Treasure Hunter Chronicles. Every company in our purview has a story. This is Wes Adams's.
The Hunter
Wes Adams is a third-generation mining executive, and his career reads like a man circling home. He started in Guyana, in operations management for the private company that discovered and developed the eleven-million-ounce Toroparu gold deposit, then joined Sandspring Resources after its reverse take-over and helped raise nearly $100 million of public equity. In 2014 he did the thing that explains everything after: he moved to Wyoming's Powder River Basin, founded an oil and gas services company, ran it, and sold it to a major midstream in 2017.
So when Adams went hunting for nickel, he did not fly into Wyoming with a Vancouver map. He went to ground he already knew — the Granite Mountains of Fremont County, in the middle of his adopted state — and he took a company called Visionary Gold with him. In July 2023 the company changed its name to Visionary Metals Corp. (TSXV: VIZ; OTCQB: VIZNF). The gold was no longer the story. By then, Adams's drills had already found something Wyoming had never produced in its long mining history.
His technical bench matches the ambition. Chief Geologist Michael Page spent nearly fifty years in nickel — Director of Exploration at Norilsk Nickel, one of the largest nickel producers on earth, and before that the man who spearheaded worldwide nickel exploration for BHP. When a company this small carries a geologist with that résumé, it is worth asking what he saw in the rocks.
The Ground
Visionary's land package covers roughly 40 square kilometres of the Granite Mountains in central Wyoming, north of Jeffrey City — a town that boomed on uranium in the 1970s and busted when the uranium price did. The bones of that era are still there, and the company's releases point to them plainly: haul roads, high-tension power lines and natural gas pipelines, installed for the uranium mines that came before. Discovery ground with infrastructure already standing is a different animal from discovery ground at the end of a hundred miles of muskeg.
The target is a family of ultramafic bodies strung along a structural corridor the company has traced for some 100 kilometres — the kind of rock that hosts magmatic nickel sulfide systems, the deposit class behind some of the great nickel camps of the world. Within the package sit three named claim groups: King Solomon, Tin Cup about ten kilometres west, and Diamond Springs.
!Visionary's Granite Mountains area map — the ultramafic occurrences strung along the corridor the company has traced for some 100 kilometres, with the key locations marked in red. Map: Visionary Metals Corp. || fit narrow The state itself has skin in the game: USGS and Wyoming Geological Survey research helped point at the ground, and in July 2026 the Wyoming Energy Authority awarded Visionary US$250,000 in Energy Matching Funds to advance the work.
The Discovery
In 2022, Visionary drilled its new Wyoming ground. On the third hole of the program — KSR22-003, announced March 6, 2023 — the company cut 44 metres of 0.23% nickel, including 17 metres of 0.43% nickel with 226 parts per million cobalt, at the top of a geophysical anomaly roughly 1.5 kilometres long by 600 metres wide. Thin-section analysis of the core identified nickel sulfide — pentlandite — in ultramafic host rock, and the company described the sulfide as class-one, battery-grade material.
Read that again with a map in mind. Nickel sulfide had never been found in Wyoming. The company's claim, made in its July 2023 program announcement, is larger: the first new nickel sulfide discovery in the continental western United States since the early 1940s. Eighty years of geologists walked this country looking for uranium, gold and iron. The nickel was sitting in the dark rocks nobody had drilled.
The follow-up held up. Hole KSR23-004, about 220 metres from the discovery intercept, cut 6 metres of 0.52% nickel, including 1.5 metres of 0.70% nickel. Across the 2023 reverse-circulation program, twelve of fourteen holes hit disseminated nickel mineralization inside the ultramafic body. Disseminated is not the prize — in magmatic systems, the disseminated halo is the smoke. The fire, if it exists, is massive sulfide at depth, and that is what the geophysics went looking for next.
The Major at the Table
On July 31, 2025, Teck American Incorporated — a subsidiary of Teck Resources — signed a strategic Exploration Alliance with Visionary covering the whole Wyoming package. Teck subscribed for 17,392,193 Visionary shares at $0.07, putting $1,217,454 into the treasury for a 9.9% stake, with room to top up toward 19.9% in future financings. Visionary runs the programs; Teck sits on the technical committee and holds the exclusive right to option any designated property — King Solomon or Tin Cup at $6 million of exploration spending each, Diamond Springs at $4 million — to earn a 70% interest.
Majors do not buy 9.9% of a micro-cap and lend it their technical committee out of charity. Teck's signature is the market's clearest signal that the Granite Mountains system deserves major-company attention — and it means Visionary is drilling this season with a major looking over its shoulder, paying part of the freight.
The Second Front
While Wyoming drills, Visionary has opened a second front: the Slipstream copper-gold-silver porphyry project, newly acquired, spanning tier-one mining jurisdictions in Utah and Nevada. The company's filings describe classic porphyry geochemistry and geology with mineralized periphery, and management said in September 2026 that it is advancing toward drilling at Slipstream as well. Two hunts, two deposit classes, one small treasury — the Wyoming alliance model, with Teck funding the nickel side, is what makes the arithmetic possible.
What Happens Next
The 2026 program is the biggest test the story has faced. Airborne VTEM in late 2025 and ground fixed-loop EM surveys through 2026 refined the targets; permitting closed in August; and diamond drilling commenced August 26, 2026 — up to 4,500 metres testing eight separate conductors: three at King Solomon, at the site of the discovery itself, and five at Tin Cup, where large conductive bodies sit along trends of elevated nickel, copper and chromium in soil and rock. Assays are pending. As of this writing there is no NI 43-101 mineral resource at King Solomon, Tin Cup or Slipstream — everything here is exploration, and exploration targets are conceptual until the drill says otherwise. That honesty is the point of the season: either the conductors are massive sulfide, or they are not, and the core will tell.
Adams, mobilizing the rigs in August 2026:
"The targets we have identified at King Solomon and Tin Cup exhibit geochemical and geophysical characteristics routinely observed at other world-class magmatic nickel and copper sulfide districts, and we are excited to see if we can make a world-class discovery with this year's drill program."
>
— Wes Adams, CEO, Visionary Metals Corp., August 26, 2026
A third-generation miner came home to Wyoming, drilled the third hole, and found the nickel a century of prospectors missed. Now the drills are turning on eight targets at once, with a major at the table and the state writing matching cheques. The Granite Mountains kept this secret for a very long time. This is the season we find out how big it is.