Invest Yukon: Exploration 2020 Series (Part 3)

0:15 Thanks for tuning in. This is the third part of our Explore UConn series this month. So, 2 great panels and introductions to companies in the previous weeks. This week should be no different. We've got a very interesting lineup for everybody today. Before we get started, quick introduction for myself. I am Trevor Hall. I'm the host of the Mining Stock Daily Podcast. You can find us on 12 different podcast networks throughout the internet. We publish pre-market news briefing typically every morning Monday through Thursday through the mineral exploration news and we get that out about an hour before the market opens And then throughout the day we also conduct some corporate commentary, corporate updates, analyst news throughout the junior and mineral exploration sector.

1:12 And it's been a wild ride and really happy to provide that content to our listeners. You can find it on Spotify, iTunes, even Amazon Alexa, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm sure you can find mining stock daily. One more quick, shameless plug for myself, cause I'm known to do that from time to time. We have shirts, Pet Rock T-shirts. You can find it on our Shopify account. They are $25 per shirt. The men's larges and extra larges are Wendling and inventory. Go figure. Plenty of small, mediums, women's cuts, and also children's sizes. If you are so interested in picking up a gift for your loved ones as we approach the fall and holiday season.

2:03 Okay, that's enough for me. I am really looking forward to this panel for a number of reasons. I've known this group for a couple years now. I had the privilege of visiting them up in the Yukon last summer. We are going to take a trip to the Keno Hill area outside of Mayo Yukon and these are 3 projects fairly close proximity to 1 another, lots of conversation back and forth. Not only do we have Victoria Gold on, which is the Yukon's newest operating mine, we also have Alexka Resources and their Keno Hill project, which looks to be the next great Yukon operating mine here shortly.

2:52 And nestled in between the 2, we have one of the most

2:57 speculative great exploration plays out of the Yukon. So this is all in the very close proximity. That exploration is Banyan Gold. So the way it's going to work, if you have a question for any of the presenters, you can see the public chat there on the right, type in your question. I will try to get them answered after we do the introductions and have a conversation with our listeners through that. Please note there will probably be some forward-looking statements made. We are not held accountable for that. You know you see that slide on every presentation, but again very excited to have this panel. We are going to start out with Clint Nauman from Alexco Resources. Alexco trades on the NYSE and the TSX with the symbol AXU.

3:47 And he joins us from beautiful New Zealand. So I hope you've had enough coffee and Clint, take it away. Yeah, thanks Trevor. And thank you everybody for attending today. So this discussion today is primarily exploration oriented so I'm going to sort of focus on that aspect of Keno Hill. So you know we bought Keno Hill at a bankruptcy way back in 2006 And really the primary asset at Keno Hill at that time was the geological and exploration database. The district of course is 15, 20 kilometers long, 10, 15 kilometers wide.

4:35 It encompasses a group of rocks that have been hugely productive since the early 1900s. Part and parcel of what we bought was all of the old exploration data, which comprised about 128,000 meters of diamond drilling and about 16,000 meters of overburdened drill holes, or 16,000 overburdened drill holes, sorry, comprising more than 500,000 meters of overburdened work. And it's through the combination of all that distillation and collation of all those materials that we have been able to sort of boil down, you know, the exploration aspects and upside at Keno Hill, which of course has resulted in a couple of, or several very significant discoveries.

5:28 So since we've been there, we've drilled about 700 holes coming up on 200,000 meters now. 400 of those have been underground holes and we've made 2 major discoveries, the Flaming Moth deposit and the Birmingham deposit. And at the end of the day, In all categories, we have about 74 million ounces of silver, indicated resource including reserves

5:53 in the district, and the average grade of that hard rock resource is right in the 500,600 gram type range. Then on top of that, we have another 24 million odd ounces of, or 24 or more million ounces of inferred material. So in all categories, and careful to say in all categories here, more than 100 million ounces have been added to the inventory at Keno Hills since we arrived in 2006. So the thing that, I guess the point that I'm going to try and make here is that as a result of all of that work, of these 2 major discoveries we've more recently made, the most important one is the Birmingham deposit.

