Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Alexco Resource Corp. Q1 2022 Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Jones, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development. Please go ahead. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Today is Friday, May 13th, 2022. My name is Paul Jones, and I welcome you to the Alexco Resource 2022 Q1 results conference call. This call is being webcast, and a recording can be accessed through the Events and Webcasts section of our website at alexcoresource.com later today. Our website also contains our most recent news releases and our financial statements for the quarter ended March 31st, 2022. All amounts mentioned today are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated. Today, our Chairman and CEO, Clynton Nauman, will discuss our most recent results, and he will be joined by our President, Brad Thrall, and our CFO, Michael Clark, during the question and answer period. Please be reminded that some statements made today may constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities regulations. Past performance discussed today is not indicative of future results, and our business involves several risks that could cause results to differ from projections. Investors are encouraged to review the disclosures pertaining to risks that can be found in our most recent regulatory filings available on our website and on SEDAR and EDGAR. I will now leave you with Clynton Nauman. Thank you, Paul. Good morning, good afternoon, and thank you to all those joining our call today. Given the volatile, changing, challenging environment, I want to thank all our shareholders for their continuing support and for helping shape Alexco's vision of becoming Canada's only primary silver producer. It's only been about eight weeks since our last conference call, so I'm gonna take this opportunity to be very brief today, but I'm gonna be happy to answer questions after this, brief discussion. As we had noted in late March, reduced workforce availability, coupled with supply chain interruptions, led to a reduction in underground equipment operating hours in the early parts of the year. This was particularly so in January and February, as COVID-related workforce issues gave way to delayed delivery of critical parts and components for underground equipment, primarily scoop trams. Even though we began to see improvement in workforce availability in March, supply line delays continued, as did availability of underground mechanics. We did see operating improvements in March with about 70% of the Q1 silver production being produced in March, about 56,000 ounces, and these improvements continued through April, where there's another 15%-20% step up in silver production. In particular, we saw better advance rates in the ramp at Birmingham and an additional production level coming on stream, the 1850-15 level at Flame & Moth. We've been encouraged by these improvements. They are admittedly short of where we need to be, so we do need to ensure that this trend continues in order for us to be successful over the longer term. Notably, our focus currently is for the near future and for the near future will be on improving underground equipment availability, which will have a direct impact on accelerating our access to additional underground ore faces. More equipment availability means more underground development, and that drives access to additional ore faces, which is key for ramping up throughput to the mill. We had previously anticipated providing formal guidance for the balance of 2022 as part of this release, but we are deferring that until we have more confidence in our projections. In the meantime, we're evaluating a number of production and operating scenarios which will drive our overall assumptions for underground development rates. With more clarity and confidence on how best to advance our development, we will then be in a better position to guide when we'll achieve our targeted 400 ton per day mill throughput. Although nearly all of our attention is focused on improving our underground productivities, we are launching a relatively small exploration program later in May, leveraging off our success at Birmingham. Now that we have a solid understanding of the structural geology architecture in which the larger and higher grade deposits occur at Keno Hill, we see many areas which require additional attention and testing, not only along strike in both directions from our discovery at Birmingham, but also in a number of other areas in this very large district. Finally, I wanna thank our shareholders for their patience and support of Alexco as we deliver Keno Hill back to full production. With that very brief statement, I'd like to ask the operator to open the call for questions. Thank you. The 1st question is from Joseph Reagor with ROTH Capital Partners. Please go ahead. Hey, Clynton and team. Thanks for taking my questions. Hi, Joe. Okay. Obviously, I've asked about this a little bit before on prior calls, but just wanna follow up on it again. What can you guys do to kind of accelerate the underground development? You know, I guess last time you guys said you were looking at, but hadn't made any decisions yet on potentially, you know, bringing in a contractor or something to do additional development work, you know, with the capital raise you completed. Are you in a position now where you know, financially could do that? Joe, it's Brad here. I think I can take that. As Clint mentioned, I mean, there's a direct linkage between, you know, our equipment availability and our advance rates. Just to give you, I guess, you know, put it into context, our scoops, the underground loaders, have had an availability in the 35% range over the last couple of months, where they really need to be in the 65%-70% range. You know, certainly the supply chain and the shortage of underground mechanics has an impact on that. To address that, we are currently in the process of leasing additional equipment, underground loaders, specifically. They have not arrived at site yet, so they are on their way. That will help increase our availability by having more units. Then in terms of the contractor, you know, we have used a contractor previously, last year to try to supplement our advanced rates. Quite honestly, I think the contractors are facing many of the very similar challenges that we do in terms of recruitment of mechanics and miners, and specifically the face miners. Those are the miners that can really do all of the tasks underground. Again, that's it. The focus is recruitment on mechanics and bringing in additional equipment to supplement our availability. Okay, fair