Northern Shield Market Update

0:05 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for this live Northern Shield event. We're joined by Ian Bliss, President and CEO, who will be providing a brief presentation. Following the presentation, we'll open the room to questions, So you can submit your questions in the bottom right corner of your screen. Please note that this event is being recorded and will be made available for viewing shortly after we conclude. With that said, Ian, the floor is yours.

0:28 Good afternoon, everyone. And thanks very much, Kyle, for that introduction. And thank you all for taking the time to take in the presentation entitled the Super Treasure Hunt and Why Root & Cellar's Findings Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg. Before I get along with my main portion of the presentation, I do have to bring your attention to this forward-looking statement advisory. This presentation is really gonna jump right into the details of the conquest zone at Root & Cellar, but for those that are joining Northern Sheila for the first time, it's a little bit of background on who we are. Northern Sheila is very well known for thinking outside the box. We're not followers. We initiate our own projects alongside prospectors in underexplored regions that have the correct geological additions that support the notion of a giant and high-grade ore deposit.

1:16 Of course, everyone wants to find a large ore deposit, but you must make sure that the geology supports that notion. That approach has led us to root and cellar. While many view Greenfield exploration as a risk, we see it very much as an opportunity, and that's an opportunity to discover a tier 1 asset near surface and at relatively low cost simply because no one has looked there before. And we implement what we call a model-driven approach to our exploration and that reduces the risk for ourselves, our shareholders and the environment. This approach has been very successful in the past, as I said, and has led to partnerships with Hadbay, Tech, South 32 and twice with Implatz from South Africa. This strategy has led us to Root & Cellar and we think Root & Cellar is well positioned to become a significant discovery in Canada and as all the ingredients, be a giant and high-grade epithermal Gold system.

2:10 Root & Cellar is located on the Buren Peninsula of Newfoundland, just a 3-hour drive from the capital of St. John's. It's located in what we call the Avalon terrain. And this is very broadly similar to BC's Golden Triangle. We all know, seen a lot of news out of that the past few years and host numerous tier 1 Gold and Copper assets. But whereas BC's Golden Triangle has been explored, even mined for the better part of a century, the Avalon has seen maybe 2 decades of exploration. And when it comes to root and cellar, it's seen no exploration, methodical exploration by a junior mining company, internal and shield option property from a local prospector. So you can imagine the opportunities that exist at root and cellar and the surrounding area when it's seen next to no exploration. And the other thing to keep in mind when going through this presentation is its location.

3:00 Epithermal deposits, when geologists typically think of epithermal systems, they think of the jungles of South America or up the mountains in South America, BC, but this is located, let's say a 10-minute drive from a deep water port on the Atlantic seaboard. And that will particularly become important if we start exploring the Copper portion of this property, because most Copper porphyries are on the Pacific rim, whereas this may hold a strategic position on the Atlantic seaboard. But all told, Root and Cellar is in a vastly underexplored portion of Newfoundland. We're going to jump right in to the Root & Cellar and then the conquest zone, but we've talked about, we explore for large-scale deposits and right from day 1, there's the indications of that on a regional scale, particularly this rifting. And here's the top left-hand image is a DEM, Digital Elevation Model of the Buren Peninsula. And you can see how Root & Sellers sits in the swath of basically lowland area. Everything else is very high. We see a very similar signature on the magnetics where there's a break in the magnetic signature here and right in here. And we believe that because there's been a period of rifting or extension.

4:12 Mostly Avalon terrain was actually created by a collisional event, so compression. But when you have compression, it's a little bit harder to get fluids up those fractures. When you have expansion or rifting, there's a lot more opportunity for magma to come up. And if you're enhancing magmatic activity, then you're also enhancing hydrothermal activity. Another key ingredient to the potential size indication at Bedroom Seller is the presence of Tellurium. Tellurium is a critical metal. It's a key component in solar panels. 90% of the world's Tellurium comes from China right now. So again, it's a Gold, perhaps a Gold system leveraged by the rarest of the critical metals. But the reason why I like Tellurium in this case is it's typically associated with very large epithermal Gold systems. And think Cripple Creek in the United States, for example, a lot of these big and high-grade Gold deposits in Fiji are also associated with Tellurium. So a lot of indications from circumstantial evidence that we're onto something very large here, very early on in our exploration history at Root & Cellar.

