Unearthing Alaska's Critical Minerals Frontier

0:04 Hello, as folks are wandering in, I'll say good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from today. I did see, I think, 8 time zones, so that's appropriate to give all of the greetings as we come in today. But I'm joined today by Kit Meyers, CEO of Western Alaska Minerals. I see you, Kit. How's your day so far?

0:19 Very good. Good to be here. Awesome. I hope everything will go smoothly. I reckon it will. Here's how today's going to work for the folks in the room. First, after I'm done my little housekeeping here, Kit's going to go through presentation, outlining and giving some context to all the work that Western Alaska Minerals does and what the future holds for the company. Then I've got some questions for him, but followed by questions from the live audience. So this is an interactive event today. There's a chat button in the bottom right of your screen there. Please do use it to ask questions at any time during the event. We'll try to get to as many as we can. But even if we don't get to it, it's still good that you asked it, because I will shoot

0:51 it through to the Western Alaska team directly following the event. So we'll be able to get some feedback pretty quickly on you. One more thing I'll say is today's event is being recorded, and will be available in replay probably this afternoon, Eastern time. It'll be right in your inbox for those who have already registered, but available on both 6.com, but also on our YouTube channel. So that's enough out of me, though. I'll get into the protein of the event and hand it over to Kit for a presentation.

1:15 OK. Hey, thanks a lot. And I see a little red light on my speaker, so let me know if the audio cuts out and I'll switch over there for you. But I'd like to say hello to everybody. Thank you for joining us today. So we'll go through a quick update of Western Alaska minerals. And actually wanted to start off with, we announced today, a name change that will go into effect tomorrow, and that will be Alaska silver. So that'll be a big change for us. And that really is to show the focus that now silver is really the primary economic driver of our deposit at Waterpump Creek. So that's where we'll be heading very shortly. I'll go through the forward-looking statement which everybody will have a chance to read at your leisure sometime.

2:05 Would like to go through some of the main points here on our project and district. So, number 1, it's the story behind Western Alaska, now Alaska Silver, is really the high grade at Water Pump Creek. So we have discovered, starting in 2021 with the drilling in 2022 and 2023, resource of 75 million ounces of silver equivalent, that really an industry-leading grade of 980 grams per ton silver equivalent. So this is a polymetallic deposit, includes zinc and lead along with the silver. And very importantly, we have 2 critical minerals. Zinc is the largest of the 2 from a content standpoint, a little over 11% zinc.

2:54 And the zinc contains gallium, which is number 1 on the US critical mineral list. The reason gallium is there, I'll touch on a little bit later, but it's really critical to electronics and really to the U.S. Department of Defense. The other thing I'd like to point out is very different than many exploration companies. Illinois Creek, the mine itself was Alaska's first open pit heat-bleached gold mine. Opened in 1997, produced for a very short period of time, then the reclamation was completed in 2002. So, it was a very good mine, timing was very poor, gold was at an all-time low of $263 an ounce in 1997 when they're in production.

3:41 The producing company USMX Dakota borrowed money at $350 gold from the Guggenheims and thought that was a pretty safe loan. So it wasn't. The mine closed after about 18 months of production, and the remaining 85% of that resource was never mined, and that is our going public resource in 2021. All of our claims and access are on state of Alaska land. So that is very important in today's permitting world. Our number 1 regulator and the entity that issues our exploration permits, access, and all other permits is the state of Alaska. So we have a very good operating relationship with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. We get five-year exploration permits last for 5 years at a time and that allows the company to really plan ahead very efficiently with their exploration.

4:37 We ultimately, when the 2 deposits go into production, Illinois Creek and Water Pump Creek, we will need an all-weather access road to the Yukon River and to a barge landing site. This had been used extensively, the barge landing site when the road was really a winter road. That was pioneered by Anaconda Copper Company back in the 1980s. We have completed civil engineering to the pre-feasibility level for this road, and it would be used to bring supplies in, but more importantly to move the zinc concentrate and the lead concentrate to market. And because it was a past producing mine, we have extensive on-site infrastructure. Air strip is shown here, upper left, 4,500 feet. We use C-130 Hercules when we need to bring in a new drill rig or large equipment.