enough. Then, you know, recovery rates in the mill seem to be, you know, kind of a touch below plan, not tragically, but just slightly. Any ideas about, you know, will, you know, filling the mill solve that problem? Is it, you know, still a matter of ramping up and getting, you know, everything fine-tuned, you know, to different ore bodies? You know, just any additional color you can give there, you know, as far as expectations going forward. Yeah, I mean, I guess the two points to make on mill recovery, you know, certainly silver recovery is directly related to head grade in the mill. As our head grade continues to increase, the recoveries increase. I think it's just a trend that you can plot and see that directly. The other piece is more consistent runtime. As we have additional ore that feeds the mill, we can operate the mill longer, rather than starting and stopping in shorter durations. You know, mills like to be fed a constant feed and so both of those things together, I think are contributing to the current recovery. I will say certainly our zinc recovery over the last couple months has been better than it has ever been, even back into the original Bellekeno days. That's a direct reflection of increased zinc levels that we see from Flame & Moth. Okay, thanks. I'll turn it over. The next question comes from Chen Lin with Lin Asset Management. Please go ahead. Hi, and thank you for taking my questions. I noticed that you sold to Victoria, you know, the rights for Banyan. With that additional CAD 6 million, what is your, like, working capital going forward? Do you see that sufficient to reach a cash flow positive? Thank you. Thanks, Chen. So yeah, with the monetization of the Banyan position, our current you know cash is right around CAD 23 million. As I mentioned in my call, we are looking at various operating scenarios moving forward. Certainly if we continue to see you know the type of improvement that we have here over the last couple of months, there's gonna be a lot less pressure. We obviously you know we're continuing to look at all options. It's a difficult one to confidently forecast, Chen, because we need to get more runtime under our belt to see continuation of these improvements to be able to you know nail when we see that point of cash self-sufficiency. Okay, great. Thank you. How about the COVID situation? Is it completely lifted in Yukon? It's much reduced than it was, you know, earlier in the Q1, for sure. The first quarter, quite frankly, was, you know, it was a struggle. That was initiated with the COVID cases that we had, some of which were held over from December, but also a bunch of new ones in January. Okay, thank you. The next question is from Lauren Scherff with Raymond James. Please go ahead. Hi, Clynton and Brad. To follow up on the earlier resolution that the leasing equipment is on the way, the second part of that was getting underground mechanics. How tight is that market? What's your likelihood of attracting anyone, and what's the price of doing so in the market today? How much do we have to pay to entice people to come in? Yeah. Well, in terms of mechanics, again, just to put it into context, we probably are on average, you know, 65%-70% filled up, if you will, of mechanics from where we really need to be. So in order to supplement that, you know, we are using a number of contractors, multiple contractors. Some of them specialized in the equipment such as the bolter. Yes, it's very tight out there in terms of, particularly on the underground mechanic side. So it's, you know, it's not all about wages, you know? It's certainly, you know, camp conditions and those types of things. You know, it's a pretty mobile industry that we're in. You know, it's really trying to continue to recruit, retain, and then we're supplementing with contractors where they can help fill those gaps. If you're successful with bringing in a couple of contractors and the equipment or it's on the way, so let's say it's coming in this quarter, how soon is the ramp up to where you wanna be if both of those things are successful? Hey, Larry, this is Clynton. I mean, it's sort of the same answer. You know, we need to see, you know, continuation of the improvement that we've seen here in the last couple of months. I am a little loathe to speculate at this point until we get a little more time under our belt to, you know, to be able to forecast exactly when that's gonna be. I mean, as I mentioned, you know, we are looking at various cases, you know, upside and downside. I can certainly, you know, assure you that in the middle and upside cases, then, you know, we're gonna reach that point. Okay. Thanks very much, guys. Appreciate it. Good luck. Thanks, Larry. The next question is from Martin O'Malley with O'Malley Investments. Please go ahead. Yeah. In our last call, we talked about the first quarter head grades and how those were affected by the fact that we had some, I guess, a little more waste rock in our feed than we should have. What are the head grades looking like now? We're about halfway through the Q2. Yeah. Just, again, we haven't released all the numbers, but I mean, certainly our April head grade is, I would say, you know, 25%-30% higher than Q1, and we're starting to see that same trend in May now as well. Just to give you a flavor, I mean, April head grades coming from the Flame & Moth mine were in excess of 700 grams per ton of silver, and over 650 grams per ton from the Birmingham mine. We're certainly seeing that trend. You know, we've learned a lot at Birmingham in terms of our long hole drilling and blasting techniques. At Flame & Moth, it's really about we're now, I guess, would be more in the heart of that 815 level, rather than on the perimeter, on the outer edges of the 835 that we were in the first quarter. In the call last, I guess eight weeks ago, you all talked about, you're just now getting into a couple of very good stopes. I can't recall which those are, but I assume that's continued. These grades you sound, they sound great for April. That's a big improvement. Yeah. That means, again, specifically the Flame & Moth, the Q1, we were primarily in what we call the 835 level, so that was higher in elevation, and you're on the perimeter, just on the very edges of that stope. Now that we are lower in the next level down, we are seeing more consistent higher grades from Flame & Moth. Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Clynton Nauman for any closing remarks. Thank you, operator. Again, I just wanna thank our shareholders for their patience and support of Alexco, as we bring Keno Hill back into full production. Thank you very much. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.