5:15 So Root & Cellar hosts multiple Gold and Copper occurrences, but the real focus right now, and moving into the drill program, is at the conquest zone. The conquest zone itself is a very large footprint, about 4km2 of mineralization. That's both outcrop boulders and soil samples, and even IP as indicated by these red hashed areas. The real focus has been in the Southern Conquest zone. We're going to start zooming into what we call the centre mound area. But much of this Gold, and it's all sort of above, most of it is above 100 ppb, but up to 111g per tonne, a lot of this is what we call leakage. It's not representative of the main epithermal itself. Epithermal system itself is just where Gold from that system at depth, or a system at depth has leaked to surface.

6:03 But we certainly do in the Southern Conquest zone start to see very clear evidence of epithermal textures and alterations and we'll zoom into that portion. Underlying that gold mineralization as you can see by this turquoise shape is a magnetic low. The mineralising events in epithermal systems of fluids often destroy the magnetic signature of the host rock. So you get a magnetic low as opposed to a magnetic high, which you get in some other deposits. And here's actually a 3D model, but now you're looking at 2D because you're looking at it in plan view, but you can see how well that the Gold mineralization, as indicated by these red squares, outlines this magnetic glow which sits beneath it. We'll have a closer look at that a little bit later. But we'll focus in now, we started on the whole conquest zone. We're looking at the central portion. Now we're going to focus in on the southern portion of the conquest zone where the drilling in 2023 occurred.

6:58 And in that area, we see an area about 100m long, 40m wide and a continuous Gold mineralization. Here's a compilation. Again, the red squares representing Gold, anomalous samples both in drill core and in surface. You have very large intercepts, 34.5m, a moderate rate 0.6g per tonne, along with a lot of sporadic higher grade, including 10.4g over 1.5m for instance. A lot of visible Gold, both in drill core and in surface sampling. It was during the trenching in 2023 where we went back to where the prospector initially discovered Gold at Conquest and stripped that off with an excavator. That's where we started finding not only more visible Gold, Clusterform and Coliform banded quartz veins, which again are an indication that you're getting close to the boiling zone or perhaps even into the boiling zone.

7:47 And Agularia, which is a potassium mineral. And when you start seeing that, it's certainly again, key evidence that you're getting closer to the hotter portions of the system, which is a feeder and that's what we're looking for. So despite the importance of these Gold grades and the good widths, In that drill program that followed up from that drenching in 2023, we also saw some other very important indicators and that was breccias, cinder material, geyser sentiments and of course, boiling textures like coliform bainese, as I just talked about. As well, we started already seeing those textures and understanding what they were, that things really began to come together as far as a geological model at the conquest zone in Ruben's cellar. And here are some of these. And I say, an analyst in Toronto recently put out a little blog on Northern Shields and one of the things he opened up with is sometimes the universe is a way of telling you things if you're paying attention.

8:40 We were paying attention to these rocks when we drilled them in 2023 because they are telling you a story about Root & cellar. A lot of the drilling in 2023 hit a variety of breccias. They're all mineralised and low-grade. Again, here's the part of the interval of 34m up 0.6, but there's visible Gold in it, the sporadic higher grades of 9g, but they're all mineralised and all heavily hydrothermally altered. These are part of what's called the hydrothermal vent breccia and you often find these at the very top of epithermal systems. The diagram on the left is an example from the Wahi epithermal system in New Zealand, produced about 7 million ounces, still producing gold, 7 million ounces and about 42 million ounces of silver. And above a lot of their vein systems, they have very similar hydrothermal vent breaches.

