Mike Parkin: I guess that’s an excellent point. On a relative basis, you’re a lot better to commute to versus a lot of the Nevada gold mines operations in terms of like location relative to local communities with decent sized labor forces.
Mitch Krebs: No, fair point. We bring people from a lot of different directions that otherwise probably couldn’t or wouldn’t make the drive all the way over further to the east there around [Elko]. The Lovelock area, Pershing County is a little bit more centrally located up there in the northern part of the state. So a fair number of our workforce comes from further to the west and to the southwest [Indiscernible] and places like that.
Mike Parkin: And then you guys took down the old crushing circuit to access better grades. Can you give us a sense in terms of what you’d expect to be stacking on a blended grade basis? Is that something that will improve over the course of the year or should that be fairly steady state?
Mitch Krebs: Well, this year, now that we’re into that area under the old ex pit that we call Yankee, the Yankee pit, the Yankee zone, does have some higher grade material, particularly on the silver side. And that was one of the big incentives for getting in there and getting that ex pit removed when we did so that we could start prepping that area, so that we could be in there here in 2024 from a mining standpoint, which we are, and those grades seem to be as advertised. And so this year, you will see a little bit on the silver — a kick on the silver gold or silver grade profile relative to outer years as a result of being in that Yankee area. Mick, did I miss anything there?
Mick Routledge: No. The gold grade is inherently low at Rochester, right. So we’re seeing that, that isn’t changing too much. But we’re getting a decent kick at least in the short term from the Yankee area for [Indiscernible] [solar] [for sure], which we’re looking forward to seeing coming through the pipe.
Mike Parkin: And then on your leach curves, usually, gold is obviously steeper than silver on the heat. When would you expect to kind of achieve like a steady state recovery rate or, call it, within the 90s percent or 95th percentile. You’re going to get up to maximum throughput around quarter end. Would it be fair to assume it takes a couple more quarters after that, so kind of starting in 2025, you’d probably see silver recovery stabilizing at that point?
Mitch Krebs: Probably in the third quarter, when we are on this call to talk about third quarter, we’ll have some data to talk about. And then obviously, in conjunction with our year end, we’ll have a lot more visibility to share and talk about. But Mick, do you want to talk a little bit about the curves and leaching kind of steady state?
Mick Routledge: And I think you nailed it to exactly the gold curve, we’re going to see where we land in the second half of this year. And the silver curve really will steady out and we expect to be steady on both silver and gold through 2025.
Operator: Our next question will come from Kevin O’Halloran with BMO Capital Markets.
Q – Kevin O’Halloran: Maybe just the first one on the LCM adjustment at Rochester. You mentioned there was a positive revaluation on some of the legacy leach pads. Was that included in this Q1 LCM adjustment or is that something we should be looking for in future quarters?
Mitch Krebs: Tom, do you want to take that?
Tom Whelan: So we added approximately 900,000 ounces of silver and 6,000 ounces of gold. So we actually updated our model as a change in estimate. And we’ve recorded that in the first quarter. So the LCM would have been actually much higher had we not made that adjustment. But again, the team had gathered enough data and we felt confident that the recovery curves on the historic pads supported that — the higher amount of gold and silver that we’re expecting to see here in ’24. So I hope that made sense.
Kevin O’Halloran: Do you have a sense of where that number would have been without the positive offset or maybe even just more broadly, what should we be looking for going forward on the LCM?
Tom Whelan: Look, it would have added in the $10 million to $12 million range benefit. So we would otherwise had a larger LCM. The question I always get is, so is this it for LCMs. I’d like to hedge a little bit just to give Mick the bandwidth to get this ramp up done safely and make sure things go really smoothly. Could we have one in the second quarter? Maybe depends on prices silver — silver prices, how fast we start to see some of that silver come through. But certainly, Q3 forward, absolutely, we’re out of the LCM business.
Kevin O’Halloran: And maybe you guys touched already on the higher grades under the ex-pit crusher at Rochester. But can you maybe comment more broadly on where you’re seeing or where you’re looking for upside at Rochester in terms of the grade profile, maybe sort of beyond this year?
Mitch Krebs: In 2024, our budget out there is somewhere around $9 million for Rochester, which is a big increase relative to recent periods when we’ve been more focused on the construction of the expansion. You go back to the mid-80s at Rochester, when Rochester pit was first identified, the blinders were sort of put on, I think, and all focus was on that structure and that deposit and ultimately, that project. And only in the last few years has — have the blinders kind of been taken off and we’ve started to look more regionally. You might recall, we added almost — doubled our land position out there when we acquired a lot of the land off to the west from Alio Gold a few years ago. So Aoife came into the picture here a couple of years ago and has really helped accelerate our thinking around where some higher grade material could be on our existing land package, and I’ll turn it over to her in a second.
But most of the focus right now is really on the eastern side of the existing pit, one area we called East Rochester. And then about 3, 4, 5 miles to the south of the Rochester pit is a historic mining area called Nevada Packard. There’s going to be some drilling down there as well where we think there’s some potential for some higher grade. And then between those two from the Rochester pit down to Nevada Packard, there’s a lot of opportunity, untapped potential there that we’ll start to investigate going forward. But Aoife, did I steal all your thunder or is there anything else you want to highlight?
