i-80 Gold Corp. (IAU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone, and thanks for sitting in today for our geological update on our Ruby Hill Property. Ruby Hill has been a tremendous acquisition for our company. We've made numerous new discoveries in our recent program at the property, and these discoveries have significant upside that we're still seeing and drilling. And we're pretty excited by what we -- what to expect here in 2013 (sic) [ 2023 ]. Tyler is joining me. He's the Senior Geologist. He's in charge of the project and all the success we're having there. And he'll be copresenting with myself. And Matt Gollat is here as well. So just quickly, the second slide is the standard disclaimer slide. There could be some forward-looking statements made in this presentation today, and I urge everybody to read this slide. On Slide 3, our company is entirely focused on North Central Nevada within The Great Basin. The Central Nevada district, which includes the Battle Mountain, Carlin and Getchell Trends, represents what is the most productive gold district you'd find anywhere in the world. It's a very safe jurisdiction, very pro-mining. So it's one of the best places to develop mines that I've worked anywhere in the world. And next to the Nevada Gold Mines, we are the largest producer in the state. Our company is the second-largest holder of gold and gold equivalent resources in the Carlin and Battle Mountain Trends. [Technical Difficulty] Sorry, everybody, we have to restart. We had some technical difficulties here on site in the office. Just start out by saying our company is very happy to present new results from our Ruby Hill project here today. We've made several very exciting new discoveries at the Ruby Hill Property since mid-last year. We'll be highlighting some of those today, talking about the geology and some of the geophysics that we've done that have really outlined some very compelling targets that we're looking forward to drilling this year. With me today are Matt Gollat from our company and Tyler Hill. Tyler is our Lead Geologist, will be copresenting with me, and we'll be talking a lot about what we're doing to define our targets for drilling, and it really is a big part of why we're having so much success on the property. The second slide is our standard disclaimer slide, involving forward-looking statements. I urge everybody to read that. On the third slide, our company is located in North Central Nevada. The postage stamp that you see in what's called The Great Basin in Northern Nevada is likely the world's most predictive -- productive gold district. One thing that it probably has been overlooked is a lot of the base level polymetallic potential, and that's something we're trying to capitalize on right now. Within the Battle Mountain and Carlin Trends, i-80 is the second-largest holder of gold resources now next to Nevada Gold Mines, the Barrick-Newmont joint venture and the largest producer in the United States. And we are advancing several projects towards development. Importantly, our projects are all mostly or fully permitted. We have water rights, road access and grid power that will allow us to pursue our development options. On Slide 4, what our competitive advantage in the state is that our company has not 1, but we have 2 processing facilities. These are existing permitted and constructed processing facilities. And the Lone Tree facility is 1 of only 5 autoclave or roasters. So facilities kick through the processing of refractory ore, and the acquisition of that facility makes our company 1 of only 3 that has a facility capable of processing refractory ore. So that's going to allow us to grow out our projects for, I hope, it's decades to come. And we can look not only at just the oxide portion like most companies, but we are one of the few companies who are actually pursuing higher-grade refractory ore in the state. In addition to that, we have a processing facility at Ruby Hill. And we are currently assessing different options on how we utilize that, either as a gold plant or converting it to a base metal production plant. So we'd have the lead and zinc concentrate. Expect to have fairly high precious metals in those because of the gold and silver that are contained in these polymetallic deposits. And we completed the study that we released in November that gave some early cost estimates on that restart. So as we're growing our business here, we have refined to start both facilities. And with these new discoveries, it's making us maybe step back a little bit and do significant drilling, which we're doing right now. I think we have 5 or 6 drills going on site, and then being in a position where we can make a more informed decision of which of the 2 facilities we start first. It -- obviously, from the study we published, we'd expect that if we started the Ruby Hill site first, there would be a much lower CapEx option. So that is going to weigh into some of our thinking as we go forward. So here on Slide 5, introducing the Ruby Hill Property. Ruby Hill is a past-producing mine in what we call the Eureka District. Eureka District is known for both polymetallic deposits or carbonate replacement deposits, CRD, and for gold deposits. The plant that you see here is the existing Ruby Hill plant that we're looking to refurbish as either a gold plant or as a flotation tank to produce concentrates. On Slide 6, before Tyler jumps in, I'm going to just talk about a bit of the history of Ruby Hill. So it's a little known fact that a lot of investors don't know is that the early history of Ruby Hill was 102 years of development and production, started in 1864 and went to 1966. And almost all of the production in that early period was carbonate replacement deposits. I'd say the most significant CRD discovery we've seen in the United States over the last decade is likely the Taylor deposit that was developed by Arizona Mining. But this district is well known for the CRD deposits. And really since 1966, there's been almost no expiration for these type of deposits here because the district was really idle until 1992 when Homestake came in, did some consolidation of ground because it was fairly fragmented ownership from the historic mining and immediately started looking for a Carlin-type deposit, not a CRD. They found one. They put it in production. It subsequently became part of Barrick because Barrick acquired Homestake. And it operated until 2014 when they had a pit wall failure. The Ruby Hill Property was subsequently purchased by Waterton. Waterton did very little with it until we acquired it. And the early part of our program was defining refractory-type mineralization in Ruby Deeps in 426. But mid-last year, we started looking at the potential for CRDs, which was the big historic history. And most of the mines over that 100-year period were found from prospecting. So they outcropped in the hills. And where the new deposits are being found is immediately adjacent to that under alluvial cover. And I believe the first 3 targets we drilled in that program we hit what are now 3 new deposits that are being delineated. So a very high strip ratio. And we just announced this morning that in one of our -- one of the areas we're drilling that we have hit another CRD zone in the East Hilltop area. We don't have assays yet, but you'll see by the core, we expect it to be quite a rich intercept, and we're following that up as we speak. So with that, I'm going to hand over some of the next few slides to Tyler, who'll talk a bit about the geology of the district.

