Bob Quartermain: Right. As you know, I came out of retirement last year to take on the Pretium opportunity; and we did it on the thesis that there would be a high-grade gold opportunity sitting in the much larger bulk tonnage mineralization. When you think about it, today we’ve outlined North America’s second-largest gold resource, 38 million ounces of measured Indicated resources, another 28 million ounces of Inferred, and within that we have now got about 8 million tonnes of mature running between 19 and 20 grams for about 5 million ounces. That continues to be open in all directions. It’s open down dip, it’s open along strike, and certain open at depth, and so there is still an opportunity there to add to the ounces identified to date. There is a lot of catalyst coming out this year in this quarter. We are going to complete a preliminary economic study on the high grade. The one we did in June last year was based off last year’s resource, not this year’s resource. We expect to have that this quarter. We are currently de-watering underground, and we’ve got a permit in place to actually drive a development expiration added from the Old West zone across into the Valley of the Kings. We’ll have an updated PEA also on a bulk tonnage opportunity, because this is what we think is an “Osisko.” Besides the very high-grade material, which sits within 1- to 2-gram material around it. We did a flow-through [financing] we announced the other day, so we’ve got the money to go back and we will be drilling aggressively, not only expanding on the resource but also doing in-field drilling, so we can move it on and complete a feasibility study by the end of this year. So throughout the year, there are going to be a lot of data points coming up, particularly starting in this quarter, and so I guess I would say, “I still own all my stock, and I’m not a seller.”
L: Just one more question. This was discovered in Silver Standard. When you were there at Silver Standard, did you know it was going to get this big? Did you have a feeling like, “Yeah, this is it,” or how much luck is involved here?
Bob: Largely luck. When I retired from Silver Standard in 2010, there was only a small resource at Bruce Jack, and there were a couple of drill holes that had hit some higher-grade material, and it was over the summer of 2010 that they drilled and then had a few more hits, and one of the drill samples had run a couple of kilos of gold, and I had only ever seen that type of mineralization either at the Royal Ontario Museum or when I worked at Red Lake, and felt if there is an opportunity like that here, then I’d like to have the opportunity to explore it – because like Ron, after doing Silver Standard for 25 years, it’s good to be back sitting on the drill rigs. I was up there in the camp this summer, continued to do sections in the office, and so, no, it’s – when Don McCloud at New Hawk did it, this was a blind deposit. They never saw it. No surface expression. It was just us methodically drilling every 50 and 100 meters. We lucked into the high-grade gold, and now we really know where to focus our drilling.
L: Very good. Duane, we’ve had a lot of questions about Almaden, and Ixtaca zone started out so sexy and exciting, but then it seems you’re still hitting drill results but not quite the ones we had earlier on. Tell us a little bit about Almaden in general and about Ixtaca. What happens next and –
Duane Poliquin: What we’ve been doing for a number of years is, let me start – if you take Nevada, in western Nevada is the Comstock lode, which was discovered early, and then the tectonic plate that’s shoving under North America, on the leading edge of that, you get copper-gold porphyries like Bingham Canyon, and you get all the Carlin-type stuff. And so we kind of applied that idea to Mexico, and over a period of years we took a helicopter – my son all the time and me with him as much as possible – and we sampled every intrusive center in eastern Mexico and every volcanic center from the American border clear down to Guatemala, and we have information the Mexican government doesn’t have. We age-dated all of those. We did whole-rock analysis, and we got a geological understanding of the eastern half of Mexico. We started staking claims, and part of it was there is no competition there. There’s not even any claims, so we acquired things like Caballo Blanco that had never had a claim on it before. It’s not on any government map, and we found a gold deposit, which we’ve sold to a gold group, and we found a nice copper/gold porphyry that we’re just doing a Titan-24 survey on right now, but it’s shaping up very nicely. Then inland from that a little ways, we found this Ixtaca zone, which also came out of that study, and again never had a claim on it before. It is a brand-new discovery. The only reason it’s still there is it’s covered with a thin veneer of volcanic ash from some volcanoes about 90 miles west of there, so there’s a little outcrop the size of this table in a creek with some little, tiny veins that have epithermal texture in them, so I’m quite proud of that discovery. We’re drilling it right now, and I wouldn’t agree with you that the results aren’t as good. We think they’re damn good results and they keep coming, and every hole we step out it’s there, and so we’re just going to keep – we’ve got four drills there working right now.
L: I didn’t say they weren’t good, but we had some, let’s just say, more exciting results earlier on.