6:39 Now the Birmingham deposit was a blind discovery, you know, just 2 or 3 years ago. It now comprises an indicator category about 1.1 million tons of mineralized material with an average grade of 930 grams per tonne silver, along with 3 to 4% lead and zinc. So hugely valuable rock. And from that, the reserve, the probable reserve, which is in our current mine plan and is currently being developed, is about 350 to 400,000 tons of that material, with an average diluted grade

7:18 of 970 grams per tonne silver. So this Birmingham deposit in all categories has more than 40 million ounces now. It is the largest discovery that we've made, and it's open. And it's especially open at depth. And so our 2020 exploration program is targeted to see whether or not this Birmingham deposit, which has about 40 million ounces in all categories, is actually a much larger deposit. And so we're just, we're filling 4,200 meters at the present time, got a couple of drills working, and we're drilling about 200 meters below the existing resource and along a strike length of about 600 meters. So we have a fairly big window or box down there of untested material that we are currently drilling and we would expect to complete that program in probably the next 6 weeks or so, 6 to 8 weeks.

8:28 And whether or not we continue to drill there is up in the air. We're not limited to, we're not saying we're only going to drill 4,200 meters. That just happens to be the array of drilling that we're going to do in 2020 that's going to give us an indication as to whether this Birmingham, this very high-grade Birmingham deposit is actually a much bigger deposit. One other quick point is that even if we make a discovery

8:53 at depth under this deposit, it will not change the mine plan. The mine plan is very high-grade, the material is very close to the surface, and there's no way that this deeper material would displace that. Thanks, Clint. Yeah, thank you. It's good to see you have a little bit of decent grade there, so appreciate that.

9:15 Alright, from Keno Hill we take the Silver Trail Highway. To Banyan Gold and the CEO Tara Christie. Thank you Trevor. So this is a very exciting year for Banyan. We are able to execute this year the largest drill program we've ever been able to do. For us, it started in May when we put out that new resource of over 900,000 ounces

9:43 between our airstrip and power line deposits. Power line was a brand new exploration discovery in 2018, which in the end of 2018 and in the course of a short year, we've already put together a new resource on it, over 129,000 ounces at 0.61. So our project, we're right on that junction of the highway between where you go to, to Alexco and then you turn and go down the McQuiston Road, as you said, and out to Victoria Gold. We also envision that this is an open pit, potentially heap leach mineable deposit. To date, we've drilled over 5,000 metres or 25 holes between Airstrip and Powerline. We know Airstrip's open to the east and the west and at depth. We know Powerline is open in all directions.

10:29 We've stepped out to try and see how far we can follow that mineralization in our latest holes. We put out our first set of exploration results on airstrip this week, 116 meters of 0.75 holes with grades up to 19.5 grams. So our geological model for there is continuing to prove out, and we're going to continue over the course of this season stepping out. We plan to target around 10,000 meters in total drilling,

10:57 drilling into the late fall. We're about to move over to our Oryx Hill target. And what's really exciting about the models that we developed for Airstrip and Powerline is we think they're more broadly applicable on the property and they've really given us a treasure map for where to do exploration on the property. So we're excited this year. We're also starting to do all those other key activities like metallurgical drilling and work to start to understand recoveries. We're doing another LIDAR survey to cover the rest of our property. We'll be doing some IP surveys and soil sampling because our property really is very under explored.

11:31 Orixum and Oquest, the 2 properties on Ormac are 92 square kilometers. We think that there's about 1% of it that's been explored to date in terms of drilling and real exploration. We're going to be moving to our Oryx Hill target, which has known gold grades up to 8 grams. It's a 10 kilometer gold and arsenic anomaly. And we really think that this year is a game changer for Banyan.

