Discovering Hycroft’s Untold Story

0:08 All right. Well, while I see the audience coming in now, I'll say good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you're signing in from. Thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to Highcraft Mining's live event hosted by 6. I'm pleased to introduce our speakers today, Highcraft Mining's President and CEO, Diane R. Garrett and Alex Davidson, the company's Vice President of Exploration. Diane and Alex will be reviewing a presentation and afterwards we'll be taking questions live, starting with those that came in advance over email. But as a reminder, you can submit your questions on the chat panel on the right-hand side of your screen at any point during the presentation, and we'll try to get to them while we've got time today. As always, today's event is being recorded and will be available on SYX.com and YouTube within the next 24 hours. Without further ado, I'm going to hand it right over to Diane Alex to get us started today. All right. Thank you, Romeo. Appreciate it.

0:55 Welcome, everybody. We're real excited about doing our inaugural webinar with 6. And happy new year to everybody. I think 2024 is shaping up to be a great year for our industry and certainly a spectacular year for Highcroft lies ahead. So I'm real excited to talk to you about that. We will be talking about some forward looking statements today. So this is our disclaimer, which we all have seen a million times to refresh everybody's memory about Highcroft we have over 10 million ounces of gold in the MNI category over 3 million ounces in the inferred category.

1:34 And what a lot of people don't realize is we have a significant amount of silver as well. 360 million ounces in the M&I category and just under another 100 million ounces in the inferred category. We're open in all directions and the depth and we have 66 million of unrestricted cash, an additional 35 million that sits in a bond for the property and that is a cash bond. This makes Highcroft one of the world's largest precious metals deposits and it is in the best jurisdiction for mining and that would be Nevada USA. We have a tremendous amount of unexplored land position because the operations since the 80s, the open pit heap leach was just on about 10% of the land package.

2:23 And the focus at that time and all through the last several decades has really been on gold. And we are really the first company to come in and take a serious look at the silver component as well. So very interesting to have a super large gold resource, but combined also with almost an equally large silver resource. We are doing what our team does best, which is applying first principles to really understanding this deposit, the geology, the mineralization, and what is driving this world class system. And since the day we all walked in, we have known that there is more to the High Cross system than just this large, low grade, open pit resource. And the results of the work that we've been doing in just a 3 short 3 years is really bearing that that anticipation out. And we've been very happy with the success we've been having under Alex and his team's leadership.

3:21 We are well funded with 66 million in the treasury, which makes it great for a company in particularly in the markets that we're in where financing has proven to be very challenging right now, notwithstanding the gold prices. And our team has a very well established track record of delivering exceptional value to our shareholders. A lot of you are dialing in today probably because you've seen our recent news dating back to October about this new high-grade silver discovery. In October, we were finding elevated silver across the high-prof system because we are the first company who looked at this system and said, let's not just focus on the gold but let's see what we're recognizing in terms of the silver.

4:07 And that led to us drilling the best hole ever in November. And then we announced some additional results last week and that whole silver zone which we're going to dive into details on that shows that the silver zone is well-defined veins excellent continuity and remains open over a large distance and some of the results we're seeing, you know, 57 meters of 356 grams, 41 meters of 636 grams, 130 meters of 213. All of the results are on our website. We still have about half a dozen bulls pending from that program and we're anxious to get those back and out to the market as well.

4:55 I always start with the team because it is the team that you're investing in at this point. That is the asset of the company. Most of our team came from Remarco. If many of you will recall, we went from 20 million market cap to over a billion dollar market cap before years before we ever got into production. And we did that by applying the same first principles and taking a fresh look at an asset much like we're doing at High Crop today. Alex joined us. He's got a phenomenal history both above and underground with Nevada Gold Mines, Newmont, Heckler, Rio Tinto. We just have an outstanding team. We've got probably about 100 people on site that are doing excellent work. The most important thing for us is sending our people home safely every day. And I am really pleased to say that we have just passed 2 years of a 0.00 tripper.

5:52 That is remarkable and we were the recipient of many, many awards, including the top safety award through the SME organization. And some of you may say, well, yeah, you're not in operation. So how easy is that? Well, it's not easy. It doesn't matter if you're in exploration or if you're in operations. We have well over 100 people at site while we're drilling. And that includes contractors. We have to train to our safety culture. So the fact that we're able to achieve these. We also have very, very large equipment running around the site all the time. We're contouring pads. We're doing concurrent reclamation. So there's a lot of work that goes on and any kind of a safety incident, whether you're an explorer or in operations is a negative. So our safety record makes really top talent people want to work for us because they know that we look after them.

