I got the impression we were headed for a earn-in/JV situation from both your report of your Mike conversation and quite a number of the PDAC reports. It makes sense given the insider ownership at CUU and how that would make that expensive to Teck (vrs the fire sales going on all over the industry). Earning-in gives them the luxury of participating in the project for cheap and still keeps the option to buy the project out entirely at a later date. Elmer's comments about the 4 yr build clause having many holes in it are condusive to this theory too.

I'd still prefer a buyout but a chunky earn-in is the very next best thing. A big influx of spending at Schaft should improve our situation with drilling of Big Red and the 171M tonnes and Mike.

I wonder though if we have Teck earning-in whether we'll be able to spend much effort drilling the northern targets. There is only so much room at camp and a big drill programme on Paramount/Liard zones will occupy much of our capacity there. While improving the Schaft project would be a plus, I really think demonstrating some real mineralizations in those northern targets would be more significant. I guess in this case having Arizona to generate NR's will be a plus.