11:59 All right, Thank you, Tara. And then moving from Banyan, down the McQuiston Road is Victoria Gold and their CEO, John McConnell. John, take it away. Yeah, thanks, Trevor. Good afternoon, everyone.

12:15 You know, It really is nice to be pouring Gold in this high Gold price environment, but there's something about exploration that really gets all of us excited. I think you can hear that from Clint and Tara as well. Having a mine in production is great. This is the first year we're self-funding. We don't have to go out and raise money to do exploration. We've got a big program. We're focused on an area called Nugget. It's another large granodiorite intrusive, very similar characteristics to the eagle granodiorite intrusive.

13:02 And it's about 13 kilometers out to the east. May even be closer to Alexco than it is to Eagle. We're, we've got 2 drills running now. 0.333 1 will start up this weekend. That isn't the way we planned it.

13:23 We had thought this year would be 1 drill running for 2 or 3 months. But because of what we're seeing, we're adding drills so that we get a better idea of what's going on there. Our budget is roughly $5M. That probably is going up as we speak because of adding more drills. We'll drill something like 15,000m. The other thing we like as an exploration tool is trenching. We do a lot of trenching because you can see the structural geology that way. And much of this part of the Yukon was never glaciated, so you can put in trenches and they're very valuable.

14:08 So yeah, watch for lots of news flow coming out of the Nugget-Raven area out to the east this year. Thanks, John. Victoria Gold trades on the TSX with the symbol VGCX. John, I know this is an exploration series, but you're obviously producing gold. That's the idea. That's why people go out and explore is to try to become profitable and produce

14:37 Valuable products that the world wants and needs and Demands. Can you comment a little bit on how the production is going?

14:47 And You know, how does how the financials looking up this first full year? We declared commercial production on July 1st. We're still tweaking the plant and getting things running properly, but I fully expect by the end of the year we'll be at full production, which I'll just remind people that's just over 200,000oz of Gold per year at an all-in sustaining cost of less than 800g per ounce. And we're on target for that. So it's coming together very nicely. You know, we ship gold every week. The guys are pouring 3 days a week. So, the gold's coming out of the ground.

15:34 Very good. In taking that same kind of idea over to Clint, Clint you and I have chatted previously the Lusanne curve is absolutely real.

15:46 You announced that you will be going into most likely production within Q4, but as you're kind of building into that situation, the nice thing is you do have exploration work, so you can kind of mitigate the effects of what that curve really does. Can you kind of describe to us how you are balancing both the exploration

16:07 and the construction and all the engineering of the mine?

16:13 Oh, you got to unmute yourself, Clint, sorry. Sorry about that. So good question. Yeah, so we are actively scaling up as we speak. We are hiring and securing workforce, professional and operators. We're at about 100 people right now. We're moving forward with a capital development, both surface and underground, to put these mines into production. Our production profile, once we get going, is going to be a run rate will be 4 million ounces of silver per year, with a significant amount of lead and zinc also.

17:00 And we will be producing the first concentrate for sale out of Keno Hill in the fourth quarter of this year. So just in a couple of 3 months. At this point, all of The capital work that is ongoing is on schedule, nothing to indicate

17:21 that we need to deviate from that particular plan. The initial ore will come from the Balquino mine where there were long-haul blocks that were already in inventory. We are underground dropping those blocks as we speak. We have started the, restarted the drive to the ore first levels of production at the Flamin' Moth deposit. And then next month we'll start at Birmingham. None of that work is interfering with exploration, although it is, you know, there's a strong collaboration between our exploration group and our operating group in terms of providing services and expertise on the geology and exploration side as we go through this process. So, you know, from the operations perspective, it's very busy, as I'm sure Tara knows, because she sits, the Banyan property sits right at the intersection of the roads going to Keno Hill and to Victoria.

18:26 And the delivery of equipment and everything else is on schedule for production in the fourth quarter of this year.