5:30 And all the drilling is pickup trucks supported on site. Like to touch on our capital structure here for a few minutes. We're very proud to keep a very tight share structure. Total outstanding issued shares right now is the top line, the 41.9 million. Another 22.5 million are shares from our original U.S. Shareholder base, Insiders. My wife, Joan, and I are founders of the company. We own 18%. Joe Piekenbrock and a few other directors and officers filled that out. So we have a really an industry leading in the exploration business for most companies today with insiders and directors ownership at 32%. So that's a Very important. Second thing is our institutional investors, very proud of having Commodity Discovery Fund.

6:22 They're out of the Netherlands, a very active Dutch fund. One of our founding shareholders, Crescat Capital, Quentin Henney, Tavi Costa and the group are out of Denver. They are a single largest shareholder. We've had a number of others over the years, including a number of the Sprott funds in California and some very large German and Swiss shareholders. So really, we have 2 resources I want to touch on here. The most important and really the flagship of our company now is Waterpump Creek. And I mentioned the grade a little earlier. So it's a very significant deposit. And the grade is really key. Grade provides the operating margin.

7:07 If you have a very high grade deposit, you're very less sensitive to fluctuations in metal prices. Our cutoff grade is 200 grams per ton, but it doesn't really change, affect the tonnage until you get well over 500 grams per ton cutoff. And that's really the key to a profitable mine. I do want to remind everybody, even though the focus shifted to Water Pump Creek when we drilled into the very high grade, is that the past producing Illinois Creek mine contains 525,000 ounces of gold equivalent. And most of that 373,000 ounces is indicated because we have 550 drill holes that are defining this resource.

7:54 Sometime in 2025, we plan to update that resource with modern metal prices. When it was done in 2019, used $1,600 an ounce gold and $20 an ounce silver. So there's been a lot of change since then. Another of our factors here, I mentioned the jurisdiction. We have an excellent exploration team, including Joe Piekenbrock, who was VP of exploration for a decade for Nova Gold, responsible for fornite discovery there, and really more importantly, the Donlan deposit, which was just in the news yesterday. And that's because Nova Gold and their partners, including John Paulson, bought out Barrick 50% ownership for well over $1 billion in cash.

8:46 I think it's a very positive thing for Alaska and I think you'll see movement going ahead on the Donlan deposit now that it's got 100 percent ownership and not a 50-50 joint venture. I'd like to touch briefly here on the critical minerals I've mentioned before. Zinc is on the list. Gallium is really number 1. And what's very important is that the gallium is contained within sphalerite, which is the principal zinc mineral at Waterpump Creek. So the zinc concentrate would contain the gallium. We've just announced about 2 weeks ago assays on a number of metallurgical composite samples to show that the concentration of gallium directly follows zinc.

9:38 And our preliminary zinc concentrate flotation range between 52% and 60% zinc. So that is excellent metallurgy with the one pass, very simple system, and really produces a marketable concentrate. The gallium follows that with gallium grades up to 110 parts per million. So very important. One reason gallium is in the news so much, it is one of the primary components in the US Air Force active radar displays, which are the leading, one of the leading elements in the F-35 fighter plane. And it's also used in most guidance missile systems. So very critical to the Department of Defense.

10:24 This map just gives you a good idea of the location of Illinois Creek. They're in West Central Alaska. We're about 270 miles west of Fairbanks. Fairbanks is home to Fort Knox. That's the flagship gold mine for Kenross. Produces well over 300,000 ounces a year. And just south of Fairbanks is the Pogo Underground Mine, run by Northern Star Resources out of Perth. And Northern Star has just finished an acquisition, and they're now Australia's largest gold producer. Due north of us is Red Dog, operated by Tech. That is the largest zinc producer in the world. And due south of us is Donlan, which I mentioned before, that was the joint venture, and now it will be 100% Noble Gold and the Paulson Group going ahead.