6:52 The Highcroft mine, as I mentioned, world-class assets that's in the Northwest Nevada. We have extensive infrastructure on site, so we are way ahead of other developers given the fact that we've got permits for open kit, heap leaching as well as milling operations. We are de-risked from the standpoint of power infrastructure and what we need to do now as we transition to the sulfide ore is to build the milling component to process the sulfide ore. If we just take a look at the Highcroft mine here, we sit near the California border and the Oregon border at the top of Nevada.

7:40 And here's the road, the Highcroft mine. We stay in the town of Winnemucca. Many of you have been to Winnemucca and it's about a 50 mile drive west out Junko Road. The Highcroft Mine, what you're seeing here in the yellow is our land position of over 60,000 acres. The resource as it sits today, which is the 15 million ounces of gold equivalent, sits within the red boundary there. And you can see how much land we still have left to explore. The historic Rosebud mine, which was a very high grade underground mine, a joint venture between Heckler and Newmont. In fact, Alex Davidson was the mine geologist at the Rosebud mines. He knows that system well.

8:31 That the claims sit in the pink boundary there. The actual rosebud mine sits just in this area where I'm drawing that blue dot. And we picked up about a year ago these red claims in here from Newmont. So we have a 50-50 undivided interest with HECLA on those. But what was most significant about picking up those claims was the fact that we obtained data from Newmont covering the area between Rosebud and High Crop. This is data that would have taken a couple of years to put together and many millions of dollars. And that has been amazing for us to combine that with our own geophysics, geochem work, and hyperspectral work, and it is putting together a very, very nice picture of this high crop system.

9:24 So we're in proximity to a very high grade mine, and we've got a massive resource here at High Crop, and we are looking to see other high-grade opportunities and where the plumbing is coming from for this high crop system. I just want to give you a sense for those of you who have not been to site. These are actual photographs and I just wanted to show you some of the pictures that we have to give you a sense of just how much infrastructure we do have on site. We've got a fully operational lab. We have truck shops, safety shops, admin, geology buildings. We also have a rail line that runs right by the property.

10:12 So we can do a spur off that and that will be helpful to bring in reagents and materials. We also have 3 stages of crushing and I'll try to spend this slowly for everybody to get a good look. This is one of the world's largest primary crushers that FLS makes. And so this, as I mentioned, most developers, this puts us really far ahead in terms of the timeline to production. We also have a brand new leach pad that was completed in 2021. We have covered it to protect it because we still do have some oxide in transition ore that will go to the leach pad in the first 3 years of mining before we start going full on to sulfides and actually will probably be in and out of some transition or so just based on the amount of sulfide sulfur we will determine if it makes more money by sending it to the leaf pad or sending it through the milling operation.

11:21 And we have 2 processing facilities. This is the larger one, the North Merrill Crow plant. And this is where we'll be doing the work for our upcoming processing of the sulfide phase and the Brimstone Merrell Crow plant will probably be closed because it will be too small for the next phase of operations. So as part of our strategy, initially was strengthening the resource. So we saw areas of higher grade that we wanted to see if there was continuity between those intercepts from historical drilling. And we determined that there was continuity. We understand where the high grade is coming from and how that is situated within the system of Highcroft.

12:09 That helps us improve the overall economics. We've also converted waste into ore and we have upgraded inferred material into MNI and that has been the result of our drilling over the last couple of years and we have launched the largest drill program that has been done at Highcroft in well over a decade. We are completing the pre-feasibility study for the pressure oxidation autoclave. We're doing some trade-off analysis right now and that PFS is anticipated to be out by the end of the first quarter. And for the first time, we are taking a look at the district potential of high crop and determining is there a high-grade starter mine, is there an opportunity to understand the feeder system to high-crop which the geophysics indicate there are 3 potential feeder systems to high-crop which doesn't really surprise us and that's consistent with what other geologists have expected in the past.

