Snowline Gold's CEO on Valley: 7.9 million ounces, a C$3.4 billion PEA net present value, and room to grow

Rick Rule opened the interview with a disclosure: he owns shares in Snowline Gold. What followed was a detailed walkthrough of the Valley discovery in the Yukon, led by CEO Scott Berdahl, and the numbers he shared put unusually concrete boundaries on both the promise and the open questions.

## A prospector's dataset became a company

Berdahl's account of the company's origin explains a lot about how it explores. A Yukon-raised prospector with a geology degree from MIT and later degrees in earth science and business, he described how his father began prospecting the eastern Yukon in 2008. The family built its model around the idea that the region could host Carlin-style gold — a deposit type known for very large systems — and eventually staked and optioned ground covering more than one percent of the Yukon's surface area, much of it handed to other companies to explore.

When the 2012–2013 downturn cut off exploration funding, that ground came back. What the family kept was the data. Re-reading it across a package of roughly 80 by 100 kilometers, Berdahl said, revealed multi-kilometer geochemical anomalies carrying several mineralization styles, including Carlin-type and reduced intrusion-related gold, where fluids tied to granitic intrusions deposit gold in large, continuous bodies. Snowline was formed to test that ground, and it hit the Valley discovery right out of the gate, alongside another drill discovery in 2021, the company's first year.

## What Valley holds today

Berdahl described Valley as a high-grade, three-dimensionally continuous body sitting right at surface, still open and still growing. The most recent resource, based on about 50,000 meters of drilling, contains 7.9 million ounces of gold in the measured and indicated categories — the two most reliable resource classes — at 1.2 grams per ton, plus 0.9 million inferred ounces at sub-gram grades on the outer periphery. He said the company is "still growing that periphery quite meaningfully."

## The starter pit is the story

The detail Berdahl emphasized most is not headline tonnage but the shape of the deposit. The Valley PEA — a Preliminary Economic Assessment, the first coarse economic study of a deposit — shows a life-of-mine strip ratio of 1.1 to 1: roughly 1.1 tonnes of waste rock moved for every tonne of ore.

The front end is unusually rich. The planned starter pit — an initial high-grade pit mined first to pull cash flow forward — contains 2.9 million ounces at an average grade of 2.3 grams per ton, with a strip ratio of 0.1 to 1 including pre-strip. Berdahl called it "the highest grade, highest strip-adjusted grade of any pit on the planet." That is his claim, but it rests on published PEA figures.

## The economics, and the gold-price question

Rule pressed on a familiar weak point: resource studies often rest on stale gold prices. Berdahl's answer was specific. The engineering assumes $1,950 gold; the economic model uses $2,150. On those assumptions, the PEA shows a net present value — NPV, the value today of future cash flows after costs — of C$3.4 billion at construction start, against C$1.7 billion of initial capital.

He then went further than most management teams do. Extrapolating the PEA model linearly to spot gold prices yields roughly C$11.4 billion of NPV, he said, while cautioning that this figure sits outside the study's stated sensitivities and rests on a mine plan that is not yet optimized. A pre-feasibility study — a more rigorous engineering stage than a PEA — is underway, and Berdahl expects the PEA's throughput to prove undersized, which would push capital costs higher.

Rule framed the valuation question with a rule of thumb he credits to Jonathan Goodman: a project's NPV should be at least twice, and preferably three times, its capital cost. On Berdahl's numbers, Snowline would clear that test even if capital costs doubled. Against a market capitalization Berdahl put at about C$2.5 billion, the stock trades at roughly 0.2 times the spot-price NPV he described.

## Where the next value comes from

Berdahl was candid about what the drill will and will not add. Infill drilling adds little now, he argued, because the deposit is already dense and well understood. Step-out holes keep hitting mineralization, but grades fade at the edges, and that material belongs late in mine life, where it is heavily discounted in a cash-flow model.

The more interesting targets are structural. Mineralization sits on the western side of the hosting intrusion, in rock enriched by a later phase of granite. The company is testing whether similar hotspots exist on the intrusion's eastern side, and at depth. Given the grade and continuity, Berdahl argued that a comparable body found 500 meters — even a kilometer — down would still be commercially interesting.

The wider point is the district. Berdahl cast Valley as proof of concept for the ground his family has worked since 2008. Discovery also lowers the bar for anything found nearby: with a mill, power, and road access in place, finds that would once have been too low-grade to matter become viable. He noted the project area is no longer 75 kilometers from the nearest road and connects to the North American network by a relatively short link — not an Arctic sea-supply scenario.

## The caveats worth holding onto

Nothing in the interview changes the stage of the asset. A PEA is preliminary; the spot-price NPV is an extrapolation the CEO himself qualified; capital costs are rising across the industry; and the pre-feasibility study will move both the throughput and the capital number. Rule's disclosed ownership of Snowline shares, and Berdahl's statement that he personally holds a large stake and is "very aligned" with shareholders, are facts investors should weigh — as alignment, and as promotion, on both sides.

What the video delivers is a clear, quantified case for why Snowline argues the market underprices Valley today, and a specific map of where the company believes the next ounces — and the next re-rating — are most likely to come from.