Hecla Mining Company

You spent almost $14 million on exploration in the quarter. You said that at least part of it was related to less COVID limitations, which makes perfect sense. But I mean, you still increased expenditures by about 50% since Q2. I just went through your September 14th exploration release again, and there you were stating that you were planning on replacing your reserves by the end of the year. That all said, walk me through your plans for 2022. And while you likely can't give me actual numbers, just sort of philosophically maybe walk me through your thoughts of expiration expenditures over the next several quarters, ideally by quarter if you can.

Well, Heiko, as you mentioned, realize we're still in the budgeting process for the coming year. So I'm not going to be able to give you quarterly information. But what I can suggest to you is that we'll have a level of expenditure that will be similar to this year. And the reason for that is we see huge opportunities at really each of our operating properties. And then we have a suite of almost 10 other properties that we see the need to explore because of the potential that they have to create real value for shareholders. And it just sort of applies across the board. So I'm not going to really go through any particular property But in the time I've been at HECLA, I've not seen us have this inventory of exploration opportunities. Having said that, we are judicious on the use of this capital. It's hard to come by. We have lots of competing interests for the capital, both expiration and operations-wise and acquiring additional assets. So it is a competitive process for the use of it.

That's a good answer, more or less what I was looking for. By the way, just to clarify, you're saying the same as this year, not the same as this quarter, correct?