9:29 Sometimes they trend right down into the main veins, sometimes there's a small gap between the veins itself and at the time we began to realize whether they're part of the main system or not but they're more likely these are sort of an umbrella that form near the top of the main vein systems in epithermal gold systems. Even more important than the breccias we started seeing in Jokur what we described at the time as very muddy-looking sedimentary rocks. Of course, these are all solidified right now, but they're not volcanic rocks, which everything else we see in Root & Cellar is volcanic rocks. We see no sedimentary rocks except for in this, in 1 or 2 drill holes. And these are hot spring sediments. So these are equivalent to sediments that would be forming in the pools that surround, for instance, the Yellowstone geyser. And The Yellowstone geyser represents the top of an epithermal system. You go down below that, drill into that, you will find an epithermal system. How much Gold it carries, we don't know, but it's an epithermal system.

10:27 And so these hot spring sediments indicate where the top of the system. We also found these siliceous rocks called cintur. They're also at the very top of an epithermal system. So very conclusively, from 2023 and into 2024, we learned without a doubt that we're at the very top of an epithermal system. So That's important because it tells us 2 things. Number 1, the system is intact. It hasn't been eroded. Even though these are probably on the order of 300M to 500M years old, it has not been eroded. The complete system is intact. The best part, what we call the boiling zone or Bonanza zone, is below the centre now. Even though we're finding visible Gold up here right now, technically in these epithermal systems, the best part is still yet to come.

11:13 Just an example of how important centres are as a vector to the minimisation is an example from Fuerte del Norte, which was operated by Irelia in 2006 to 2012, I believe. And again, it was even deeper, more deeply buried than what we have at Rudin Sellers, about 200m of essentially barren rock above that, but there was evidence of a little bit of Gold leaking to the surface. They recognised the chemistry and the signatures of that as coming from an epithermal system, drilled a few holes, the first missed, but then they hit the centre. They recognised the importance of the centre and that represented the top of a vein system and steeped in the hole and the next hole hit 240 metres of about 4 grams per tonne gold and the rest is history. So these centers are very important in marking the top of an epithermal vein system. The only sometimes questions about them is, you know, at Fuerte del Norte, for example, the main veins were right underneath the center terrace, whereas in other examples around the world, particularly in some of these Mexico epithermal systems, you may have a gap of about 200m or 300m before you get into the boiling zone and the higher grades of Gold. Again, at Root & Cellar, we don't know whether the veins are starting right below it or deeper.

12:30 My gut feeling is they're pretty close because we're already getting Gold up here, including visible Gold. And that's highly unusual, you don't see a lot of Gold above the centre terrace.

12:41 So here's an example of little fragments of centre. This rock actually has visible Gold, so at some point Gold was brought up to that level of the center mound. And I say both in drill core and more importantly in the trenching, we started seeing these classic banded quartz veins that we call crustiform, coliform banded quartz veins with bugs. And that's an indication too that at least we're getting closer on the very fringe of the boiling zone, which is where your Gold precipitation is going to happen in these epitomal systems. So highly unusual to be getting that amount of Gold at that level. And I say that's what I encourage us is that we may be on to quite a high-grade system as well as a large system at Root & Cellar. I think it's really starting to come together earlier this year. We always knew that the gold mineralization in the concussed zone was sat above a magnetic low, but we really focus in on some 3D modeling of that magnetic globe early this year. And this is the shape we get. And if you remember back to that classic epithermal model, I'll go back to it right now,

13:42 this sort of tree-like shape or wire-like shape, The magnetic model matches that very closely. This is a magnetic low, based on the model, it extends to a depth of around 800m, so considerable depth. Most interesting of all is the Discovery Trench with the centre fragments and the 20, 20 feet drilling with the centre fragments and the gold sits right up in here from this, there's an arm protruding up and all that drilling a place in here. And as I say, it's right on the tip of this branch of this arm. So it's hard not to believe that the rest of this branch of this magnetic lobe is not somehow related to that epithermal system. And of course, it goes down into a much larger trunk, if you want to call it that, of the tree or the epithermal system. So the fact that we're drilling up in here, getting the center fragments, I say it's

14:39 very, very confident building that the rest of this magnetic load is related to the epithermal system. Then even over here, this photograph was actually taken just a few weeks ago when I was down here. We have some very pyritic and weekly gold anomalous rhyolite sitting up in here. We see quite a large patch of it actually. And so again, this is probably where gold from down in here has leaked up to surface through fractures and along contacts of, in this case, the rhyolite. Interestingly, too, we see a change in the morphology of this magnetic blow. Below this is the brown dashed line here. And below that, the magnetic signature tends to get more and stronger and more bulbous.