11:17 So I look for some very good news out of that. Zooming in a little bit on our property position, again, we are 100% of our properties are on state of Alaska land. Because Joe Piekenbrock and my wife, Joan, and I together staked all of these claims. We did not have to purchase anything from another company, so there's no underlying option agreements, royalties, etc. We do have to pay an annual rental to the state of Alaska, same as all Alaska mining claims. The red line shown there, that is the historic winter access road that was been used since the 1980s, And our proposed all-weather access follows that very closely.

12:04 Over to the Yukon River, it's about 28 miles, a little over 40 kilometers, fairly straightforward road. And, again, that is fully engineered. And the Yukon River at this point is about a mile or so wide and up to 40 feet deep. So you can bring ocean-going barge up to that site. Touch here quickly on the resource shown in red. The red is the sulfide resource. The 75 million ounces of silver equivalent I mentioned. On the upper left is a mustard color. That is the original discovery by Anaconda. It is an oxide deposit. It's really the same mineralization, but it's been oxidized, and it's quite high-grade silver. It is not included in the sulfide because it would require a different metallurgy.

12:57 This is a slide that was done for us by Michael Gray at Agentis. What this shows is there are only 6 advanced explorers, early developers, that have a silver deposit that meets the criteria and the filter that Agentis put on that. And that criteria is the deposits have to be larger than 60 million ounces silver equivalent and need a cutoff grade of 200 grams per ton or higher. As I said, our cutoff is actually can go up to 500 grams without changing the tonnage. So in red there, where on the left that little red circle shows our 980 grams per ton silver equivalent grade. The grade is shown on the right description and on the left would be the tons.

13:46 So you see the 5 or the 6 deposits besides ourself. We need to grow, we'd like to grow the size a little bit, but again, we have an industry-leading grade shown there. Another thing this I'd like to point out here is the discovery rate of our drilling. We are under drilled, that's something that we really wanna start changing going forward in 2025 with larger budgets and more drilling. We've only drilled 23,000 meters compared to industry leading Wiesla at their Pinucco deposit of 370,000 meters. However, we discover 3,196 ounces per every meter drilled, And so that is well over 3 times our competitors.

14:35 Key to that is that we have a good program. Our team knows what they're doing. But when you drill into this high grade and the thicknesses that we have at Waterpump Creek, you really develop a lot of ounces per drill hole. This also really shows what I feel is a yardstick that we're very undervalued. On a enterprise value per ounce, we are at 30 cents an ounce. Wiesla and Dahlia Vardner at the higher end, a dollar 31 and a dollar 37. So As we advance the project, this gives viewers an idea of the leverage we have going forward. We could increase the market value of the company by 4 or 5 times as we get closer to development and as we expand the resource.

15:22 This is a little more complicated slide, so for I think I'll go through it very quickly, skip over part of it, but really we're just trying to show the scale of Illinois Creek and that's compared to on the right 3 of the most well-known carbon replacement deposits of which we are 1. On the far right is Hermosa going into production now in southern Arizona by South 32. They purchased that for well over 1.3 billion US about 5 or 6 years ago. Santiago Lale is the flagship of carbonate replacement deposits made famous by Peter Maga. And the center is the Tinnick District, active exploration right now. And the takeaway here is all of these, all 4 of these are at the same scale. And it gives an idea, should give an idea of the tremendous scale that we have at Illinois Creek. The upper right-hand corner is our Water Pump Creek deposit and to the lower left is the Illinois Creek Gold deposit.

16:20 Zooming in here, it shows again the scale of the project. The goal here is just to show this is really one big geologic system ranging from the higher temperature gold and copper at Illinois Creek on the left-hand side, and then 8 kilometers away up at Waterpump Creek, the metal zoning turns into the high-grade silver, zinc, and lead. So very classic zoning for a carbonate replacement deposit. This is a section view that shows the resource, gives you an idea of what it looks like in cross-section. The top of the sulfides is about 110 meters. The bottom is about 300 meters. This would be an underground mine. And very importantly, the target for our 2025 program shown here in pink is the Water Pump Creek extension.

