Hi Portee!

I have been gone from the forum for a few months and now that is ruined with 3 or 4 posts in one day. ;-)

From what I have seen there will never be an open pit at Hercules. Sure there are extensive veins and some high grade ore right to surface, but outside of the WL zone, most of those hits were just a meter or two of vein width and steeply dipping. You can take that down maybe 75m before the benching to maintain slope stability means that you would be extracting 20 tonnes of waste rock for every one tonne of ore. Picture and inverted funnel. Near the base there is very little waste but the deeper you go you have to remove more and more rock for just that small slice of ore, and its not even continuous ore. Its not a viable pit design for the geometry of the vein structure. Even if you float the idea of a 'super pit' where you literally blast the hell out of everything and selectively mine the high grade bits, you are still stripping too much rock for a tiny fraction that you get paid on.

I am thinking this will have to be underground mining, and its the most expensive kind of underground mine since you have to sink a very deep shaft to get at the richer ore bodies that probably will be awaiting discovery at 1000m and beyond. You can run a spiral decline ramp to access down about 300-400m and punch a lot of drifts to get at the richer ore bodies near surface, but even that is pretty thin so far and you still must develop a shaft sooner or later if we are lucky enough to really hit the jackpot down the road.

None of that matters much right now. But I just dont keep my fingers crossed hoping that some miracle resource report is going to come out and make it all look better than it is. Management are pros. They will not put any lipstick on a pig just to goose the stock for a few weeks. That is why they release NRs when they have batches of data now, instead of chasing a pop on one high grade interval. Brian Maher has been around too many mines and knows what it takes to make this work. The VG and occasional high grade hits that are reported are like the trail of bread crumbs that lead down to where the big bonanza is waiting. Everything else is just noise.

Look there are lots of companies that were touting huge resource numbers and phoney mine plans that are dead in the water today. They did not make sense in the bull market and they sure as hell dont make sense now when financing is tough to come by. How much better is it to have a company that is honest and focused and just continues drilling until they do find a mineable resource. KXL is built to go for years and I think they will find something. Then all this talk about mining methods and resources will matter.

Anyway I am probably pissing some longs off here and maybe its better if I disappear for a few more months. I have a core position in my retirement account and I keep up on the story but I do not have much new to add.

cheers!

mike