13:07 And so we're doing a lot of ground-based work under Alex's leadership. And we also are looking at other opportunities in the industry should they be important in creating additional value for our shareholders. So let me just show you a little bit about the system. All of these are these are not cartoon pictures. These are actually taken from our geologic and our drill hole database, images that are created. What you see in the orange and the green is the measured and indicated resource. And the blue is inferred. So you can see there is a tremendous amount of opportunity to fill in some of those gaps of depth. This ore body is not defined by geology, it is defined by the amount of drilling and the extent of drilling that's been done. So we do expect this to grow considerably in the future as we do more drilling.

14:09 And to give you a sense of how important and how large both the gold and silver resources are, This is the gold pitch shell. If you look at just bulk tonnage gold.

14:26 And if we look at bulk tonnage silver. You can see it's a substantial amount of silver along with the gold and one of the things that Alex looked at was looking at the deposit in terms of gold equivalent ounces. So those areas that were very low grade gold really popped because they had very high significant silver components and that type of analysis is what has drawn our attention to areas that are highly prospective for high-grade silver and we see the results of that with the drill news we've been putting out since last fall. What you see here is this is the vortex deposit and this is the Eiffel Tower. So you can get a sense of the scale of this asset. It really is amazing.

15:17 But before this recent discovery of brimstone the ideas that we would be starting in the Bay Area and over to Campbell and brimstone and then we would dive on vortex and vortex has always been the highest grade silver until this recent discovery of brimstone. So this means that the high grade in vortex doesn't come into play until after about year 10. But with the recent discovery of vortex, which sits much higher in the system and then knowing what we have in vortex and understanding that these 2 are likely to connect we might be able to access this brimstone area sooner And that is what we are very focused on right now.

16:05 And just to give you another view of that drilling, this is the resource cone at Highcroft. And you can see the drilling from the recent results that we've put out dating back to November, December time frame. This is some vortex drilling that we also announced. And the thinking is we've got over 800 meters of strike here that you'll see in the press release we put out last week. We talk about a vortex brimstone trend. We are definitely seeing that this is a trend and then the vortex camel trend in the other direction, the 600 meter strike length. So Alex is going to talk about why we believe that those 2 trends will connect and why we're super excited about the drilling results we've been getting.

16:58 So we've talked a bit about our safety and how important that is to our team. On the metallurgical results, we have really outstanding results that we published in the fall. They were 10% higher than what we had assumed and what had previously been used on metallurgical studies. It's important to note that in 21, we actually drilled across the entire ore body, took representative samples of every single geologic domain, and ran the full suite of metallurgical tests on them. So we own every bit of this work. We stand behind it. We're using FLS and Hazen, which are some of the best. And John Marsden is our QP on this work, who is, you know, the Pope of metallurgy, as they call him. He wrote the book called the chemistry of gold extraction which every metallurgist has on their shelf.

17:50 So we're very pleased with those results. Again initiated the largest exploration program in over 10 years and really focused on going back to first principles and unlocking what we see is the potential for even higher value for our shareholders in the near term. And part of that taking a fresh look at Highcroft, We also see that this is our resource here, but the work that Alex and his team have been doing popped up the wild rose target chance school bus and Oscar is high priority true exploration targets and we have been grilling at Waldrose and Oscar. And again, I don't want to steal Alex's thunder. He'll talk a little bit more about that.

18:38 So we talk about this being an untold story of high crop because everybody knows what high crop was. Nobody really knows what it is and what it can be. And we are learning that and we are developing that and we are communicating that to the market. And that's just evidence of all the work that we did dating back to 22. And then in February, seeing these high grade intercepts even deeper in Vortex. And then in October, more high grade silver and yet the best hole ever in November followed up with drilled ourselves last week and a lot more to come. So now I'm going to turn it over to Alex so that he can walk through all the exciting stuff about the new drilling we've been doing.

19:24 Thanks Diane. I wanted to make a quick comment there. Your last slide is really great. It highlights the fact that in the summer of 2022, we kicked off a robust exploration program. And when I came in that summer, my goal was really to help unlock the value that we know exists there. This is an amazing deposit. There's incredible amount of metal in the ground and I wanted to be a part of that. What we're looking at these pictures here is from our recent drilling. These are from the November release that we put out.

20:10 And it shows the silver mineralization that we see in the zone. And you know, the bigger part of the story was kind of fun. Our geologists who are logging this, these RC chips, they were logging this as it was coming off the drill. And they immediately came in to my exploration manager, Justin, who I have to say, over the last 18 months, I've had the opportunity to build just a tremendous team these guys are really great but the geologists came in and they're like hey we're seeing something significant here And this is a pivotal point in this part of the story.