17:12 And the goal here is to extend the high-grade mineralization to the south. And we think that will be the best way to increase the tonnage that we've discovered at Waterpump Creek. This is a plan view of the same area. Again, just shows our target areas that move south, shown in the red dots at Waterpump Creek. Also, it shows that we do have a secondary target at Waterpump Creek North that has never been tested. So these 2 will be the focus of our 2025 program.

17:45 So new catalyst going ahead really is the 2025 plan drilling program for Waterpump Creek South. And the goal is to expand the silver rich inventory of mineralization there. If we have enough funding and enough time, we would like to drill a few more holes following up our discovery last year of the Warm Springs Target, which is down closer to the Illinois Creek Pit. We also have access now, just recently released, to some excellent high-resolution airborne electromagnetic geophysical survey that was run by the state of Alaska and the USGS. And last year, it was a multimillion-dollar regional survey focused and centered on the discovery of Waterpump Creek. And That is now will be public data.

18:32 So we will be updating our Illinois Creek resource later in the year and continue our metallurgical program. So I think with that, I'll get ready to wrap it up here. I do want to point out one of our main technical advisors is Dr. Peter McGaugh, a good friend of mine, long-time geologist, lives here in Tucson, and we met each other at the University of Arizona many years ago. Peter has been on site at least 3 times and is extremely active in planning our exploration. And along with Joe Pickenbrock, who's shown there in the top center. So this will be one last slide before we end here. I just want to point out that we have a very active program and get engaging the Alaska Native communities that are in our region, the villages of Caltag, Novato, and Galena. We've had a local hire program in place since 2017.

19:28 And very active, we bring out the tribal leaders to our site to see everything firsthand, see their friends and neighbors working, et cetera. So with that, we'll wrap things up and turn it back over to you, Romeo. Awesome. Thank you so much, Kit. You can feel free to stop sharing. It's your pleasure now. Now, there are some already great questions in the chat, but I do have a couple that I wanted to run through first. So I will, if you don't mind. I wanted to say the Water Pump Creek resource shows, to me, a very impressive 980 grams per ton silver equivalent grade, which obviously stands out considerably among pure projects. And I'm curious,

20:07 is grade really what makes this deposit so unique to you?

20:11 That is true, grade combined with the metallurgy. So when you have this type of grade, metal prices are changing daily here lately, but it's well over $800 a ton gross metal value that we don't have but we haven't done a PEA economic assessment yet but if you look at comparable mines in Alaska that would be underground, the all-in costs are somewhere in the $200 a ton range. That would be your mining, processing, GNA, et cetera. So when you have a margin of 300%, if you round things down, that gives you a lot of leeway, where a typical open pit gold mine, of course, they're doing very well right now, Tom, but their margin often would be in the 30, 40, 50% range, depending on the deposit.

20:59 So what that means is metal prices can fluctuate, but you don't have to go in and out of production when you have this kind of grade. Sure, yeah, which that can be costly obviously. One thing I noticed is you recently discovered a new spoke at Warm Springs in 2024. I'm curious if you can kind of explain the significance of this discovery within your CRD model and how it might expand your resource potential. Yeah, that's a very good question. It was an exciting geologic discovery. Be honest with you, it didn't excite the markets very much because it wasn't a big thick intercept. But geologically, what it showed is that we've proven that the carbonate replacement system really has true scale. We stepped off about a kilometer and a half to the east of the Illinois Creek Mine.

21:50 We drilled into some very high-grade gold and copper, rather thin, but it showed the greatest there. And that was the first time that we've drilled high-grade copper and gold. Intercept was about 12 grams gold and just under percent copper. But also at the bottom of those drill holes we went into the lower part of the sequence, hit some of the high-grade galena, Argentiferous galena, similar to Waterpump Creek. So we show that the 2 parts of the system do connect up and it's a totally blind discovery, geologic and geophysical data. It's gonna take more drilling. It's not something we're gonna jump on unless we have a very good drilling budget this year, but in the next year or 2, that we'll hopefully add a third resource to the company.