18:34 Tara, you've watched these 2 colleagues build mines. Is it easier to build a mine or discover a mine? Oh, I'm going to stick to what I'm good at, and that's finding gold. I know a couple of builders and they're my 2 largest shareholders and they're on this webinar with me. They both built heap leach mines and we really appreciate their support and we're really lucky to be able to get their experience from everything from metallurgy to geology and structure. It's really helping us guide our program. So it's nice to have that collaboration with our 2 neighbors. And certainly they help us logistically too. Every once in a while, we're short a core cutter or something like that. And, You know, Lexco lets us use some of their camp facilities. And so it's a great collaboration that we have with them. And that technical alliance is really valuable and has helped us immensely over the years, including this year, to really maximize our exploration dollars.

19:33 In case you didn't pick it up, I am not one of those large shareholders. So that narrows it down, doesn't it?

19:41 Tara, because you're kind of sandwiched in between these 2 projects, I'm just curious about the geology of what you have found on your properties. Does it maybe lean more towards similar to what Victoria Gold has, or have you been able to, is there similarities to Keno Hill as well? I'm just kind of curious here. So, you know, structurally,

20:06 you know, we've got a lot of the same trending structures as I see through Keno Hill, and we see a little bit of the silver mineralization, which is indicative of, you know, We haven't really chased after any of the little bits of silver that we found at this point, but really we are the same age of mineralization as Victoria Gold. We know we have multiple phases of gold mineralization, which I believe Victoria Gold does as well. There are lots of similarities And that actually is why getting technical expertise from both Victoria and Alexco is so valuable because there are a lot of similar, we're right next door, understanding Alexco has done a tremendous job of actually mapping the geology and advancing our understanding of what's there from what was previously put out from the Yukon government. They've really spent the time on the ground and that's hugely valuable as well.

21:00 So, long answer. Yeah, no problem. And still sticking with you, can you run us back this latest drill result? And I wonder if it's a little bit more indicative of what we might be able to see more of as we get drill results out.

21:15 It was 0.75 grams per ton gold over a very wide interval, over 116 meters. Is this the similar type of mineralization you expect to see or there be opportunities for maybe higher grade and smaller intervals? Well, you know, we're trying to find higher grade. There absolutely is the potential for some higher grade and over shorter intervals. We found that in our results, but we continue to target finding those broad intervals to really add ounces. We're also focusing on where we know the pit, the conceptual pit, with the resource is located so that we can infill in previously undrilled areas, because that also will help us advance this project and build that resource up quicker.

22:02 We're being very measured and scientific in how we drill. You know, we step out, we look what mineralization we have. Sometimes we wait for results before we step out again so that we're actually following the mineralization. And that's really what guides our exploration. Do we expect we'll find more? Yes, we're gonna keep drilling. We're gonna go back to Airstrip again. Once we get all the results in and we're completed at Airstrip and a couple other targets that we wanna to drill. You know, we did the first phase at Powerline.

22:32 You know, we haven't got results back yet, but we'll also be going back to power line to continue to look for those broad intervals. Power line, as you know, was higher grade. It was a 0.61 with, you know, that grade up to 48 grams over 0.4 meters. So we are excited about the higher potential at the power line zone, airstrip we seem to have those bigger, thicker package rocks.

22:55 John, I mean, you obviously seen the drill returns that Banyan's been able to publish to the market. Similarities to what you remember seeing from your property during the exploration times?

23:10 I think Banyan is where we were 10 years ago. You've got something and now you've got to drill it off and then move to the next step of development. Okay. Clint, I hate to bring up same conversation, we've got a different audience. You got that water license, that was a big deal. And we've had continuing discussion about policy work within the territory. But can you give some comment? It sounds like the

23:43 Yukon government is really working on streamlining some of the policies that are really going to be beneficial for exploration and mine development up there. Yeah, you know, there's people that are much more, you know, schooled in the details of the policy discussions than I am. I can just tell you that from Alexco's experience, in order to get this final water license or the renewal actually of our original water license, it took 2.5 years. And I think that even the government, and as we have talked, recognizes that that's not a sustainable