All right. Thanks, Ewan. So at the Ruby Hill Property, we have multiple styles of mineralization overlapping spatially. So we have Carlin-type refractory gold, and that's primarily the Ruby Deeps deposit as well as some of the 426 Zone. The 426 Zone also has oxide Carlin-type mineralization. There's an oxide gold that has a potential for open pit at Mineral Point that is distal-disseminated mineralization. And then, of course, there's the polymetallic CRD mineralization that we see throughout the district, and that includes Hilltop. There's skarn base metal mineralization, and that's Blackjack, which is underneath the bottom of the Archimedes open pit. And we also have an operating heap leach facility and an on-site oxide milling facility. And you can see in the image there on the right the location of some of these deposits, with the stars being the CRD deposits historically and where we have discovered at Hilltop. This is taking a look at a geologic model. This is kind of a magmatic hydrothermal model from Dick Sillitoe in a 2015 paper. And so when we think about magmatic hydrothermal systems, we know that they can produce multiple deposit types from one magmatic hydrothermal system. And so when we put this into the context of Ruby Hill, we've seen that we have Mineral Point, which is close to 5.5 million ounces of gold and 170 million ounces of silver, and it's a distal-disseminated system. Hilltop and the historic mines throughout the district, which are gold, silver, lead, zinc, a cretaceous CRD mineralization. And then moving closer to a potential source, we have Blackjack, which is a zinc skarn. But what we haven't discovered yet so far is a porphyry center. And so we'll go through some slides later in the presentation, which I think presents some pretty compelling evidence that there is a porphyry potential at depth here. And this is the target we're working on drilling this year. All right. We'll go back to a plan view here. So as Ewan mentioned before, this is historically one of the world's highest-grade CRD districts. We have made 5 discoveries since mid-2022. These include the Lower Hilltop zone; then the Upper Hilltop zone; the East Hilltop, which we drilled in September, 12% zinc over about 40 meters there; and then more recently, in November, a Carlin-type gold hit, the 1428 zone, which is underneath the middle of the Archimedes pit. We had an intercept of 12.3 grams over 10.7 meters; and then just a few weeks ago, a new discovery, East Hilltop CRD. So we already had that new zinc skarn zone. And now we've discovered additional CRD mineralization out there to the east, and those assays are pending. And then I'd like to point out in the plan view some of the historic mine grades here, so the Helen and Holly mines there to the north, about 0.23 ounce per tonne gold, 28 ounce per tonne silver and over 37% lead; the T.L. mine, 0.43 ounce per tonne of gold and 11.5 ounces per tonne silver, 17% lead and 3% zinc; and then down to the south, the largest mine historically in the district, the original Ruby Hill mine, grades of 0.89 ounce per tonne gold, 21 ounce per tonne silver and 15% lead. And if that mine was active today in Nevada, it would be the highest-grade mine in Nevada just on the gold alone. So quite rich grades here throughout the district. And then again, this -- with the geologic map and kind of highlighting that Hilltop corridor, which we have come to recognize as defined by this northwest-striking Hilltop fault along with additional fault intersections, and we continue to explore this zone. And the image on the left, you can see Blackjack there in the orange, the 426 Zone in the yellow and Ruby Deeps in the lower yellow as well. Hand it back to you.