15:24 And what that looks like has happened is that the fluids have percolated up one of the main structures. They hit what we think was a layer

15:30 of a rock that was formed partway through the hydrothermal system, basically capped all those fluids from coming to the surface. They sort of pooled underneath this cap rock. There's potential here to have where those hydrothermal fluids pooled to have very large intersections, widths of vulcanisation as well as potentially very high grades. In the upcoming programme, we're going to target in and around here. This is what we call the Hodder's Pond vein target. And of course, keep tracking the centre mound vein at depth. And I think once we get below this level here, we'll start to see better grades and more consistent grades. So this is a view looking west into the magnetic low, Just have a look at it from a different point of view, you know, looking southwards now, same big tree-like structure You can clearly see this bulbous magnetic

16:24 low and Interesting enough. We have an IP charge stability anomaly that corresponds exactly to the top of that magnetic low And when the geophysicists model this IP, we didn't really want to see a flatline IP anomaly. We expected to see something at a vertical extent. Now, it could be that. It could be that we're just looking at the very top of a deeper vertical IP structure. But I say, originally, we were a little bit concerned or in disbelief that it was flat-lined, but once you model that magnetic load, very clearly it corresponds to this flat-line sort of contact, or I believe of the contact rocks and the host rocks and the main part of the epithermal system. Everything was beginning to come together, both on the geochemical side, on the mineralogy side in 2023, and then say early this year with the modelling in 3D of the magnetic glow, everything

17:17 really came together. Now we have a very compelling drill target going into this drill program. The focus will start following down the Discovery Trench, down this arm of the branch and also just to the west at the hottest pond vein system. So that's what it looks again in plan view. Here's what we call the centre mound, the centre terrace with the geyser sediments. So go back in here, a lot of the drilling, initial drilling will probably start here, shallower than going to depth And then deeper holes here trying to hit this level, which is about 200m down. By the time we step back, there are sort of 400m holes. Again, the IP is really strongest on the sort of flanks of that magnetic low here and again over here.

18:04 The strongest portion of the low itself is in the centre, so we're not really sure whether to target the IP and the flanks or the centre, but a lot of these holes will go through and test the IP and the centre of the magnetic anomaly. A few holes at the eastern end of the conquest zone. This is really following up on some of the drilling from 2021.

18:25 And a very high-grade Boulder of 111g per tonne that we've yet to find a source, but we do see rocks very similar to the host rock of that Gold in outcrop in this area. We got a nice IP chargeability anomaly in the area too. So short holes in here. And we have an IP target up here that's sort of a ring around a large magnetic target here in the middle. In 2021, we did hit Copper mineralisation and drill holes that just skimmed the flanks of this IP chargeability, marked in now in green hash marks. We'll probably test the heart of this IP target, but more likely it's leading towards a copper target just from what we saw in the other holes. But the big focus is on what we call the heart of the pond vein and the center, which both has very strong supporting geochemistry, gold values, IP, magnetics and geochemistry. And so We don't think it gets much better than this from when you're trying to find a blind

19:25 epithermal Gold system. Just to talk a little bit about the logistics and again, the importance of location of root and cellar. Here's the conquest zone. Here's the end of a road that you can really get to. You don't even need really a 4x4. You can get here with an old 1990 2-wheel drive Datsun if you wanted to. The geologist's apartment is going to be down here and just outside of Marystown. We've got the drillers here. We've got Canadian tires, so when things go wrong with the drill or whatever, you've got your main shopping nearby. Core Logging is right in the centre of Marystown. When it comes to exploration, you rarely have that opportunity of finding something that's so close to infrastructure. Of course, we've got a large deep water port just outside of Maristown and so access is excellent.