24:26 process. That simply to renew a water license should not take that period of time. So there is a lot of work going on, on the policy side. I really don't want to elaborate on it, but there is a very keen interest in the government, in the various departments to try and improve

24:50 upon the permitting process that's currently underway. The current is in place in the Yukon, both on the environmental assessment side of the permitting process as well as on the licensing and authorization side. I mean it's a big beast here and and hopefully they'll make some you know significant progress. I mean the conversations I've had and I have heard it really sounds like the government is looking for opportunities to improve wherever it needs to be improved. And so that's always beneficial. I don't get a whole lot of conversation like that here in the United States very often. So kudos to the Yukon.

25:38 You know, John, I was wondering, I thought it might be interesting. You've obviously built a mine. You've explored, you discovered, and you built a mine. And you have 2 colleagues here who you've known really well for quite a while. But what kind of advice, given the experience you've had over the last 10 years, what kind of advice would you give not only Clinton Terra, but anybody else up in the Yukon when it comes to getting to that point where you need to decide if you're going into construction or not. Maybe it's about financing, maybe it's about permitting. You kind of take the reins with this and let us know what you learned.

26:17 My advice is become a used car salesman, far less of a headache. You know, it's really been a journey. You know, we started down this road back in 2009. And, you know, so 11 years of development, probably close to $150M. That's where most juniors run into the wall, getting the money to do the proper development. It's nice in the early days when you're drilling some holes, but then when it comes to doing metallurgical test work and infill drilling, it's pretty boring to the market. Your share price suffers and you hit a wall in terms of being able to finance.

27:07 I think for us, we're in the North and people look at a 0.7g deposit and everybody's concerned. What they forget is there's more,

27:21 it's great. You've got to look at strip ratio. You've got to look at recoveries in terms of metallurgy. We always knew Eagle would be a very successful mine once it was up and running.

27:40 Even though we're cash-flowing like crazy, we still have people question the grade. Your questions were around Tara, what can you do to find higher grade? She doesn't need higher grade. The grade that she's finding is exactly what Eagle is. And being, I don't think there's been any studies

28:07 looking at the orientation of the deposit, but it's right on surface, so I'll assume the strip ratio will be low.

28:20 Tara, we did have a question about any sort of permitting that you're undertaking for your project and what you need to do if you're set for the time or what type of permits will you need to take care of? Sure, so we have another 8 years left on our class 4 mining land use permit that we have. And it's a pretty robust permit, which will allow us to probably carry out all the exploration that we need for that. It has all road building. We anticipated that when we first acquired the property and put together a very robust permit. There'll be little things that come up from time to time, secondary permits or amendments, And we're very knowledgeable about the permitting process, so I don't anticipate that being a problem.

29:06 The other really important thing, and I have to give thanks to both Clint and John for the work that they've done in the community and the relationships they've built. We've worked hard to develop our own relationships, and of course, that's a really important part of permitting is communication with communities and making sure that you are talking to them as you're doing that permitting. So that's something that we'll be doing but we don't anticipate any major challenges in that regard.

29:32 We have to submit preseason reports when we change our program. We've done that and we've paid our security for this year to increase our program. So we're really in a good position in that. Very good. Clint, Here's your warning to take yourself off mute while I ask you the next question. We've, we've had a couple of guests on

29:52 this, exploration Yukon, sessions this month that, you share borders with, metallic was on last week, actually, very excited. I mean, it's almost seems like Alex go. I mean the Keno hill jurisdiction has always been a hot place for silver exploration, right? But, a lot of people have been following in your footsteps there at Alexco. Can you comment on the excitement of continued exploration in your back door? And what do you see potential to be for silver exploration and production within this small area of the Yukon you see in the future?

