Artemis Gold Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Artemis Gold first quarter 2026 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in a listen only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may reach an operator by pressing star then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Meg Brown, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining our Q1 conference call and webcast. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that certain statements made on the call today may be forward-looking. and we encourage you to refer to our public filings and disclosures, including the cautionary language in yesterday's news release, for a more detailed discussion of potential risks and uncertainties related to these statements. I will now hand the call over to our CEO, Dale Andres.

Thanks, Meg, and thank you all for taking the time to join this call. In addition to myself on the call today, we have our President, Jeremy Langford, our CFO, Jerry Vander West-Huizen, our Chief Business Development Officer, Tony Scott, and our VP Finance, Eric Marchand. Jeremy and Jerry will help present the highlights of the quarter together with myself, and then we'll open the call up to your questions. On slide four, there are several important updates to highlight for the quarter. Firstly, we had a strong performance at Blackwater with respect to the open pit mine with record mining rates for the quarter and strong grades continuing. While we did have an unplanned shutdown of the mill in March, we recovered quickly and recoveries, which were a record, helped to partially offset the lower tons milled. We were successful on a number of other fronts during the quarter. primarily advancing our organic growth initiatives, including the Phase 1A expansion, which is being carried out concurrently with a much larger EP2 project. Phase 1A is now 34% complete and on track for tie-in and commissioning by the end of the year, adding 33% capacity to our plant. As a reminder, this is an incredibly capital-efficient expansion, costing just $55 per ton of annual throughput. The much larger ET2 project is also progressing well and was importantly, I think, recently named a priority major project by the province of BC. Early works commenced in January with major works construction scheduled to begin in Q3 of this year. Engineering and procurement are well advanced, and we have placed orders for the majority of our long lead items, which significantly de-risks the schedule. As we mentioned in our news release, the ball mill components are already en route to Blackwater, which is a fantastic position to be in at this stage of the project. And Jeremy will be expanding on this, but there's just been great progress to date, and I really want to commend the team for the work done so far. On the financial front, we significantly bolstered our balance sheet in Q1 with a $450 million corporate bond completed at very attractive terms and with the full revolving credit facility balance of $700 million now available as risk mitigation. We announced an inaugural dividend policy in the first quarter, which reflects our confidence in the ability to fund all of our organic growth through operating cash flows over the next two and a half years, and importantly, lays out our longer-term strategy for returning capital to shareholders with our first base dividend payments expected in the third quarter. On slide five, this shows our operating highlights for the quarter. We did achieve a new record, as I mentioned, for tons mined, and we delivered high grade ore to the mill with grades averaging 1.59 gram per ton gold in the quarter. The plant processed just over 1.3 million tons in Q1, and we produced just shy of 62,000 ounces of gold. This is lower than we originally anticipated due to the unexpected failure of the ball mill gearbox. However, Our team did respond quickly to restore full operations. And as I mentioned before, the lower than expected mill throughput was partially offset by both continuing high grades from the mine, as well as record recoveries of 90.6% for the first quarter. And that's due to improvements that are ongoing in ore blending and continued optimization of the mill circuits. And I do believe we're well set up for the rest of the year from an ore delivery perspective. On slide six, this shows a recent drone photo of the open pit and our current ore stockpile. We continue to see more low and medium grade material than estimated in the reserve. And our stockpile for future processing is now approaching 20 million tons. And you can see it there in the foreground. As mentioned, mining tonnage was higher, up 7% from the previous quarter, due in part to mine productivity improvements, including the introduction of double-sided loading on our shovels and hot seating on our haulage trucks. In the mill, we continue to focus on plant reliability and optimization, including some permanent structural and equipment fixes in some areas of the plant, such as the CIL circuit, And there's plans now in place to address and correct these design deficiencies once and for all. On slide seven and looking ahead, we're in the middle of an exciting growth phase at Blackwater with plans to achieve gold production of more than 500,000 ounces per year by the end of 2028 through ongoing optimization of the current plant, delivery of phase 1A, and that's coming up quite soon, but by the fourth quarter of this year, and completing construction of EP2 in the third quarter of 2028 with ramp up to full capacity by the end of the year. Beyond EP2, we do believe Blackwater offers tremendous potential. We are advancing studies on various initiatives, which will feed back into our strategic planning process as we assess both life extension and further growth opportunities beyond EP2. I'll now pass it over to Jeremy, who will provide a progress update on both Phase 1A and EP2. Over to you, Jeremy.