring wells.  We went out and reconditioned them, and now what we are doing is filing our permit or our protocols for our water collection.

James West: Okay.

Bill Wagener: So we're moving fast on that.

James West: Right, so Oregon is not a state that is synonymous with mining.  And one would actually imagine Oregon would be somewhat environmentally sensitive.  So what kind of roadblocks are you facing in terms of changing that mindset in the regulatory side?

Bill Wagener: Yeah, what we found is, we're not facing any roadblocks at all. Quite frankly we're getting a lot of support from both the local community, the state and federal agencies have been very responsive to us.  And the County Commission in fact has written a pass to resolution in support of Calico in the development of this project.

So we see that everybody is in favor of moving forward, we certainly have to do our environmental work and technical work but there's a lot of support.

James West: Okay great.  Tell us about, you've got how much money in the bank, and --?

Bill Wagener: Well somewhere less than a million dollars right now but that's enough to take us through the physical year, which runs 1 July to 30 June.  But we do need to fund up for our exploration program that we're currently planning for 2012.

James West: Sure, so Grassy Mountain's on the fast track but what have you got to build value in the company going forward, outside of Grassy Mountain?

Bill Wagener: Yeah, that's a good point, because Grassy Mountain is, it was born out of a hot springs type of a depositional environment.  And within the property position we control, there's over 17 other targets that had been identified either by mapping or chip sampling but also in many cases drilled testing by previous operators. 

We're pretty excited about the opportunity to find a second Grassy Mountain or a third Grassy Mountain.  And we were able to get in, and we had to break in the weather.  And we're able to complete a resistivity survey which we just received on Friday the results of that.  We're very encouraged about our ability to locate a second and third Grassy Mountain

James West: So you've got additional targets on the same land package?

Jill Wagener: Exactly, exactly.  Additional targets, exactly.

James West: Any drilling going on right now?

Bill Wagener: No drilling going on right now.  The problem for us is it's 22 miles of unimproved county road.  So we get some rivers of seasonality to our ability to drill.  We should be back in May.

James West: Okay, so I'm a shareholder who's just considering buying for the first time, what is there that's going to drive value to me within the next 24 months?

Bill Wagener: What's going to happen here in the next 24 months is kind of three fold.  One, Grassy Mountain itself is viable mine as it stands today if we don't find another rounds.  And we're moving that towards PEA.  It is PEA stage, let's put it that way.  It's Preliminary Economic and Assessment stage.

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In barking upon the metallurgical analysis to give us final design for the prep plant, for the processing facility and which we think, it's going to be very interesting because the processing is going to be very simple.  It's off the shelf technology, and we're trying to determine whether we actually need you to sign that or not.

That the exploration we'll do on Grassy Mountain would be focused on geotechnical work, some fine old metallurgical work.  But it's just to make that a little bit bigger.  The real, I think the real exciting thing is in the surrounding areas.  And being, we're very excited about that resistivity survey, and how that's going to direct our exploration of these surrounding areas.  We'll tie that in with the previous geophysical work and the drilling that's been completed on those outside targets. 

I think it's worth saying that Grassy Mountain itself already has 240 holes in it.  The surrounding area has almost 200 additional holes target on the satellites.  So we're working from a real, real strong base of information.

James West: Okay, lots to look forward to.  We're going to leave it there for now.  Bill, I'd like to thank you for joining us today.

Bill Wagener: James, thanks very much.

James West: If you like to learn more about Calico Resources, you can visit them online at calicoresources.com and if you'd like to learn more about companies like Calico Resources, visit midasletter.com.  I'm James West, and this is Midas Letter Money.

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