22:39 Awesome. One thing I noticed in your presentation is that, you know, that you've got one of the, if not the highest, ounces per meter drilled ratio. I'm curious, just for folks who aren't as familiar with that metric, what does that efficiency tell investors about your approach to exploration? What it shows is really some of the aspects of a carbonate replacement deposit. These are large, sort of blocky. Once they occur, they have a good thickness. Our resource ranges from maybe 7 or 8 meters at the thinnest to up to 100 meters thick. So when you drill 40, 50 meters of this grade, you develop tonnage very quickly. A classic Mexican silver vein deposit, which are very good grade and very successful mining, they're a thin planar feature. So it takes a lot of drilling going through the vein.

23:33 They're a little easier to drill. Usually they're vertical and you can come in from the side, but you do a lot of drilling and so that's why your discovery rate is a little bit less. So different kind of deposits and it shows what you can do with good geology. Nope, I appreciate that. I do want to talk about gallium for a second because I know you talk about it in your presentation and I'm curious, how does the presence of it in your project affect permitting timelines or potential government support, just for folks who might not know in the audience? Well, I think the most important thing is with the discussion of supply chain issues and critical minerals, which are including more minerals every day, the realization is that the US, to be self-sufficient and be self-sufficient for the Department of Defense, you need to have a full supply chain.

24:25 Rare earths are certainly in the news and they're very important. Things like gallium are just as important, not as well known. So I think the difference is just the attitude change and that mining is now discussed publicly in a positive sense rather than a negative sense. And I think the public will come to realize how important it is. It's done properly in the United States. The permitting is not a skimpy thing. Hopefully, it'll be a little more streamlined and go quicker. But environmentally, the world's a lot better off by having a mine in the US than someplace in Indonesia that has very few environmental controls. Yeah, I've seen some of their nickel operations, and that's certainly a fair point. I do want to jump to a question from the chat, just because it's directly related. As Wesley asked, is Trump continuing the Biden critical mineral strategy? So I'll throw it to you for some comments there.

25:19 Yeah, he's continuing it and really putting it in the forefront. So I think that's the difference. A number of these projects, I mentioned South 32 at Irmosa in Southern Arizona, that permitting occurred during the Biden administration. So you've got to give credit where credit is due there. I think the difference is now there's a number of other projects that have been held back in permitting that have been moved to the forefront. The critical minerals, that whole list has been around for 20, 30, 40 years. So it's not new news. So it has been talked about, it just hasn't been the emphasis of the government, not just administration, but really all Congress, too. So I think the change is really not just administration, but Congress is getting on board.

26:11 And Alaska is very fortunate, having 2 senators that are very pro-natural Resources. Dan Sullivan used to be the chief administrator of Alaska Department of Natural Resources, so firsthand knowledge there. And Mr. Begich, the sole Alaska congressman, has been very involved in natural resources. Lisa Murkowski, the other US Senator, presented a grant to GraphiteOne a year ago when she went out to the site and stood on the drill rig and made the announcement. So you have tremendous support there. That's great. I do want to talk about valuation really quickly. So with your current market cap, about 6 cents a share-ish, how does your valuation compare to the intrinsic value of just the high-grade assets that you've got?

26:59 Well, that's a great question. If I had a perfect answer, I would have given that a long time ago. Markets are very quirky. You just look at gold to see that a couple of years ago, people were, no 1 talked about gold. Suddenly, it's in the forefront of the news once it's got over $3,000 an ounce. A number of years ago, silver deposits were a common yardstick of value was $1 per ounce of silver in the ground. This was when silver was at $20 an ounce. So if you use that yardstick from 6, 7 years ago, our 75 million ounces of silver equivalent times $1 an ounce should give us a market cap of $75 million. And that would be double what we are now.