20:59 They're doing that gave us an opportunity to sit down and go, okay, what do we understand? What do we not understand about this part of brimstone?

21:09 And it allowed us to pivot our core drill and drill some core holes to give us some real good detail in there. In the core photo that you see at the bottom, it's a great demonstration of, you know, classic epithermal textures that we're seeing with some amazing silver mineralization. This little bit that you see here, this core photo was taken from an intercept over 4 meters that's 3,800 grams per ton silver. So when we're talking significant silver, we mean significant silver. So I want to give a little more detail on these 2 trends.

21:59 And I, you know, when we started getting the assays back and started evaluating this, it gave us a moment of pause. It's like, okay, well, where else are we seeing this high grade sort of mineralization? And so we sat down and evaluated all the data across the deposit. We put together great thickness maps and that really started driving this picture of these 2 trends. And what I like about this picture is it really demonstrates that, you know, here's the resource cone as we know it.

22:45 And we have drilling that's well below that resource cone and shows that we still have more work to do both at depth and along the strife of these 2 zones.

23:00 So as we start talking a little bit more about these trends, I want to give you a sense of where the new drilling is sitting. So this is a bird's eye view of the Highcroft pit. As we spin around and look to the east. Those 3 holes that you see under Brimstone there, those were the November drill holes. And if we transition to the to the next view,

23:31 spins around and gives us a view looking almost down the strike of this new trend that we're seeing in Brimstone. And I just want to give you a three-dimensional sense of how that drilling is oriented. These are the holes from our most recent press release. And again, just trying to give you the sense of that 3D orientation of those holes. So if we move to that next orientation, you're looking down, roughly down the strike, a little bit oblique, but it just gives that nice three-dimensional view of the orientation of this drilling and for me it's important that we understand how the drilling is related to the rest of that, this deposit.

24:26 So now if we move to the next slide there, thank you. This figure on the right is really important. It clearly demonstrates we have 2 very strong orientations. What's really important is that red shape that's in the middle there. Justin had the opportunity to build a great shell in leapfrog with all of the data greater than 70 grams per ton. What's important about that shell though is the average grade in that is 137 grams per ton of silver. So this is really showing great continuity.

25:12 We see it both in the vortex to camel trend and we see it also in the vortex to brimstone trend. Another very important part of this is it is demonstrating that it's open both to the northwest. Sorry, yeah, to the northwest for vortex to camel and along the northeast to to brimstone and southwest

25:56 along that that same strike. These 2 trends in in northern Nevada appear regularly. They're associated with big mineralized deposits across the area. And so this really gives us a lot of confidence in what we're doing. We're seeing this macro scale geology is really an important part. And it's an important part to understand the rest of the high crop story. So over the next year or the course of 2024, this is going to be a big focus of our exploration program. We're going to dedicate a lot of time to working this area. There's a lot of gaps and there's a lot of potential to fill

26:41 this in. Now I also want to give you a little bit of an update on our exploration outside the resource area and Diane, as you had mentioned earlier, we did acquire 3 patented claims. Newmont shared those patented claims anyhow down in the Rosebud area and with those patented claims came a significant amount of data. Our our claim package as a whole was already had heaps of targets in it that were that are all pretty exciting. But getting this data really helped us focus in what we did is we took the opportunity to develop a rating and ranking of all of these target areas that we've got.

27:35 I'm in a position where I have a very target rich environment, so

27:40 I needed to pare down and pick out what the best targets are. So we looked through data, data quality, etc. Just to try and define what these targets are and 4 came right up to the top and that's Wildrose, chance, the school bus and Oscar. And of those 4, we decided that our best information, best quality data, best understanding that we've got right now is wild rose and Oscar. So we're we focused in on those areas in 2023. We did some more geochemistry and soil sampling. We did some IP geophysics up in Wildrose and we did a magnetic survey down in OSCR.

