Happy Creek’s Jason Bahnsen on Advancing One of the World’s Highest-Grade Tungsten Deposits

Few projects in Canada’s critical minerals landscape capture the strategic urgency of tungsten the way Happy Creek Minerals Ltd. (TSXV: HPY) does. “Happy Creek has one of the highest-grade tungsten deposits in the world,” said President, CEO, and Director Jason Bahnsen, “which is a great place to start.” The company’s flagship Fox Tungsten Project in British Columbia holds an NI 43-101 resource of roughly 1.2 million tonnes across Indicated and Inferred categories, and with drilling now underway, Bahnsen believes “this could be one of the largest and highest-grade tungsten deposits globally.”Founded by geologist Dave Blann in 2006 and named after a nearby creek, Happy Creek has recently caught the attention of investors. “When I joined, the company had a market cap of about seven or eight million dollars,” Bahnsen recalled. “We’re now at around $25 million, and we think there’s a lot more room to grow.” Since his arrival, the share price has more than doubled and the company has raised fresh capital, appointed a new director, and initiated a 10,000-metre resource-expansion drill program at Fox. “Because of the timing of our financing in September, we got going fairly late in the season,” he explained. “Drilling began about three weeks ago. The holes are relatively short—around 100 metres—which gives us a lot of efficiency and highlights the shallow nature of the deposit.”That shallowness, combined with Fox’s grade, makes the project stand out in the global tungsten landscape. As Bahnsen pointed out, “There currently isn’t a single tungsten producer on the continent,” positioning Happy Creek to fill a major North American supply-chain gap. The company’s 2025/2026 diamond-drill program—up to 100 holes across several target zones—is designed to expand its existing high-grade resource. “We’ll be announcing assays over the next few months,” he said. “We like what we’re seeing in the drilling so far.”Yet Happy Creek’s ambitions extend well beyond tungsten. Its Silver Boss Project, a 200-square-kilometre copper-molybdenum-gold-silver property, sits adjacent to Glencore’s former Boss Mountain Molybdenum Mine. “Boss Mountain was one of the highest-grade molybdenum mines in Canada—around 0.2 percent moly—and ran for over 20 years until 1983,” said Bahnsen. “We’re exploring extensions of that mineralization.” He noted the presence of a 4.5-kilometre copper-in-soil anomaly and highlighted that the area “is so mineralized it could almost be a standalone company.”Happy Creek’s contiguous 370-square-kilometre land package also includes the Hen Art-DL area, hosting historic gold workings and samples grading up to 40 grams per tonne. “The entire area is richly mineralized—with copper, gold, silver, molybdenum, and even some palladium and platinum,” Bahnsen added. “With renewed investor interest in explorers, I think Happy Creek is in a great position.”As the drilling season advances, the company expects steady assay results from Fox and continued progress at Silver Boss—each update moving closer to Bahnsen’s vision of building a significant North American source of tungsten and a diversified portfolio of critical mineral assets in British Columbia.