27:45 I mentioned early on that when we went public, our going public resource was Illinois Creek. We didn't announce Waterpump Creek resource for 2 more years after going public. Our 500,000 plus ounces of gold equivalent, I don't think are given any value in our current valuation. So what is the proper number there? I don't want to speculate and throw things out, but you certainly could add another 30 some million plus just for the existing resource, which we hope to grow in the future. Helpful context. I honestly appreciate it. 1 slide comparing your CRD system to major historical producers like Tintex, Santa Yulia is compelling to me. I'm curious what similarities you see that suggest comparable scale potential with

28:33 your project?

28:35 Yeah, I think the scale potential is really the takeaway from those comparisons. Every deposit's a little bit different, but the way they form carbon replacement deposits, as Peter Maga is discussed and shown many times, start at a higher temperature core, usually related to a porphyry copper, not always discovered. And as the fluids move out into the carbonate rocks, they follow faults, folds, zones, permissible zones for mineralization. And they're very long in the longitudinal sense, because that's the way the fluids move. So they can be multi-kilometers long. And that is really the model we use in our exploration. If we had better outcrop and exposure as you do in Mexico, they'd be a lot easier to explore.

29:24 We have a very nice place, but it's covered with lots of green things and it takes a lot more work. Sure, that's a part of being responsible, I appreciate it. Speaking of, I know Alaska is one of these great tier 1 jurisdictions. And your team has over 100 years of Alaska experience. How does that expertise translate to both exploration success, but also relationships with local communities? Well, it's very important. If you have the 100 years is obviously not just in 1 person, but it's in our total team. Yeah. What that does is that we know how to run a program, we know how to do this, we're very efficient. We plan ahead, we've done it before. So if a company is coming in brand new and buys a property in Alaska, starts from scratch, there's a very steep learning curve and running exploration. So we're very efficient from that standpoint.

30:17 And because we've done this for many years. We're very comfortable working with the the local Alaska native villages we go out and do our hiring on-site We often do that in the wintertime when most people are not traveling around 1 year we our crew is in Caltagta, Nulato, which are both on the Iditarod Trail. And so that was an interesting time. But we very much like to work with the local Alaska Native leaders and their people. And when Illinois Creek was in production, it was at least it was between 60% and 75% local hire. Very important to the local communities. That was the largest private employer in the district. And right now, it's isn't a whole lot going on economically.

31:07 We are currently the largest non-government employer. Awesome. That's useful actually, I didn't know that. I got one question, actually I'll run a couple of the questions in the chat, because my question was about WPC South. And some people in the chat had the same question, so I'll throw it to them. Andreas in the chat asked, what indications do you have of mineralization at WPC South? Well, it's really the geologic model and the fact that some of our thickest intercepts are just to the north, it's still not totally clear whether that is a true fault, that is down-drop mineralization, or potentially a fold which is down-drop the mineralization. But if you look at the geologic models of Tinnick, Hermosa, Santiago-Laulea, they don't just end, they have continuity. That's one of the characteristics of a CRD deposit.

31:58 So we tend to prove that out and discover new mineralization to the south. But we haven't done that yet. So it takes drilling, and that's what the plan is. So very, very similar to Anaconda's original discovery of the oxide. It took a number of years, 30 plus drill holes before we really defined the water pump creek sulfide resource that we have now. So it takes a little work, but we know the, we believe the continuity is there. Great. As a follow-on question, I also asked,

32:32 what's the target depth of WPC South? Right now, for the South, to the North, the bottom of the resource is about 300 meters of depth. We're anticipating that we would need to drill 350 to 400 meters. And we have 2 brand new drill rigs, 1 just brought on last year and the other the year before. And for people that are familiar with drilling, we can do large diameters called HQ drilling, often used for metallurgical testing. That allows us to go to depths of 300 meters. With the large diameter, we can reduce a couple more times without losing a drill hole. Very important in carbonate rocks. We have the equipment and the know-how and we've proven we've done it before. So it's a little bit deeper, but it should not be a problem.