28:33 We also had an opportunity to drill a few holes in wild rose in a couple holes down in Oscar. The results of that is still pending. We're still waiting for some assays on that. But all of the indications are these are 2 top targets that will remain

28:54 in our focus. We're going to continue putting in some attention to these areas, do a little more work in 2024 and beyond. This is a really exciting story for me as a geologist. This area is just an amazing district. The metal content in the resource area is just fascinating. So we're really excited to be able to have the opportunity to unlock this, the value of this deposit. Okay,

29:34 thank you, Alex. And we're going to have lots of opportunity to hear more from Alex with the questions that we're hoping everybody's going to be asking. So our milestones coming up for 2024, as Alex said, a big focus is this new Brimstone area and more drilling there finalizing the engineering studies and doing the trade-off analysis and you know looking at the results from Wildrose and Oscar and what is that telling us and then looking at development plans for the project. This is our capitalization and ownership. Everybody's probably well aware that Eric's brought in AMC Entertainment, our 2 largest shareholders. And these are just capitalization numbers with our cash position.

30:23 And just in summary, it is one of the world's largest gold and silver deposits and a tier 1 jurisdiction, highly leveraged to gold and silver prices, a lot of upside potential, which we've always talked about, but now we're actually able to give real concrete information and numbers to that upside potential. And we just think we have a long way to go on further defining that. Well developed in terms of our infrastructure and our permitting. And we are in the process of transitioning from the oxide material into the sulfide material and you've got a very committed passionate team working on this project. We do own a popcorn machine at Highcroft and so this is all of us raising our bags of popcorn. To our shareholders, we thank you very much for your support.

31:12 And I think that concludes our presentation and we will then take questions from the audience. Great, Alex, Diane, thank you so much for that presentation. Thanks everyone for submitting so many questions. If we don't get to your question today, rest assured, we'll make sure that the Highcroft team does get back to you. We'll try to get to as many as we can. Start with a couple questions that came over email.

31:36 Diane, kind of first up is an amalgamation of a number of questions that basically amount to when does mining begin at the IACRAF mine?

31:44 Okay. That seems to be the number 1 question we always get. I know a lot of you became shareholders when we were still processing ore off the leach pads and producing gold and silver and now we're transitioning into the next phase. Unfortunately, that work of transitioning in the sulfide phase was not previously completed. And so we are having to do that work. And engineering studies are very, very important. And it does take time, but we're nearing the completion of those engineering studies now. It's important because you don't want to tackle a world-class asset like this without fully understanding the exact proper grind size, the best method for generating the best cash flow for shareholders. Otherwise, and we've seen it too many times where you start up an operation prematurely

32:36 and unfortunately it gets shut down because the work up front wasn't done and we will never apologize for doing the good work up front. We have a history of doing that and I know it can be painful, but also remember that there is a lot of opportunity to create significant value in the share price long before operations continue. And our former company, Remarco, was certainly evidence of that. But when are we going to start mining operations? Well, we first have to get the feasibility, the prefeasibility work completed. Then there's about a 6 month period of detailed engineering. And then we don't know what the lead times are going to be for the mills. In some market conditions, you can get mills, you know, within 9 months. It was just 2 years ago it was taking 2 years to get delivery of those mills and we've all seen the issues with supply chains. We also have to make sure that the markets are there and that there is sufficient flows of money coming into the market in order to finance the purchase and construction of those mills.

33:39 The construction period will probably take about 18 months to 2 years. So we're a few years away from production once we make the production decision to move forward. Our goal right now, now that we're on this very high grade area of Brimstone, that delivers a lot more cash flow and revenues and value to our shareholders than starting very large with the low-grade deposit. It also means less capital, less expenditure up front, and much better returns for our shareholders. So we really want to take a look at that over the next few months as we continue to drill. As soon as we get our economics and our engineering studies out to the market, then we'll be able to put a better timeline together because those studies also include, you know, the lead times for mills. We'll be looking at that and cost of the mills and everything else. So I know that a lot of people are anxious to hear and I promise you there is nobody more anxious than this team to get going on the next phase of operations but we want to do it right because we want to do it right for our shareholders and generate the best value we can.

34:51 So it won't be long before we're able to put a timeline on that for all of you. Thanks, Tam. Next question that came in over email is really what's the next catalyst that's going to likely improve shareholder value or has potential to improve shareholder value?

35:07 I think the next catalyst is really this new high-grade silver system. Look, a lot of people have known about high-crop, very large, great location, low-grade. Low-grade means you have to build a massive operation plus 60,000 tons a day, high capital, and to get the economies of scale to process lower grade ore. With the work that we've been doing in this higher grade component that totally changes the perception of what I did that 15 million ounces of gold equivalent is not going anywhere it will always be there but if we can start less expensive lower capital better returns for our shareholders that is the smart move to make and so I think the more we develop out this high-grade system and demonstrate to the market that whatever you thought you knew about Highcroft you can put that out of your head.