Yes. So our plan here is we're submitting all of our permits for the underground development program here. We expect to go ahead with constructing the declines later this year upon receipt of our permits. We are going through an EA process with the BLM. In Nevada, we expect to have the approvals for the surface infrastructure here in the first half of the year so that if we want, we could start building the shops and the paste fill plants, items like that, that we're going to need for the underground and expect to be in a position to start to have the approvals on the declines later in the year, probably late Q3 or early Q4. The plan here, as you can see, is to go underground. We've got another slide later in the presentation that show this in 3D, but 2 portals going out of the side of the existing pit. So it's an amendment to the current mine permit here to allow for the underground development. As we go immediately north of that underground decline, we would almost immediately access the 426 Zone, which is an oxide and sulfide gold deposit, mostly sulfide. The oxide material here, we could view as being processed either by converting the plant here to a gold plant or we'll likely look at it a slightly lower-growth grade than the rest of the deposit because we do have an operating heap leach. And we could probably have a much lower cutoff grade for our gold here because it would just come out of the underground workings and directly on the heap leach. So we'll be exploring those as we work through the economic scenarios here. We are expecting to publish a revised resource for the underground portion, the -- mainly the refractory underground gold portion this year with the PEA. And as you can see in this development plan, we're also planning to do -- put any infrastructure to the southwest, which would access the Blackjack zone. Blackjack is a skarn polymetallic zinc-rich deposit. And then down to the south, we are putting together the -- some of the plans on how we would go down to the south and also, at the same time, develop the Hilltop deposits. So we would expect from this underground infrastructure to ultimately produce Carlin-style gold, skarn polymetallic and CRD polymetallic all from the same underground operation. And given that the refractory ore, which is the biggest part of the gold deposit would be tracked to Lone Tree, the utilization of Ruby Hill as a plant for gold would be very limited. So then our thinking, once we bought this, what do we do with that plan? And instead of just sit on it, like it is today, we're looking at how do we convert that plant to be a base metal processing with 2 concentrates and significantly increase our annual gold equivalent production through the usage of that plant. The Blackjack deposit shown here on Slide 12 is immediately underneath the pit. It's right -- actually right under where the pit wall failure occurred. So it's a very difficult zone for us to drill from surface because of where it occurs. We are doing some directional drilling right now so that we can upgrade this deposit to 43-101 resource. But the image on the right here really highlights the historic grades here. Often 5% to almost 30% zinc with associated gold, silver and lead in a lot of the intercepts. This deposit appears to be completely open laterally to the north and the south. And the best way to drill off the existing part is to put in the underground infrastructure, drill it from underground, which would then prepare it almost immediately for development. But also expansion drilling could be done there. And our program that we started in mid-2022 was to look for mineralization around that pit. And since we've made the discovery of the Hilltop zones, we did some additional geophysics, some -- an IP survey. And we really went back and compiled what Barrick had done here. They did gravity, they did magnetics, and they did a Titan MT survey. And the Titan MT survey appears to be very effective for picking up the zones that we're drilling, and we'll go through that here shortly. I'm going to let Tyler talk a bit about the upside opportunity we see here and some of the deposits we're drilling, including the recently interpreted Hilltop fault where all of these deposits tend to occur along. And just so you know, we call this the Hilltop discovery because his name is Tyler Hill. So it's in reference to Tyler.

Thanks, Ewan. So we're looking at here a plan view, kind of an overview of the pits and looking at some of the structural controls here. So you see the Blanchard fault, is probably the longest strike to the pit oriented northwest. And that was a major structural control on the pit. It's in your vertical fault. And then on the west side of the page, you have the Holly fault. And so a little bit hit within the hanging wall of the Holly fault, and then also the Ruby Deeps and 426 mineralization are also all in the hanging wall or the east side of that fault. And then what we've recently discovered through the drilling we've done in the Hilltop area is this another northwest striking kind of Blanchard-parallel fault. This Hilltop fault hits steeply to the north, 80 degrees. And all of the mineralization that we've drilled so far is proximal to that fault. There are additional faults that come through there, north-striking fault and northeast-striking fault. In those intersections is where the mineralization appears to blow out. But this fault is definitely an important structural control.

So really, the Slide 14 that you see here is sort of stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, as we say. The base metal CRD was largely overlooked in the last 60 years. In fact, some of the areas we're drilling, in fact, one area we're drilling right now are areas where Homestake or Barrick can drill holes, and either in their drill logs, we saw that they get sphalerite and galena, which is lead-zinc mineralization, in their drill holes but didn't assay for lead/zinc. So we went back and started looking at some of these targets and drilling those. And immediately, we start drilling off what are now appearing to be pretty significant deposits. And one target -- my favorite target that we're drilling this year, we call it the 4H target is an MT IP anomaly. And there is an old Homestake hole there that get extremely high-grade mineralization that they didn't follow up. So in my opinion, it looks like it could be a very large CRD opportunity, and we just started drilling that. We've got some pictures of our first RC hole into that target here in today's presentation. But when you step back, you can see we've superimposed the historic mine workings. And again, as Tyler highlighted, the gold grades of these historic mines were higher than any of our current gold deposits. Never mind the fact that they had 10 to 30 ounces per tonne of silver and up to almost 40% lead/zinc pulled out of them. So very, very high-grade district, largely overlooked. And the mineralization we're seeing, as Tyler said, is -- appears to be closely associated with this Hilltop fault. The Blackjack's skarn deposit is up against a grandiorite intrusive that we call the graveyard stock. And that contact is known to occur for kilometers. And other than Blackjack and where we recently drilled hole 61 of last year's program where we hit 12.5% zinc over 40 meters, that entire contact of that intrusive is almost completely untested. So that offers, we think, a big opportunity to find significant additional skarn mineralization in the future. Right now, our focus has been on CRD just because the grades are so high. And we're seeing -- in our drilling, we're seeing gold grades up to 60 grams with 8% to 40% lead/zinc. So it's pretty unique to see grades of this type. And we are testing multiple new targets this year, and I think we're going to have a very successful program. Down to the south was the historic Ruby Hill mine, and it was faulted off by -- there was a fault offset that depth Paycore has the FAD deposit that has a historic CRD deposit. But they've also been doing some drilling and having some very strong results. Between there and Hilltop is about 2 kilometers alluvial-covered area where we think the primary structures nor self-structures run that is almost completely untested. And it's in this area that we've just started doing geophysics, and we're putting the different types of geophysics together to look at what method may find these type of deposits better than others. And I think so far, what we're seeing is IP and MT seem to pick out every one of the targets that we've drilled. And we've hit massive sulphide mineralization show up in those surveys. So now it's stepping back and saying, are there other anomalies like this. And what you'll see is there's much larger anomalies that showed up in that survey that are yet to be tested. Like I said, the first of those, we're drilling right now.