33:25 Awesome, I appreciate that. I got one question about infrastructure, Because I know there are a number of infrastructure advantages to the project, particularly like the airstrip, proposed road access to Yukon River. So I'm curious if you could just walk through generally what's great about infrastructure where you're at. Things are changing very quickly in the mining business, both politically permitting and also metal prices, which I don't think is lost on probably any of your viewers. Silver has been holding at $32 an ounce. A lot of people think that once it finally goes through $35, it could take off, but I'm not going to predict metal prices. So where we are, the next step is we will probably start to do some internal economic studies. We just haven't had the time to do that on a formal scale.

34:15 If that looks promising and we get some additional funding, we may go ahead and launch into a PEA, but I'm not going to give a time frame yet because we haven't made that decision. Permitting is something we'll take a look at. Should we start permitting this year? That may be something we should seriously consider, since the permitting window, I think, is open. And it'll get things moving ahead quicker. We're very much tied to or interested in the importance of critical minerals. We're in discussions with various entities within the Department of Defense and elsewhere. I think there's some good opportunities. They've already happened for a number of other companies. Perpetua is 1 with their Stibnite gold deposit in northern Idaho.

35:03 So we're certainly looking into that. Nothing has happened yet, but that would be another place moving the development along. So ultimately, it's metal prices, costs, road, and critical minerals. Great. I appreciate that. And I know with a pretty significant percentage, I think over 30% insider ownership and founders, as far as I understand, owning 18%. Curious if you could just share basically what that means for investors because I think a lot of people don't look as closely at your structure. Well, a couple of things. What it means is the management has a lot of skin in the game. We want this project to be successful. We started the company and we've participated in many of the financings and so continuing to put money in since we've gone public and for the years, 10 years before that, a lot of funding.

35:58 The other thing is that most of our shares are closely held, so they're not at risk of being sold. You do have that stability. I want to zoom out and talk about the whole deposit here for a quick second. Based on your CRD model, what do you think at this point is the potential size, the overall system that exists across the whole property. And what percentage of that do you think you've identified so far? Well, that's a tough one since we haven't identified it all. But if you look at Tinnick, not going to use Santee Lally because that's the most famous in the world. So that's about 50 million tons. Tittick, I believe, is in the 20 million ton range, 18 to 20. A number of other deposits probably averages in the, say, 12 million, a little bit bigger ton range. So I think that would be the target. If we have 2 and 1 half million tons now at Waterpump Creek, probably 3 and 1 half if you include the oxide, because it was a part of the deposit.

37:00 The gold deposit was really what it represents as an oxidized pyritic gold zinc deposit. And the zinc is mostly gone, the pyrite is all gone, it's iron oxide and gold and silver. So that is about 10 million tons. So Warm Springs is one of the key. If that ends up being another 4 or 5 million tons, we can certainly get to that 10 to 12 million ton range. And that would be a, we don't have to get to there for this to be economic. I think we're getting pretty close to where we are now at another 1 or 2 million tons and we should be there. Awesome. Really, really appreciate that. Even though it is a bit of crystal ball gazing, I appreciate it very much. I look into the chat, there's some easy questions. I'm just gonna knock off quick and then I'll get into some of the longer ones.

37:48 There's 1, Laura Stein in the audience asked when you'll be in New York, Kit. Because she says you're likely going to be in New York. Well, we do the actually the SME New York branch of Society of Mining and Metallurgy is going to be there in about 3 weeks in mid-May. So I'll be there and I think presenting on a panel discussing critical minerals. So that should be fun. We were there a year ago and I think that's one of the best run, very different from a lot of the quote money shows you see around in Toronto or in Switzerland. It's a lot of industry people and because it's on the East Coast, you have a lot of government attendees also. So it's a very good interaction and that's become one of my favorite events.

38:35 Awesome. I appreciate it. Michael from the chat asks, will the stock symbol change with the name change? And what about the WAMFF US market stock? Very good question. We elected to, we like the WAM, and so that's going to stay in Toronto and in the US, hopefully in conjunction with our registration with the SEC. We'll go on the OTCQX, which is the highest level market, I guess you'd call it, and will retain the WAMFF symbol. Awesome. I like WAM personally, so I'm glad for that answer. Me too. Yeah, there you go. Graham from the chat, and I know you said you don't like to predict metals prices, So we'll just talk about it in a broader sense. But he asks, if the Fed finally cuts rates, is that when silver rips? I was curious about how interest rates might impact the silver price.