30:39 Yeah, well, you know, they're loaded questions, of course. Of course. You know, I think the thing to keep in mind here is, although it's not geologically correct, you have a very significant metallogenic district here. You've got 100 million ounces of silver sitting at Keno Hill. You've got 2, 3, plus 4 million ounces, or 2, 3 plus million ounces of gold sitting over in Victoria right next door. You've got banyan nestled in the middle there, in rocks that are actually a little younger than the silver mineralization, in which the silver mineralization occurs at Keno Hill.

31:30 So there is an entire district here. And if there's one thing that, or, you know, a metallogenic district, one thing that really, you know, that really resonates, you know, with me is that metal budget. I mean, there are not too many places in the world where you can find this type of mineralization over tens of miles or tens of kilometers and have an inventory and a wealth that is present here. Now, in terms of the future for silver, nobody really knows where the silver's coming from. We certainly have no idea. We have some suspicions. We have some pathfinders, if you like, that would lead us to believe that the central area that is the emanating focus for the fluids that form these deposits is within the Keno Hill package. We don't know exactly where that is. We do see indications of higher temperature fluids, silver bearing fluids, the deeper we drill in some parts of the district.

32:40 And so it, you know, the whole thing just gives you the impression that, you know, there'll be numerous discoveries made in this metallogenic district, both on the gold side and on the silver side. And that's one of the reasons that we are, you know, very, hopefully the most enthusiastic investors in Banyan. We recognized the Banyan target some time ago, but knew that, you know, we just didn't have a timeline to get to it that made any sense. So the best thing to do was to, you know, was to get together with other people, in this case with Victoria, and put that land package together and get an independent company working on it. And it's paid off.

33:27 So those types of opportunities, I think, abound in this district, And that's why it's attracting so much material. So huge district, lots of metal, lots of exploration upside, surfaces hardly been scratched in my view. You mentioned that, you know, further advancement or addition to the resources through exploration at Birmingham won't necessarily change your mine plan, but is your mill set up for expansion if necessary at any time? Yeah, so we are adding extra grinding capacity, putting this mill back in production, also filtration capacity. We have a standard conventional flotation mill. It's all pretty simple, straightforward stuff. It has lots of upside nameplates, 400 tons per day.

34:20 That's our initial throughput target that we'll reach in the first quarter of next year. And with these other modifications we're making, that mill's probably good for 600 tons per day without further, you know, without further modification. But I sort of talk in my own book here, as you and I have talked, Trevor. I mean, you've got a district, you have a large and expanding civil resource. We're mining that at 400 tons a day from a couple of deposits underground. We've got 4 or 5 of those types of deposits that lend themselves to that activity. And 400 tons a day is not the right long-term capacity to be operating this district at. And so our job is to try and figure out over time, over this next 5678 years, just what kind of capacity should this district be operated at to optimize, you know, the entire process and production.

35:19 Tara, you're a pure exploration player, but can you kind of expand on the opportunities for exploration throughout the entire district, you know, from all angles and all the other companies that are in the area? Well, you know, as Clint said, it's a very large mineralizing system that created what we have at Alexco and at Victoria and what we're seeing on Banyan. I personally believe the Yukon generally is under explored and we're going to make a lot of discoveries. The Mayo Mining District in particular, we finally have a real light on it. So I think there will be new discoveries in our area. I don't know where they'll be. I've kind of had my head down and working pretty focused on what we have to do, but I will start looking around and seeing what everyone else is doing now that, you know, we were active early too, and, you know, Victoria and Alexco were there, but there weren't a lot of other people in June when we started, and now that we're ramping up to really continue through the fall, we've been pretty focused on that, and all the other aspects of, you know, that we're doing in environmental baseline, the metallurgical work. So that's all been mostly my focus.

36:27 Yeah. John, I've got to assume it's been pretty exciting to see the trends flow through the district in all sorts of exploration development. And you know, as you know, one of the founding people, somebody actually built the mine there. What's your, you know, What goes through your head when you see more projects continue to push forward and develop into something really meaningful and valuable for shareholders? Yeah, I think Banyan is a good example, but there's others in the district and having their exploring and apply their expertise to the district is great. We're there and established and I'd love to have other people spending money to find the next one. All right.