All right. So this image takes a look at the Hilltop fault. We're looking northwest down the strike of the fault. Two MT anomaly lines. These are east-west lines on here and then also the drill hole traces. And so you can see along that Hilltop fault in the MT, we see resistivity high right along the trace of that fault and then conductivity highs on the margins of that, which very much correlates spatially with where we've drilled massive sulfide. And we see these conductors elsewhere in the MT, which will be future targets of ours. So this slide highlights the drilling that we've done in the Hilltop zone and some of our more recent intercepts that were released this morning. Hole 66 was a really nice hole. That was 100-meter step-out on the Upper Hilltop zone. That ran 25 grams gold, 848 grams silver and 7.9% lead over 7.6 meters. You can also see there out to the east, iRH23-10. We'll show some 4 photos of that hole here shortly, but that was another CRD intercept with the assays still pending. And that's kind of right between the Upper Hilltop zone and our zinc skarn hit from last year at hole 61. So continue to be very exciting facility. This is a cross-section view looking to the north of the Hilltop zone, both the upper and lower and then hits out to the east as well. So the discovery hole was actually in the Lower Hilltop zone following up on a historic Homestake hole. And then we were precollaring actually to drill that lower zone again and hit massive sulfide in the precollar. So we then quickly followed it up with a [indiscernible]. And that was our first hole that we released, hole 43, which ran about almost a gram gold, 515 grams silver, 28.9% lead and 10.5% zinc over 28.3 meters. And kind of from that point on, we've been off to the races, drilling this area off. And you can see the step-outs there to the east. And there's just no additional drilling out there to the east, and we put very few holes in there so far, and we continue to hit.