36:03 It is identical to what we did at the Hale gold mine when we were with Remarco. And I hate to keep going back

36:08 and talking about that, but it is such a unique parallel to the Highcroft story. So there was an asset that everybody said was low grade. It was small. There was nothing else left. Company after company drilled it and never found anything. And yet we took a new view of the geology reinterpreted that geology and had a very very massive high grade discovery. And the market rewards you for that. And I think we're starting to see it. We know it. And the phone calls and emails that are coming in across the board from people now paying attention because

36:41 now we're demonstrating that this is not the same Highcroft. It's not your mother's Highcroft. Right. This is something new. This is a very unique story. And it still has so much more to go so I think the drilling news and getting the economics of the project out and determining the robustness of that is going to be the real value drivers for our share price and of course increasing commodity prices, but we don't have control over that. That's a bit more crystal ball, but I've got some questions from the chat. Ken asks what the earliest we could get the economic value of the project by way of an economic study? That economic study will be out at the end of the second quarter of this year.

37:27 Great. Thank you. MKS from the chat asks, you stated you'd start with the surface material. What do you see for a value of that surface material as you move to the richer areas? So we have on the existing resource itself, it is fairly homogeneous in terms of grade. We're just under half a gram of gold. And so but what we talk about the surface, it's all surface and it's all open pit mining. Although this new brimstone vortex area could be underground. In fact, it would be underground if we were to start there. But the surface mining as we transition from oxides into sulfides, it's homogeneous grade, but it's just a different processing technique for processing sulfides over oxides.

38:19 But the caveat there is we are seeing that as we go deeper in this system, as evidenced by Vortex, as evidenced by the Rosebud mine to the south, and as evidenced by our new drill results and new silver discovery at Brimstone, we are seeing higher grades and we're starting to see that classic epithermal system veining. Great, thank you. Roberto from the chat asks, why renounce to the unrestricted cash to pay back a debt that would only come due in 2027. The the unrestricted I'm sorry, maybe I didn't understand the question. Could you repeat that? Yeah, I'll just read it exactly as Roberto's written it.

39:04 He asks why renounce to the unrestricted cash to pay back a debt that would only come due in 2027. Renounce so I don't know that would be in relation to the recent news Diane. Okay the Sprott debt yes. So part of our goal and objective is to been to clean up the balance sheet. Look we inherited debt with this company. We would never take on debt for a company that is not yet cash flowing. That is big no, no rule number 1. You just don't do it. And yet we see companies doing it all the time right now in this market because it's the only way they can finance. But here we are. We've got this debt and we want to clean up the debt off our balance sheet. We had sufficient cash. We know we're sitting today with 66 million which is an enviable position.

39:55 Yes it was nice to have 107 million. And yes that debt wasn't due until May. But here's the thing with that debt. It was brought in as project financing debt and it comes with a lot of restrictions. So it restricts us from doing certain transactions, from doing certain drill programs. It restricts us in the way we spend our money. So our goal was twofold to reduce the debt on the balance sheet. And then Sprott has been wonderful to work with. And even though we left a balance of $15 million, we are now free of those restrictions so that we can do these other things at the project.

40:42 Debtors always want to restrict you from spending your money because they want to make sure they get paid back when the maturity comes due. And so now we have a lot more control over what we do at the project. At the same time, we have reduced the debt on the balance sheet and we're going to continue to improve our balance sheet. Great, thank you. As a 2 part question from Daniel, first, but he goes into some context. He notes that he helped facilitate the sale of Remarco, propelling from 20 million to the value of a billion, billion plus, and he notes that Remarco had 12,000 acres. Meanwhile, Highcroft to 72,000 acres plus. So he's wondering if you see a similar value addition coming to Highcroft, especially with the latest findings of higher grade silver and gold. We absolutely do.