20:17 Drilling costs are on the order of probably just under $200, or at $200 a metre all in drilling costs. That's extremely low and that's, we think, will be representative of future exploration and development costs. And that's why we think, other than the technical evidence of what we think we have at Ruin Cellar, it's backed up by just having a really excellent location. You just don't get these opportunities very often for brand new discoveries with such good infrastructure in place. We talked a lot about conquest. As I say, now we're just backing up and taking a bigger view of the whole property. Conquest is only one portion of the Gold showings. We have 5 other Gold showings. We think windfall is actually ultimately connected to Conquest.

21:02 It's about to do work on a drop zone and certainly Braxton Bradley. And then this huge Copper porphyry target we have right at the end of the southwest portion of the property. It's probably actually cut by conquest. We think the Copper porphyry is older and the epithermal event came later, overprinting the Copper porphyry. Of course, Copper porphyry and epithermals are end members of the same hydrothermal system, so it's not unusual to have them together, but typically, the Copper porphyry are much deeper than the Gold. If you're seeing the Gold, you're never going to get to the Copper, but through various mechanisms, telescoping or faulting, you can occasionally get them side by side and maybe that's what's happened here. The focus is definitely the Gold at the conquest zone.

21:48 But going down the road, we're going to start, as we understand the geometry and the geology of the Gold, it helps us with the Copper. Conquest is as exciting as it is. It's only a small portion of what we have at Ruben's Cellar. There's a very unique opportunity here. Surface sampling has outlined a very large Gold amount on the Llamas area just at the conquest zone, about 4km2. We have Tellurium, a critical metal, so it has added value in itself. But as I indicated, I like it because it's an indication of a large Gold system. You never find Tellurium on its own or very, very rarely. It's basically found as a by-product of certain epithermal Gold systems and Copper 4-3s.

22:36 And I say, importantly, the trenching and the drilling last year has identified that centre mound and that marks the top of the epithermal system. So it's intact and it looks like it goes to depth. Obviously, we see a lot of high-grade, 78g per tonne now and now 111g per tonne in Boulder. And I say we're not even into the boiling zone. So we're sitting up here and we're already getting gold. So It bodes very well as to what we hope to find down at depth. And I say it's not just 1 set of evidence. We have multiple sets of data that's all been pointing in the same direction in the last few years. I say even work by an MSC thesis using some very innovative geochemical plots to completely reinforce our visual observations of the centre as being at the top of an outflow zone. He came at it from a totally different point of view, but all the data is pointing in the same direction and that gives us a lot of confidence when going into a drill program like this.

23:36 And of course, Northern Shield owns 100% of Root & Cellar. And as I said, it's located in Newfoundland, minutes away from a paved highway and deep water port on the Atlantic seaboard. I think that's kind of become important, especially if we sink our teeth into a Copper porphyry at the same time. It's just one of multiple Gold showings on the property. Of course, we have first mover status, not just obviously on Root & Cellar itself, but we have a very good understanding of the surrounding area. We have a very good relationship with the prospector that found Root & Cellar. He has multiple other projects, both Gold and Copper porphyries that I find extremely interesting. We do have sort of first mover status on this and have a good knowledge of the geology and the prospect here. So as I say, we don't believe the exploration opportunities and the investment opportunities gets much better than the technical evidence we have and the location of where this is located. So we're very excited to be going into this drill program.

24:36 We closed the financing last month for about $500,000. We're just about to close another 1 for $300,000. So we're financed now for the 3,000m drill program, which we were trying to build up to, and we now have that. And we have a drill contract signed, so we should be starting to drill in early June. So that really concludes my presentations. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to try to answer. Excellent. Thank you so much, Shane, for the great presentation. We'll stop the Q&A session here with some questions that were submitted upon registration. What are the key milestones or results you're hoping to achieve with this upcoming drill program and how would success in this phase impact Northern Shield's overall development timeline for the project? What are the key milestones or results you're hoping to achieve with this upcoming drill program and how would success in this phase impact Northern Shield's overall development timeline for the project?