39:23 I'm sorry, could you go through that one more time? Sure, he asked, if the Fed finally cuts rates, Is that when silver will rip? Boy, that's a tough one. Rates are very important. I think more importantly, and I do follow economics, I'm a geologist, not an economist, but I think the flight away from the dollar, you see the dollar, we do present and go to conferences in the UK and in Switzerland, so we certainly know that. The dollar's dropped almost 10% to the euro in the last couple of months. So I think the lowering of the value of the dollar is really going to encourage more investment in gold and silver, which is priced in dollars. So it's just cheaper. It's sort of the reverse of US residents traveling in Europe when the euro is at par, it's easier to go out to dinner.

40:21 So I think the dollar is going to be one of the keys. Lower interest rates will certainly help. And then silver is a been, you know, demand from industrial uses, solar, electronics has exceeded the supply for quite a few years. When that tipping point occurs, it's been predicted for a number of years. It hasn't happened yet. I think the growth of silver demand will be the other catalyst for silver prices going up. Once you hit that and the supply become smaller and you have a deficient, I think that will be a tipping point along with the dollar and interest rates will certainly be a third part.

41:07 I appreciate it. There's kind of a 2 part question from Andreas in the chat from the beginning and the end of the presentation. How big is this year's drilling season and when is it due to start? The starting point, that's going to be a function of our next financing. Usually, we start drilling around July 10th, July 15th, excuse me, June 10th, June 15th. Just thinking of summer, I guess, since it's coming along. So that is our target. We can start earlier, but we, and we definitely, 2 years ago, drilled through up to about October 1st. With more funding, we can extend that easily into mid-October. So the size right now, the planned is I think a minimum would be about 4,000 meters is what we did last year.

41:57 In 2023 we drill about 6,000 meters So that's where I'd like to end up is a 2 rigged 6,000 meter program allows us to test a lot of sites and our rigs are on tracks so that we can do a move in less than 2 shifts. Great. And speaking of actually raising, Manuel from the chat asks, how much capital do you need for the next steps? And what is your strategy for raising capital in this market? Well, next steps would be last year we raised about 8 million Canadian. So that is sort of a target, like to be a little bit more than that. It's a function of the market, so whenever people ask me that, I ask them for a prediction on metal prices and market sentiment.

42:45 I do want to say that the last 4 meetings we've gone to, which would be Roundup in Vancouver, PDAC in Toronto, Swiss Mining in Zurich, and a couple others, that the mood has clearly changed. Very positive. Once gold took off and silver is following behind it, that's really been a change. So I'm hoping that that will filter down to the explorers. That hasn't fully happened yet, but I see that starting to happen in the next few weeks to months. That makes sense. I tell people this is the first PDAC I've been to where I saw some smiles, not many, but you could almost see a couple. So I do think moods are changing for sure. One thing I love to end conversations on is I'd love if you could just share with the audience here. What are you most excited about for this year at Western Alaska?

43:39 For this year is really can't wait to have a couple of good intercepts in Waterpump Creek South because that will really open up the deposit. It will prove what we believe for a long time. Last year, we decided to do some exploration at Warm Spring, because it's been something we wanted to do for years. Made that discovery, but we're removing our resources and our technical thinking back to Waterpump Creek South, so we can get a couple of nice intercepts of high-grade silver, zinc, and lead. That will expand the deposit very quickly and show that it does have the continuity that people have asked about. Awesome. Kit, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. I'd also like to thank the audience that joined us today. I really appreciate your time. Of course, those who asked questions, I think we got to most of them, but we'll be sending the transcript to the Western Alaska team so if we did miss it I'll make sure they get it. But Kit, thank you once again this was awesome.