41:28 At Remarco, it was changing the thinking by the market of what they thought the Hale goldmine was and what we demonstrated that potential truly could be. And it made it very attractive as a takeover target. At Highcroft, we are similarly changing thinking of what people have always known high-croft to be, but what is true potential? And I hear it all the time in the market before this discovery. Well, many companies have been through high-croft and they've done drilling. So if there was something more out there, they might've found it. Well, it's not that they didn't do any drilling, but it was the way in which they drilled. It was not understanding the system and what was controlling the mineralization and certainly what was controlling the high-grade silver or high-grade in general. So I do see the same value drivers. Now, the uniqueness about Remarco too is when we were changing the perception and delivering this very high grade phenomenal results over and over and over with multiple best holes ever drilled. We also have a rising gold market.

42:32 It got it touched 2000. So now let's look at Highcroft in the market we're in right now. We see gold over 2000. So it's phenomenal. We are we have yet to start seeing a lot of the new inflows of money coming into the sector particularly from the generalist funds and when they step in and we do believe and people much smarter than me believe that 2024 is setting up very nicely for that and we can talk about the reasons why if anybody's interested, but when that money comes flowing in it propels you know all stocks and so based on the work we're doing based on these results which are resonating extremely well in the market then you get the new inflows of money in these higher gold and silver price environments.

43:20 And then we are looking very attractive as a home for those monies for people to invest. And then that helps to propel the stock. So I see so many parallels between this story and the Remarco story. Great, thanks. Second part of that question, this is based on your industry expertise. Do institutional investors typically invest before drilling campaigns or afterwards? It all depends. They can invest before if they are following a team that has a demonstrated track record and if the team has done enough work to make them feel confident that those drill targets are well thought out and advanced enough that there's a high probability of good return.

44:12 Others, and it also depends on a lot of other factors, what their other portfolios are doing, what market conditions are doing. Others would rather pay a little more for less risk. So what what you do see though is and the same thing at Remarco you know people didn't invest for those first few holes we put out once we start demonstrating this thing is getting bigger and bigger, then they came in with a, with a vengeance. And I think you're seeing this here at High Crop, we're getting requests for so many meetings, really wanting to hear from Alex and understand more about this system. So sometimes it's a little bit of, I'll pay a little bit more for less risk and I want to see what the next few holes. So a lot of people were waiting on our results we put out yesterday. They were very well received. Some may wait until the next round comes out And I don't know the next few weeks or whatever the last holes come in, but it could go both ways.

45:09 Great, thanks. Switching gears a little onto future exploration. What impact would a discovery outside of the known resource have and how likely do you think that is? That I'm going to kick over to Alex. Even though I like to be a biologist every now and then. That's a great question. 1 that we ask ourselves every day basically, you know, there's a lot goes into that discovery. We have to gather a lot of data. Like I had mentioned earlier, it's, you know, first going through that round of geochemistry understanding what the soil samples are telling you how did that compare to the geophysics getting getting that geophysics in is is critical it's the most efficient use of your money for that first look into the ground and grounded. There's a lot of work that really helps us generate what these targets are. It's a methodical, detailed evaluation of every bit of data that comes through and understanding it, how it relates to all of the other pieces of data. So it takes a long time to really generate a valuable target. And we're taking every opportunity we can to

46:42 make sure that we're taking an appropriate approach to getting that discovery made. The area is probably one of the most well endowed areas in northwestern Nevada. So the likelihood of finding something I think is quite high. My 2 favorite spots are definitely Wildrose and Oscar targets. There's great information there that gives us good hope for something. It's a story yet to come. So I'm excited about it. Thanks, Alex. In the interest of time, I'm going to combine a number of questions I see in the chat with some questions that came in over email. The basic idea of them is, will I crops remaining 66 million cash on hand be enough to get us through feasibility study and build install those mills.

47:40 It's certainly enough to get us through the pre feasibility work and starting out on that feasibility study. And you know this gives us runway of several years. The fortunate thing is while we will be employing third party groups, we still have a lot of very talented individuals internally that have. One of our studies is his 14th mind to start up and he's worked all over the world. So we have a lot of ability to do a lot of this work, helping the engineering firms along in their understanding of what they're doing at Microsoft. So it will get us several years down the road. Certainly we can do a feasibility study, but that counts. And so we are mindful of the shortcomings for mindful inclusion.

48:32 And we want to be, the nice thing is a lot of people don't need money to... Sorry I just want to chime in here Diane it's a little muffled when you're talking can you... Oh sorry. There you go. Okay so what happened? We want to hear every last word come on. I know. You missed. Anyway so we're mindful of dilution we don't have a need for raising any additional funds right now. With respect to location How close are you to the McDermott Caldera and you anticipate any benefit from the recent news of that area. I can't speak to any of their news per se distance wise we're about 85 miles just southwest of actually south southwest of the McDermott Caldera.