25:38 We think we can get right into the heart of the system and get something that's going to totally transform the exploration program that we can get in the heart, get good Gold intercepts, high-grade Gold of good widths. Even if that's just in 1 or 2 holes, we think that will move us forward very, very rapidly. Of course, there's always end members of an early-stage exploration. You can either get right into the heart of it right away or you keep getting the fringes of it. There's still a lot to learn, especially when you go deeper down. As long as you're getting indications that you're in the epithermal systems, maybe you're drilling parallel to the structure you really want, which gives us a little bit slower timeline to develop, but I have no doubt we'll hit, you know, you go back to 2023, we had only enough money to drill a 500m drill program. And We didn't have the knowledge that we have today and we hit Gold mineralization in 7 out of 8 holes, including 3 with the visible Gold.

26:38 With a 3,000m program, yes, we're going deeper, but with a 3,000m program and the knowledge we have, I expect we're going to get some good grades over good widths. If that happens, that will see a very rapid advancement in exploration and a speed up in exploration. I think we'll just continue to roll through 1 drill program after another with that success. I think you'll see a rapid step up in exploration and drilling at Root & Cellar after this. Thank you. There's a question in the chat, Do you see this as a district-level potential? Well, a certain district-level potential. I said the whole Avalon, not just the Burin, but the whole Avalon is under-explored and even those epithermals that have been explored, just haven't seen the attention of similar systems in BC, for instance.

27:37 We also have a better understanding, some of that understanding may just be confined to the immediate root and cellar area, but some of it I think we can transport to other districts within the pier and the Avalon. But district scale, yeah, but I still think that route and seller, particularly conquest is the kingpin of that. Sometimes when you get very, very large systems, you don't get a lot of other things going on. But there are other alterations on. The prospector has 2 other projects nearby that very much interest me. And if we can get some momentum here, I'm just trying to look at acquiring those. So Lava District is already locked up. So yes, there is a district potential here, but Root & South is still standing out as being very different. You know, but Tellurium, for instance, there is one other occurrence that has some Tellurium nearby, but Root & South is standing out as perhaps being the centre of that district.

28:40 I believe you already addressed this question. Do we have an official start date for drilling? And then a follow-up question, Is it the same drill team as before? The start date, barring anything unusual with either the drillers or weather, is June 10th. It's a different drill team than we will be using in 2023 and 2021. You'll see an announcement on that very shortly. June 10th will take a day or 2, unless something unusual happens either with the contractors or whether but that's what we're gearing up to right now And would you use the same labs you used as last time an individual is wondering how long to receive assay results after drilling?

29:31 How long if you were to rush assays? Yes, for using the same lab as always, it's very important because even though the methods are the same, it's always a slight variation. So we never want to compare apples to oranges. I mean, Gold is gold, but it's more the other elements that we want a level playing field on. We like going back to the same lab. Turnaround time, I think typically is probably on the order, they say 4-weeks, but it's probably more like 4-8-weeks. In Rushing, you can get it done, I think 2 weeks perhaps. So some samples if necessary will be rushed, but otherwise I would bank on a good 6 to 8 weeks for turnaround time for large batches of samples in the summer.

30:18 Thank you. Based on your recent visit to the site, have there been any unexpected challenges or opportunities you've encountered that weren't previously factored into your planning at the Root & Cellar project? No, the only thing that factored in was actually having a closer look, and it was outside of Root & Cellar, having a closer look at one of the prospectors' projects that he has just south of Root & Cellar. I've been aware of it for some time, but I had a closer look at his data and that really jumped out at me as another project that needs a lot of work. 10km of gold mineralization. As far as Root & Cellar, I was just going down there to secure logging facilities, checking access to the drill pads, things like that. It just reminded me, we have 2 options on a logging facility, but it just reminded me as I showed by that little map how easily accessible and how lucky we are with having you know existing infrastructure nearby and knowing that very willing people like everybody's trying to help. One place we went to as an example to try to see if we can rent space from them because they had a warehouse space.

