Hecla Mining Company

Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Regina, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Heckler Mining Company third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Anvita Patil. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for HETLA's third quarter 2022 financial and operations results conference calls. I'm Anvita Patil, HETLA's vice president of investor relations and treasurer. Our financial results news release that was issued this morning along with today's presentation are available on HETLA's website. On today's call, we have Phil Baker, Hitler's President and CEO, Lauren Roberts, Hitler's Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Russell Lawler, Hitler's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Any forward-looking statements made today by the management team come under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and involve risks as shown on slides two and three in our earnings release and in our 10-K and 10-Q piling for the SEC. These and other risks could cause results to differ from those projected in the forward-looking statement. Reconciliations with non-GAAP measures cited in this call and related slides are found in the slides or news release. With that, I'll pass the call to Phil.

Thanks, indeed. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our call. With this being the first conference call since the September 7th closing of the Lexco transaction, I want to start with a few comments on Kena Hill. You know, the week After the closing, I, along with Lauren and our chief administrative officer, Mike Cleary, went to site. We went to Mayo, which is the local town, and to Whitehorse. This visit was timed around the biweekly shift change, which allowed us to meet, I'd say, about 140 of the 170 employees. And the enthusiasm of the workforce was palpable. the the crews are excited to have resources and plans that allow them to be successful and so we're going to have our challenges but i think we're starting at a very good place we also met with the uconn federal and community leaders and there's a recognition that keno hill is a high profile project for the uconn and that's important for the and this project is important for the success of mining development in the Yukon. So I'm confident that we're going to receive all the support that these folks can give. And Lauren's going to go into our performance and plans for the rest of the year operationally. Now the third quarter marked another strong operational performance from all of our mines where we actually achieved new records at each of them. At Greens Creek, We've been working to increase throughput, and we've begun to see the results where we produced a quarterly record of about 2,500 tons per day of throughput. At the Lucky Friday, we produced in excess of a million ounces for the second consecutive quarter, all while executing a very significant capital plan, which is going to allow us to further increase throughput and reliability. Casablarity also continued to achieve new monthly throughput records one of the months during the quarter. With Keno Hill expected to be in production next year, Lucky Friday's growth and Green Street's consistent performance, we now expect to produce in the range of 17 to 20 million ounces of silver by 2024. And this production will not only be the largest producer of silver in the United States, but will also be the largest in Canada. So despite Heckler being a 130-year-old company, we believe we are the fastest-growing established silver producer. While we are investing our business with large capital programs at each of the mines and at Keno Hill, we ended the quarter with a very strong balance sheet, which we're committed to maintain. Russ will talk more about that. Strong operational performance in the year has allowed us to increase our silver production guidance while maintaining our operating capital cost guidance despite adding Keener Hill. So, Lauren, why don't you give some insights into our operations?