49:34 Great thanks. This combines a couple questions but really people want to know if the infrastructure Highcroft already has on site, if it's optimal for processing these new high-grade silver discoveries, and if not, what else is needed to get those into production? That's an excellent question. So this equipment, a lot of it has been refurbished over the years and we keep it exercised. So the crushers run, I think once a week we're running them. We keep everything exercised and in good shape. So this equipment, the three-stage crushing, the lab, the Merrill Crow plant, we just completely upgraded our lab with all new state-of-the-art equipment there. So all of that is in great shape. When we process the higher grades, We are clearly not going to be bleaching those. Those are sulfide ores and they're going to be going through a milling operation. So the mills and the flotation cells for that operation for all the sulfides, which is the predominance of the resource of my crop as it stands today, That will be built new, but we will need the crushing and all of that, but we will be building the next component for the sulfide work.

50:44 Great. Ken asks, have you given any thought to acquiring a producer, taking advantage of depressed equity, using your great cash position to get cash flow going? We have. We are very active in the M&A space and have looked at many, many opportunities because we think that is good value for our shareholders that you know we've got a plug-and-play team of very talented operations people and so we could take on a producing asset combine their teams with our teams and that would help generate cash flow while we're going through the development of the next phase of operations. We're also very mindful of what those opportunities look like. We want good safe jurisdictions and things where you know we know we can add value to the shareholders and similarly things that are not burdened by a significant amount of debt that impact and take away generating value for the shareholders but yes very actively.

51:51 It appears as though we've we've lost the host honestly what is going on with technology these days it's been a week of technological issues left right and center so I'll step in here no problem. You know in the interest of time we'll pose maybe one more question and and then we can wrap up and And for those questions that we weren't able to get to, we will follow up with answers to those questions via email as well. So here's a question for Alex, a good way to wrap up. These new developments are certainly exciting. Can Alex provide an indication of how much you're aiming to drill on these targets in the next 12 to 18 months? Well, just starting off with the first 6 months of the year, we're planning about 12,000 feet of core drilling in the silver zone between camel vortex and vortex to brimstone.

52:55 So that those 2 trends are a high value target for us. That is only just beginning. Across the next 18 months to 2 years. There's a lot of work that needs to be done in there. We have, we've got a lot of things to, to pin down more geochemistry in the area. We need to get a better understanding of the structural paragenesis of this new trend. So there's a heap of work going to come over the next 2 years to include drilling. Excellent. Diane, do you want to finish off with anything, to put a point on that and close out this excellent, excellent webinar we've had today?

53:43 Well, I think how I would close out on Alex's last comment was, look, to spend a lot of money in doing drilling to get more of the same low grade which is what we you know what is doesn't really add value to our shareholders because the resources already have 15 plus year mind life But on this new discovery on this high grade understanding these higher grades, longer intercepts, the deeper you go, we don't know what else is going on down there. And we are certainly going to support that drill program because as long as we're delivering results, we're adding significant value to those assets that adds value to our shareholders and we will keep doing that and support them. That is the right thing to do.

54:30 So we're real excited about it. I mean, I don't even know how to share with you all the excitement that everybody has at site with Alex's team and all of us. This is really cool stuff. And the fact that we've been able to achieve this, and just being the new management is really remarkable in our space. You could be spending a decade. It could still be there, but it could be a long time. And that is why I started the presentation with it all goes back to the team. It is the team is the asset you're investing in to deliver the value for shareholders. So I just wanted to say thank you for being here with us. We're going to be doing a lot of marketing on the road. Please email us if you have any questions. Call us. We're always here to answer your questions.

55:25 Thank you very much, Diane and Alex, and apologies, the internet gods frowned on me, it looks like for a minute, it does happen. But thanks everyone who joined us from across the world looks like. So really appreciate everybody joining in. I know we didn't get a chance to get to every question or if you're like me and you think of the perfect question right after the webinar ends, please do reach out. I'll make sure that a Highcroft representative gets in touch with you very soon. And the replay will be available if you'd like to share it with your friends, family, and peers by tomorrow morning. So keep an eye out for that as well.