31:34 And they said, no, they have no room, but right away they reached out to other people that they knew in the area and found us what we believe is a space to log for. So everybody in and around Marys Town is very helpful. They want to see this project succeed. And they say, you don't get that everywhere in this day and age. So I was just reminded, there's no, it's very opposite of challenges. It just reminded me of what a fantastic place to work, to work is, Marystown is, and not only like on the geologic side of how, you know, well-endowed the mineralization scene city, but it's access and the willingness of people to help you succeed. Thank you for that. We have another question in the chat here. We know 3,000m is planned. How many holes roughly would that be?

32:25 We're still fine tuning it, but it's going to be on the order of 8-10. Some of these holes that we sort of plan around 450m, you never know if you're in mineralization or if you haven't hit the magnetic load that we're targeting, you'd push it. It's on the order of 8 to 10 drill holes. Thank you. Could you share some details, and I believe you had a slide on this already, but about the infrastructure and logistical preparations currently underway to support the June drip drill program? Yeah, I mean, as I just go back to this image here, as I say, it's, you know, Northern Shield, in our previous life, all our work was very remote, you know, helicopter and float plane access, and that had a cost to it, which was helicopters.

33:14 And you know, and with money harder and harder to come by for junior exploration, that became a problem. And so years ago, we started looking at areas that had been, that were underexplored or not explored, which one of our criteria was to find it, look, explore in areas that were completely underexplored. But it's hard to find those that are accessible as root and cellar and a lot of other targets in Newfoundland. And so this just exemplifies that to a T, how underexplored Newfoundland is and how, you know, this project in particular, how perfectly well it's situated. When you have a deep water port access, you have infrastructure, you have an underemployed population and everybody willing to help you there, it doesn't really get better than this. So I'd say simple things like when drills break down, which unfortunately they do from time to time, some more frequently than you want, you're not far from, and let me not just clean and tie this, a lot of heavy equipment operators and mechanics here. And so you have 10 minutes, you can walk from here to the end of the road, ATV in 5 or 10 minutes, you're in your car and in 10 minutes you're in town and if something's broken, you're getting it fixed.

34:28 The geologists can make multiple trips to the drill to keep a better eye on it when they're getting near that critical area. These are why the drilling costs and the exploration costs are much cheaper than in a lot of places because it's very accessible and it's a lot easier to find jobs. We all like being outdoors, but sometimes, 3 months in a tent, 100 miles from anywhere gets a little bit tiring. Here you have something that you can stay in a nice Airbnb or apartment. You can get your Tim Hortons coffee or whatever you want and it's still hot when you get to the drill. So when it comes to infrastructure, it really doesn't get much better than this. No, certainly. So you have cash for this drill program, but Everyone wants to always know what's next.

35:18 We've got a question here. What potential partnerships or financing options is Northern Shield considering to advance the Root & Cellar project through its next phase of development following this drill program? When we get to the next phase, I think results will probably speak for themselves. We're always talking to various potential partners. I think every junior mining company does that right now. We have the financing in place, as mentioned, through private equity markets. But yeah, Roon Seller has been attracting attention the last few months. At one point we thought we may have a partner before the drill program, but I'm glad we went this way right now. We have obviously very strong retail support.

36:06 And I think a good intersection and drill core is gonna speak for itself. And if that's the case, I don't think any future partners will be hard to come by. Well said. I believe that's it for the questions we have for today, Ian. So thank you. And thank you, everyone, that participated and asked questions. If you came in a little late, there will be a recording of this and our team will make sure it's available within the next couple of hours here. But I'll pass it over to you, Ian, if you have any final words before we close off. Yes, we're very excited for this upcoming drill program. I know it's been a long time, but it's been obviously very tough markets for the juniors, especially those that are exploring as far upstream as Northern Shield does. But we think that hard work has paid off.

36:59 I don't think I've been on a project in the 25-years of running Northern Shield where you have so much supporting information, all pointing in the same direction. And, you know, yeah, Mother Nature can play cruel jokes on you, but there's a lot of supporting data there. And I think we're on to something significant here and I look forward to joining. Excellent. Thank you so much for your time.