Okay. So the next part of the presentation here today where we've got a lot of slides we're trying to get through as quickly as possible is talking a bit about the geophysics. So as Tyler alluded to earlier, here on Slide 18, we showed this slide earlier, but there are multiple styles of mineralization. They all tend to sit on top of each other. And I say -- I've been saying to Tyler, it's remarkable. It's almost everywhere we drill, we hit something. And it's pretty rare that you see that. You usually hit a good hole, and you're following up, and you hit nothing. And here is we get a good hole, and we step out, and we hit something else while we go after that something. So it's been pretty remarkable. And what we're going to show is these MT anomalies because they seem, in my opinion, to really show mineralization in this district. The red stars -- the small red stars, as Tyler said, are the historic CRD mines in the district. They're all, where the color is, outcrop. So that's getting up into the hills. And there's various pits you can see. If you look at the airbornes, they are finding mineralization on surface and later sinking shops or ramps to mine those. And they mine those for 102 years. The bigger stars are undeveloped, either CRD or skarn-based metal zones. And then all of the various color circles are different gold deposits on the property. The Hilltop corridor, as we call it, the area between FAD and where we're drilling, is -- has very little drill holes. There is -- we found one historical, I believe, probably drilled maybe even 100 years ago. They had hit 3 zones of CRD mineralization, about 400 meters north of that and about 1.5 kilometer south of where we are. So that really speaks to when you see very rare holes like that they're hitting CRD mineralization that we think this is a major structure. I think this is going to turn out to be, in future years, as one of the world-class deposits that's being found in Nevada. Recent drilling by Paycore also had good results. But we're going to go through is the 4 red lines that are shown here. And these are the MT survey that Barrick did in 2010. And really, as far as we can tell, Barrick [ didn't ] drill any of those big anomalies they identified. So that really presents an opportunity for us. So if you look at the northmost line, which is north of the pit, we haven't really done any drilling out in that area yet. It's not really in any of our plans for 2023. But the -- when you look at that data, it does show a couple of interesting features. The big blob that you see here at depth is what we call our porphyry target. Like Tyler said, when he took you through Sillitoe's model, we do have all the ingredients of your typical large system -- geological system with multiple deposit types. And we haven't sourced the porphyry. Some of our work this year will be actually looking for that porphyry. And this big anomaly at depth occurs at about a depth of about 3,000 feet or deeper but is found over several lines. It's a big deep anomaly over several lines, and it's associated with a major deep-seated magnetic anomaly. So if there is a porphyry right here, we think it's right underneath the pit, and this will be a target we will drill later this year. The target 2 that you see on this slide is the northern extension of the anomaly you'll see on line C that we call Spring Valley target. And the Spring Valley fault had the Silver Lick mine. If we go back a slide here, you can see the Silver Lick, which is the westernmost mine of the CRD mines right in around the pit here. And it was along that Spring Valley fault. But up to the north under alluvial cover, there's been no drilling. And it has what we -- I call our #3 target of this year came is on that line C. So when you look at line C, target 3 on the west is a pretty major anomaly, MT anomaly. Our conductor fitting adjacent to that Spring Valley fault just north of the Silver Lick mine hasn't been drilled. But what I'd point out is target 1 here is where we -- that's exactly where Hilltop is. So you can see the size difference of the anomalies. And that's what makes me so excited is that Upper Hilltop zone anomaly is fairly small on this image. And then below that, immediately below and at a depth of about 3,000 feet is this big, big conductor. And that's one that Tyler will take you through the magnetics, et cetera, as we go through this presentation. There is an in-between line, a very small line in between lines B and C here. And on that line is where we've interpreted the Hilltop fault comes through. On either side of it is a conductive anomaly. The one on the right is very closely associated with exactly where we're drilling the Upper Hilltop zone -- I mean, the one on the left. And the one on the right is closely associated where we just drilled this hole 10 of this year's program and hit CRD. So it appears to be picking up the sulfide bodies quite well. And then target 3 is, if we go back to the previous line, that big strong anomaly at depth appears to be quite a bit weaker here, but it does show up. The target 2, as we show here, is the -- what I think is the beginning of what we call our 4H anomaly. And the 4H anomaly is -- well, before we go there, the anomaly on the right on this one at target 1, we've now drilled. And hole 10 was that intercept. And you can see we hit a void in that hole. So we had some lost core over about 10 feet. But surrounding that, we hit massive sulfide mineralization. On the left on this image is essentially massive sphalerite. So we're expecting this to be quite a rich intercept, and we should have the assays in the coming weeks. The -- we also show here hole 2 of this year's program. If you recall, right at the end of last year, hole 61, we had 12.5% zinc over almost 40 meters in skarn-type mineralization. And you can see the disseminated sphalerite mineralization throughout the unit here in skarn unit that we've hit in hole 2. So we're hitting both skarn and CRD now in this eastern target. And we've -- we're working on getting permits so that we can drill this out more thoroughly as the year goes on. The ground to the south of where we're drilling is BLM ground, so we have to do some additional permitting to do disturbance on that ground to facilitate our drilling. Here, line B, which is the southmost line that Barrick drilled, it's my #1 target. Tyler's #1 is the porphyry target. So we've got a bet going who's going to be right. But target #1 on this slide is a very large anomaly. Immediately south of the T.L. Mine and the Holly and Helen. So it appears to be almost right along and trend from those just under the alluvial cover. And the lower image on the left is subsequent to finding these zones, we did an IP survey. And in that IP survey, you can see the small red lump. The chargeability anomaly there appears to very well correspond with our Hilltop zone. But as you move south of that associated with this large MT anomaly is what we call the 4H target. That's because there's Helen, Holly, Hilltop, and what are we going to call the fourth one we hit here was kind of the reason for calling it that target. We're just putting the first couple of holes through this anomaly as we speak. And we are seeing significant alteration and mineralization in these holes. We just hit this in the last couple of days. What's also of interest here is just north of the drill setup we have here. Homestake drilled a hole, I don't know, 20-some years ago. And they hit what appears to be high grades here. They didn't assay for zinc. It was gold, silver, lead assays, no zinc, but extremely high grades, so were pretty impressive wins and was never followed up. And that big MT anomaly is just to the east of that intercept and very closely associated with these -- the larger of our 2 IP anomalies that we've identified here. So the first hole we've drilled, hole 13, is drilled right to the north end of that conduct those 2 anomalies in the 2 surveys. And as you can see here, we hit highly oxidized mineralization, which is typical of the upper parts of a lot of these CRD deposits and very similar to the description of the mineralization in the Homestake log. So this could represent a much larger-scale target for us to drill than what we see at Hilltop. And it's early days. So as you can see, there's a lot of drill pads in that area. This mineralization is essentially right below what we call the Mineral Point deposits. It's a 5 million-ounce near-surface oxide gold deposit that Barrick drilled out with about 170 million ounces of silver. It's just underneath that where we're seeing the CRD mineralization, and to the south, and there's very few drill past the south because that gets on to that BLM ground we were talking about. We own the mining rights, but BLM holds the surface rights. So BLM is quite a favorable group to work with when it comes to permitting and working in Nevada, and we're just working through that process. And before we get into a bit on the goal, if we have time, the -- Tyler's favorite target of the year is the porphyry target. And I'll let him take you through this anomaly and the geology and geological reasons why he thinks there's a good opportunity here to find even another style of mineralization right here on the property.