37:20 Here's a question for both Clint and John coming from one of our viewers. How does Alexa and Victoria view Banyan's progress this last year and How has the bull market of 2020 affected the Mayo Mining District? I'll go first. I think Banyan has been a 10-bagger already. I've made lots of new friends because I told people 6 months ago they should buy Banyan at 5 cents. But I don't think Banyan has changed the interest in the area. I think Victoria and Alexco have changed the interest in the area.

38:12 Yeah, I would tend to agree with that. I mean, Banyan has been a huge success for Banyan shareholders and also for Alexco shareholders. We both, Victoria and Alexco, have significant positions, equity positions in Banyan for a very good reason. And that is that we both recognize the opportunity there. So I mean, I think that I do think that the Banyan discovery will actually attract more gold exploration into the area as people start to sort of unravel the geology and know specifically where to be looking for these types of gold deposits versus silver deposits.

38:58 So I think it's all good. We are hugely happy. Terra has survived through a nuclear winter here in terms of continuing to push forward with this project and our hat is off to her for sure. And like John says, the more people that are working in this district, the happier we are. You know, that it can only help the Mayo Mining District and the Yukon, you know, in total, if we can attract more explorers, you know, into this into this area. And more female explorers and CEOs, if I might add. Tara, you are one of the strongest women in this industry I've ever met, but you're also one of the few CEOs in mineral exploration.

39:50 And I know I've asked you this before in an interview on the podcast, but for this sake, can you comment on, you know, bringing more women into this industry, maybe even working in the Yukon and really how that could improve things all around? Well, I'm a big champion of women in mining, and mining is a really broad field. There's so much that you can do that I think it really gives lots of opportunity for women. I know both Clint and John are also big champions, And if you look at their crews, they have lots of women in various roles, all the way up to senior roles. So, you know, it is a great business. It's been a learning curve being a CEO of a public company, especially through some of the challenging years. But, you know, you learn something new every day and it makes you stronger and helps you really advance your company or project. I think I'm well positioned now to know where to take Banyan.

40:43 And that really has been because I've had great mentors and that's a message that you know we need to get out is that more people need to mentor our strong, smart, capable women to get them up to the senior roles because it's not something that there's no course on how to take on a senior role or how to be a CEO. So, and we're seeing that. There are quite a few women involved in the Yukon mining business and exploration business that are in more and more senior roles. So it's coming. And that's been a great career for me. So yeah, I felt very supported. Can we talk, John, can we highlight the exploration work out of Victoria? Real quick, we got a few minutes left for everybody. So try to get this thing wrapped up here in 510 minutes.

41:32 But the exploration work with Victoria, you kind of hit on it in your opening, dialogue. You know, there has been some talk of, the grade and you mentioned the grade about 0.65 grams per ton, but obviously there's a lot of it. Is that something similar? You, you are looking to find more of in this exploration? You have any reason to believe there might be higher grade? Just walk us through this. You know, we've been really focused on EGLE for the last 10 years. It's only the last 2 years we've started to step out from Eagle and look at the regional potential. We did an airborne geophysics survey 3-years ago, followed that up with ground geophysics and ground geochem and I think we have 13 targets on the greater Dublin Gulch claim block now.

42:26 Nugget was our first priority because the granodioride intrusive, as I said earlier, has very similar characteristics to the eagle intrusive, which is different than most of the intrusives. It's actually a mag low as opposed to a mag high. So we got out there, we built a road out to Nugget last summer, we did some trenching, and lo and behold, we got a new discovery called Raven. One of the first trenches, I think it was 3.5 grams over 135 meters. We had hoped to get boots on the ground in April of this year, but COVID delayed that and we didn't get started with the exploration program until first week of July.