Duane: Well, stay tuned. We’ve got four drills there right now, and it’s going to keep coming. And there are going to be more, because we’ve staked a whole bunch of things in this belt. We’ve got two other copper/gold porphyries staked that we haven’t had time to get to. We’ve got a bunch of other epithermal things with silver numbers, gold numbers on the surface. We just haven’t had time to get to it yet. We’ll drill this one off, and then we’ll go down the belt.
L: Before you pass the mic on, let me ask about Gold Mountain, because some of our readers – because of the potential conflict of interest internally we haven’t recommended it, we haven’t said anything about Gold Mountain, though obviously we always love the Elk deposit. Both of you here –
Duane: Well, we’re both here. Jim is –
L: Who’s running the show? Who’s going to make Gold Mountain happen? He’s busy perfecting a mine…
Duane: Jim has just hired somebody to run the show, I think. He’ll tell you. Do you want to tell him about that, Jim? Okay. Well, they did some drilling last summer, which I was quite delighted with, because we had never chased it into the volcanics, and they chased the zone into the volcanics and got some really nice numbers across underground mining widths and chased it about 400 meters into the volcanics. Everything else was in these vein swarms in the intrusive. So it’s developing nicely, and Jim’s the mining guy, which we’re very delighted to be in with.
L: Jim’s going to build out, but you’re still going to have – you have an equity position?
Duane: We have a large equity.
L: Do you have a lot of input on the exploration?
Duane: Yes, indeed.
L: That’s what I want to hear because you guys are my favorites.
Duane: We’re still there. Morgan is still there. Morgan is on the board of directors.
L: Okay, Ron, so you already did a talk about Nevada. People probably don’t need you to do the whole story over again, but bring us up to date on what’s going on with Renaissance and what happens next.
Ron Parratt: Sure. Well, as many of you probably know, we’re now about a year out on the spinout of Renaissance from AuEx. We had some good success there up in northeastern Nevada, a brand-new discovery, actually a new district of Carlin-type gold mineralization ended up in a 51-49 joint venture with Fronteer. They bought us, and three months later Newmont bought them for a couple billion dollars. It was quite a nice deal. Within three days of closing the deal with Fronteer, we did the spinout of Renaissance, the same team of people, almost all of the properties we had. Fronteer was only allowed to take the Pequop District properties, and we’ve been doing the same thing. We think the business model works very well. We are focused on continuing at that. We’re going to be very disciplined in our business approach, as we had been before – use other people’s money, leverage the risk out, minimize dilution, and get to discovery. We’ve got 30 projects we are working on now; 10 of those are in joint ventures. We drilled seven last year – Newmont, Sumitomo, Agnico, Eldorado, and some juniors, so a good program. You’ve got to be out drilling holes, taking swings with the bat to have success, so that’s a great focus for us, and we will do more this year, and hopefully we will get to meaningful discovery as soon as we can.
L: How many projects are you going to drill this year?
Ron: Well, as I said, we did seven this year. I know now that we’ll be drilling three in the first quarter of this year, two in Argentina, and we’ll be starting probably a six-month drilling program at our silver property in western Nevada with Liberty Silver. We know that the Wood Hills results are good enough. None of this is out yet, but they’re good enough that our partners are going to be back with a bigger program there. Sumitomo is already committed to a bigger program at Spruce Mountain. We’re running that program… Early yet in the year for everybody else, but I’m sure we’re going to do a fair bit more this year than we did last year.
L: All right. This might be also a question for Ross, but Argentina – as you know we got pretty cold feet about mineral investing in that country. I noticed that the Rio Negro province just re-legalized gold mining – that was a good thing. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your sense of the political risk in Argentina? You’re quite welcome to disagree with the Casey consensus there, but tell us what you think.
Ron: Well, we went to the Santa Cruz province first of all because of the endowment. We think it’s a great place to explore and that you can find gold there. It’s not a stretch. You look at the epithermal systems. That area is very early in its exploration history. We see a lot of upside. Obviously there is some political risk. The assessment of the recent change by Cristina looks as though it’s not going to be as great as everybody thought to begin with. Given that it’s Argentina, I think people are going to figure out how to make it even less as time goes on. We don’t see any diminishment of interest by potential partners for our properties down there. I attended an event in Toronto a couple of months ago on Santa Cruz proper through Macquarie. Great turnout, great interest. We’re still very bullish on the area, and we are going to continue working down there.
L: All right. Well, Ross, we could probably do a panel just with you. We’ve got Magma, we’ve got Pan American, we’ve got all these different things going on, so I guess start out with your babies, your sweethearts. What are the sweet spots right now? If you’re speaking to an investor who wants to get in on a Ross Beaty play, what two or three things would you tell him to focus on right now?