So on the top-left image here, you see a 900-foot depth slice of the magnetics. And you kind of see the subtle MAG feature in the green there. And the graveyard flat stock kind of sticks out on the right in the orange and red. But you don't see much else. It's fairly subtle. And again, the stars there highlight the CRD deposits. And then we have the Mineral Point system also outlined in gray. But on the right is the MT 5,000-foot depth slice. So this is from inversions that were done. And you see just this very large MT conductive anomaly there. And it sits kind of under the western portion of the pit. So this MT anomaly becomes strong around 2,800 feet below surface, and it exists to at least 7,000 feet. That's as deep as the MT was inverted. And then this also corresponds fairly well with the 3,000-foot depth slice of the MAG, which is in the bottom left there. So we kind of have this bull's eye that is thus far unexplained. So that bull's eye is not over the graveyard flat stock. It's not over Blackjack. It's more on the southeast margin of this MT anomaly. So it could potentially be a magnetic skarn body on the margin of an intrusive at depth. And in the bottom right, you see probably the best section that highlights this MT anomaly at depth there. And it's this near vertical kind of pipe-like structure in the footwall of the Holly fault. And you see Mineral Point there is up into the west of the MT anomaly, with Hilltop right over top of it. We do see a distinct metamorphic halo that's separate. So the graveyard flat stock and that zinc skarn has some metamorphic halo. So you see garnet pyroxene in the outward marble and hornfels. But as we drill further west, we just drill unaltered limestone and shale. But an additional deeper drilling we've done further to the west, we get into a separate metamorphic halo where we're getting into marble and hornfels again and calc-silicate alteration at depth. And that appears to correspond pretty well spatially with the MT anomaly. So that's pretty interesting. There are -- the best-known porphyry of the same age is Robinson, just a [ wee ] off to the east. Robinson historically has produced almost 1 billion tonnes at about 0.58% copper. So it is a fairly large deposit that's been mined in the last 100 years. And then there's the Butte Valley property as well that is being explored by Freeport. Carbonate-hosted porphyries also tend to be higher-grade, if you looked at something like Grasberg. And they sort of have been overlooked due to the lack of a broad alteration halo. So because of the buffering capacity of carbonates, you don't have this giant alteration hale that you get in volcanic rocks. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here, especially in CRD districts throughout Nevada, to look for deeper porphyry system.

And I'll point out that if you look at today's press release that in the lower Hilltop area, some of our holes were pushed a little deeper than we did previously. Those holes often gone into massive pyrites. So you see massive pyrite halos typically around big porphyries. And you'll see we had grades up to 1.8% copper. So we're starting to see some copper in those deeper intercepts. So it's a really compelling target. When do you think we're going to drill it?

I think the hole is starting today. So we -- yes, with the core.