43:18 But as I say, we've wrapped it up very quickly and we've got 2 25-person camps, 1 at Raven itself and 1 a little ways away at the Lynx property and we'll have 3 drills running as of this weekend. So, you know, it's gonna be a good year. Very good. And John, there was a question from the audience that, for you, how will the rolling off of gold hedges increase cashflow from operations in 2021 using current gold prices in the future curve? I don't have an exact number on that, but we've hedged less than 25% of our production this year and next year, and then there are no further hedges.

44:14 No further hedging is planned. Sure. Well, if we continue to be in this bull market, this you know long-term bull market, then things should pan out pretty good. Tara, can you tell us about Newsflow with some of the drilling news that Bannon will be publishing here. I do understand I was talking to Brandon McDonald earlier today from Fireweed Zinc. He did mention there's a little bit of a hold up in the assay labs. When do you expect to get more news flow from drill results out? Well, lab results coming back to me aren't entirely in my control. So I can tell you that we are consistently delivering samples to the lab weekly, if not more frequently than that.

45:02 And then we've had about 2 months time on some of our results. And so, you know, I appreciate that it is a very busy time for exploration. The labs have, you know, went from having no staff and then having to hire and challenges finding staff and spacing in some of their facilities. And when it gets to their Vancouver analytical lab, it's not just Yukon samples, it's samples from all over and we're seeing exploration ramping up. So our discussions with them as they are working on it and they're trying to improve their times. But what we can control is that we're getting our drilling done. I don't anticipate those delays impacting our program at all. We're drilling at 1 target, moving to the next target. We've got enough time because then we'll move to another target and then you know come back around. So it gives us ample time to get results and analyze them.

45:55 You know we also want to spend time 1 doing our QA QC which I think is underappreciated. You don't just get your results and put them out. You really have to spend some time to make sure that there hasn't been any errors and that you understand that they're good quality before you put them out. And then it's also important to put together press releases that tell a story. So to have enough holes and be able to put together the whole picture when you're just putting out results. Because just putting out splashy holes doesn't really show people how you're growing the deposit and kind of what the strategy is. So we are gonna be strategic, but we're also patient on getting our results. And it's actually a good thing that our guys can just focus on the field work while the summer is still here and really maximize that. And, you know, we've got a lot of things on the go and it's hard to get them all done.

46:45 Clint, this is going to be the final question and I'm going to hand it over to you. You are ramping up to get into production. You're hiring people to come into the camp and continue to progress. Can you talk about hiring local, hiring UConn, the ratio of who's local, who's maybe coming in from other areas of the country, you know, but the importance of really trying to get as many local people in there as possible? Yeah, so we, you know, of the people that we have on board or onboarded, I guess, you know, since we started this scale up, this 90,100, 90,100 people are, 90% of them are either from British Columbia or from the Yukon.

47:39 And I think that last I checked, about 40% of the group were Yukon residents. And We have an interesting thing happening is that in this environment where it is difficult to move between jurisdictions, we have had a number of cases where people have committed to us to move to the Yukon so that they can work at Alexco and in the mines generally. So that's a trend that we are seeing. And we are specifically trying to stay away from anything that is east of Alberta, if possible. The COVID situation drives some of that, but we would much rather see, build a sort of a workforce, an experienced workforce, built up within the Yukon jurisdiction if we can possibly help do that.

48:41 So, I mean, that's our focus. I mean, it just shows you how powerful something like building a mine can be for the economy of the entire territory. Right. It's, it's not just the mine that provides the economics, it's bringing the people in. And that's a really powerful to know that people are willing to move to the Yukon to, to work in this industry. So kudos to you and everybody else. That's it for us. We kind of wrapped up our time here. So Tara, Clint, John, appreciate all this and the time you gave us and answering the questions. Best of luck as we continue to roll into the late part of the summer and into the fall. I know exploration is, you got a tight time frame during each year so everybody's working as hard as they can. Look forward to sharing that news when it comes out from each company.

49:35 Obviously we will do our best to report the meaningful news on mining stock daily but again thank you Tara, thank you Clint, thank you John. Take care and have a great evening. Thank you. Good evening. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.