So it's something that's a pretty exciting opportunity for the company. It appears as though -- if you remember that Sillitoe model, you have the disseminated gold system. Right beside it is the CRD deposits. Right beside those is the skarns. They're all centrally located. And then right below that, we have this MAG high and large conductors. So is it possible that the whole system is in place right there at Ruby Hill? And I guess we're hoping to find out this year if that's the case or not. Lastly, talk a bit again about the development plan. Our plan is to develop multiple deposits here from shared infrastructure. We're designing the infrastructure to access both gold. So the Ruby Deeps and 426 Zones are the zones to the north or the northwest as we go underground. And then you can also see in the 3D plan where we've designed some preliminary stopes or mine designs on how we would access the Blackjack deposit and then, from that, how we would drive a drift up to Hilltop, the Upper Hilltop zone. And from the lower part of Blackjack, we would just drift over and get into the Lower Hilltop zone. So all of these zones would be mined from the same portal system. And I think it's pretty rare of any project where you have the opportunity to say, well, today, we're going to mine gold, and tomorrow we'll mine base now or similar. So -- and given that this is a brownfield site, it is a pit that stopped mining in 2022. The opportunity for us to get reasonably timed permits, we feel, is very realistic. And all of the regulators we work with are very positive towards seeing this project move forward. Mining in the Eureka area, the various towns around Eureka is about the only business other than a few farms. I think they call the highway there the loneliest highway in the United States. So it's something that we are looking at. Obviously, with 2 processing sites, we don't think we're going to be capable of building both of them at the same time. With just the capital intensity for that would be a bit much for a company our size. So we're looking at the 2 opportunities this year and, hopefully, in the second half, be in a better position to decide which of those 2 facilities we plan on developing first. We are doing a site visit after the BMO tour to Ruby Hill and to Lone Tree. So anybody who hasn't signed up for that, we can -- we're going to be taking people straight from the BMO conference next week to site. And hopefully, we'll have even more color to show in that presentation. So we don't want to -- I'm afraid we forget about the gold deposits we have here. I'll really quickly go through these because we've been -- we're actually going over time. The Ruby Deeps and 426 deposits sit right beside the Blackjack and Hilltop deposits. The first half of last year's drill program was mainly defining the 426 and the Ruby Deeps deposits to the point where we think we've got about a 10-year mine life. And we think we've achieved that. We're redoing the resource, and we're deciding how much material might we mine at lower-grade oxide, put on a heap leach, going through that before we release our PEA for this project. The PEA will be on gold only. And then late in the year, we tested another target, the 428 target, immediately underneath the pit, very close to that Blanchard fault. There was the big controlling fault feature for all the mineralization mined out of the pit. And in that hole, we hit 12.3 grams over 10.7 meters in a deeper ramp that isn't known to host Carlin before this drilling until we just drilled it. But there was, again, another old Homestake hole that was never followed up. About 40 or 50 meters away from where we drilled, it hit 15 grams over 5.5 meters. So this is a new high-grade gold target that isn't at least in our first half of the year plan. Maybe in the second half, we'll go back and look at it. But it's possible that we may not even test this target, again, in 2023 because of the success we're having in the other zones. The Ruby Deeps deposit, you can see, is off to the right or here to the east. And Ruby Deeps has been fairly thoroughly drilled out and remains open for expansion, both north and south. We're seeing extremely good ground conditions here for Carlin-type gold deposit. Pretty amazing ground conditions, so the mineability of this deposit, we expect to be quite a bit better than you typically see in Nevada for these type of deposits. And we are, as you know, going through the permitting process to develop those. And then finally, the Mineral Point project is a larger open-pit project right beside the existing pit. It was drilled out by Barrick. And we haven't done any drilling in that target. We have no plans to drill it this year unless we drill through it by mistake or by accident, I guess, as we're drilling out the deeper targets. But it is a future project. It's not something that will be in our 5-year plan. But as we look at our company growing in the future, it's probably something that we will be looking at beyond 5 years as a potential growth project for i-80 into the future. And I think for or Ruby Hill, that's the end. And since we're really highlighting Ruby Hill, there's a few supplementary slides in this presentation or on our website with Granite Creek and -- that we are developing and mining at. The material being mined at Granite Creek is being processed either at Lone Tree, the oxide on the heap leach or to the north at it's being stockpiled right now, the refractory material at Twin Creeks, that's the Nevada Gold Mines operation. So we have a processing arrangement. We're starting to see some real improvements in our mining. But a lot of the work we're doing this year is putting in additional development to access the South Pacific Zone, which was another discovery that we have made and had a lot of success on, up until mid-'22 was one of our primary drill targets. That's a high grade, where we expect to be plus 10-gram gold deposit that we hope to be mining in 2024. The McCoy Cove project is over 60% completed a decline, and we started the underground drill pool. So if there's any quick questions from in the room, we have a pretty hard cutoff in about 7 minutes. But if anybody has a couple of questions here in the room, we'll take those. And everybody, we're welcome to take calls after this meeting on our office line so we can point you to the right people.

Ewan, it's interesting that you guys have different #1 priorities for drill targets this year. It must be good to have so many options and so many targets to go after. But how do you prioritize those targets? What are the guiding principles there? It sounds like, Tyler, you got the first hole. How did we [indiscernible]?

Mine was precollar first, but here's finished first. So yes, we have priority targets. But in the grand scheme of it, we're going to put holes in all of those. It's just maybe if we put more holes into the 4H target or more meters into the 4H target rather than the porphyry target. So we'll put it deep and down in this porphyry target, and we'll see what we come up with. I'm sure if we hit a porphyry, that may quickly become our #1 priority. So...

And we're waiting for permits as well. Some of the targets [indiscernible].

Yes. We are waiting for additional permitting for some of them as well. So that is permitting dependence.

And then with the underground development, did you say that it could be underground and start the portal and the decline by later this year? If you're going to hit the 426 Zone first and then Blackjack later on and you need a bit more time, I imagine, to get Blackjack and Hilltop into resource -- into mineral resources, is there a thought -- does that lean towards starting the gold configuration at Ruby Hill first? Or do you -- just a little bit the economics I think that there's a lot more upside in the basin. Probably those studies or those trade-offs are leaning towards a base metals flow configuration.

Our interim processing agreements we have with Nevada Gold Mines allow for the processing of refractory ore also from Ruby Hill. So we could actually process both Granite Creek and Ruby Hill through Nevada Gold Mines operations until we get ours going. So that will -- and the heap leach being there potentially for the oxide allows us to pursue the gold immediately without necessarily having to start the autoclave right away. Ultimately, it is something we need to do for all deposits. But with 1,750 tonnes a day of available capacity through Nevada Gold Mines facilities, it does give us some pretty good flexibility to pursue those at the same time as base metals.

Yes. So you don't need the Ruby Hill gold configuration? You can do both through the processing agreements?

Yes. I'd say we are talking to Nevada Gold Mines about potentially also processing oxide gold for us. Those haven't been -- those are just being advanced now. So we have capacity at autoclave and roaster under our current agreements, and we're hoping to be able to expand those to also include some oxide processing. We've got some stokes that like 20 grams that are going on the heap leach pad right [ there ]. So that's not the optimum scenario.

Just looking at Hilltop Upper and Lower, I noted both CRD mineralization in 2 kind of very separate horizons along that structural corridor. Do you see those as likely to continue laterally along those separate lithological contacts? Or kind of how do you see that?

Yes. It looks like anywhere you're proximal to that Hilltop fault, like that's the primary fluid flow pathway. And then there's preferable beds, depending on which unit you're in, and that's what it's kind of bleeding out to in these natural bodies. So I think anywhere along strike of that Hilltop fault is a brief perspective if you're in one of the more massive limestones is what it seems to prefer.

And over what sort of -- I guess how far distally from that kind of mean controlling feeder structure? Is that still...

Yes. I think we're still trying to figure that out, yes. I don't think we've gotten there yet to really define that.

If you go underground at Ruby later this year, have you had any geotech firm or got any good geotech data from the drilling that you have done?

Yes. So when we drilled out the Ruby Deeps and 426 over the past 1.5 years, we had a geotechnical firm on site, a consulting firm, doing geotechnical logging of that core through that area.

And what are they telling you?

It's good rock quality.

It's good rock?

Yes.

Yes, it was some of the reasons why the assays took so long is because we're doing a lot of that detailed logging before our geos fit the detailed logging and then split it. So sometimes, it would be weeks or even a month before a hole was drilled and then got split. So we want to get all that data so we know where we -- what we're going to do. Much like we did at Cove. Before we went underground at Cove, we knew where the faults we were meant to deal with. At Cove, we went into the fault. We had some ground issues. We pulled back, went around it, attacked it at a different angle, treated it differently, and we got through that fault. So just making sure that we're doing things really well and not hurting anybody as we do it. These fault structures in the mines at Nevada sometimes are known for having really bad ground. The upper parts of Granite Creek that we started mining, we found the ground was so bad that we've put that area into resource. So it's something that we'll look at potentially in the future mining and drove levels into the Ogee Zone, where the ground conditions are much better, and that's where all the mining is taking place right now. I think we have one stope in the upper parts but really going into the lower parts. And then when we drilled out South Pacific Zone, the ground conditions based on the footwall and the hanging wall rock to the intercepts looks to be even better in that horizon. So that's made it a priority for development to get our tonnes per day up. And we're actually prioritizing driving the decline deeper and getting the Hilltop over mining right now. So there's -- we're mining but not at the same rate we intended to because we're putting the crews on getting the decline and the infrastructure in place to get to the point we believe the project will become significantly cash flow-positive.

Ewan, right off the top, I think you mentioned that as you're considering if you're going to do the base metal or gold route, permitting considerations are going to play into that decision, can you just kind of lay what are the major differences when you think about permitting the base metal route versus the gold route?

The -- under the EA, when we go underground, we expect to be able to mine the 426 Zone, the Blackjack, Upper Hilltop. But to get down into Ruby Deeps, we are still in discussions with the BLM whether to -- when we need to accelerate the dewatering rate here beyond the current permit. Do we need to do -- can we do that with this EA? Will they allow it to the EA? Or will you have to do an EIS? If they choose that we're going to do EIS, that will delay our ability to get into the deep part, just Ruby Deeps. The 426 Zone would be accessible. So that's one of the permitting items that we're waiting on this year before...

Will that impact Hilltop Lower as well?

Yes. At Hilltop Lower, we're only drilling a couple of holes. We're sticking more up higher. So even if we hit the porphyry, you'll have to argue with me to drill additional holes because right now, our priority is drilling off the Hilltop zones so that we can move those into a mine plan. That's the big priority. And if we could, the Blackjack would be a big priority. But as we're drilling out the other targets -- because what if the Upper Hilltop is the second- or third-best thing on the property, we just find something better. Then we'll have to stop really drilling that one. So that's why we're doing some of this early drilling of these targets because if one of them -- or one or more turns some good grades and maybe some big wins, then we might have to change our plan a little bit. The other project for permitting is Cove because to fill the autoclave, we believe we need all 3 projects running and mining at full rate. So Cove is the other one we're going through. It has a major dewatering program. We're going to put in how many dewatering wells?

12.

12 dewatering wells and then dewater. We're working through with hydrologists, how long is that dewatering going to take to get into that, are there any additional permits we're going to need because it's going to be initially pumping at 40,000, 50,000 gallons a minute. We have a permit to pump, I think, at 2,500 gallons a minute there right now. So it's a big increase in the rate of water flow. And so it's when do we get those final permits, when do we have the wells drilled, when can we get into Cove to mine that. And Cove would be the last piece that we expect would come into the autoclave start-up. So that makes us believe, well, maybe that's going to be an 18-month delay from what we were previously thinking. There's no delay in base metals. For me, our mind is made up in which -- but it is polymetallics because we're hitting 30 ounces silver and up to 60 grams gold. So we would expect to be a pretty major gold and silver producer out of that base metal operation. I think we hit the hour in on the nose with the restart. So thanks, everybody, for listening in. Please call our office or one of our offices if you'd like any additional information on what we're doing. And again, we're having a site tour next week, if there's anybody interested in joining us. Thanks again.