OK, back home and wanted to post some thoughts and impressions regarding the meeting in Golden with Golden:

These guys seem very excited about this deal. The SVP of exploration Bob Blakestad basically said he can't wait to spend some money drilling into Velardena. More that once in his presentation Jeff Clevenger said the resource is unknown at depth and the grades get larger. While we know this, having these people doing their due diligence and feeling this way sure makes me feel good!

In Jeffs presentation he had a couple of statements I thought important:

He said AUMN provided the note to ECU in order to "make sure they were solvent until closing", which suggests to me that ECU was in more dire straits financially than we were led to believe.

He said the oxide mill was "at heck of a mill" meaning he thought it was a good piece of property.

He plans to build a new sulfide mill of 2000T day withing 3 years. (In speaking after the meeting he said this may be modified depending on what the drilling uncovers.)

I think I mentioned this before, but they plan on having a new 43.101 by year end.

In going through the properties that AUMN has, I was impressed at the potential of these. Jeff said that Bob was particularly excited aboiut the Atlas property in Southern Argentina.

Since I was the only ECU shareholder in attendance I received some extra attention by the management of Golden. I talked with Jeff, Bob, and Jerry for about 15 minutes at the conclusion of the meeting.

Jerry said that he was going on the road next week for a month, to resource shows and to speak with institutions regarding this new entity, and is very excited to put this out. He indicated (as did Jeff in his presentation) that he thinks many of the institutions who hold positions in either company will want to increase their holdings to the pre merger percentages. He was very happy to see that ECU has such a retail following, and knows about Agoracom and that the shares we represent here is substantial. In partnership with the retail of ECU, this is a nice combination IMHO.

I do not think these folks are going to let a lot of grass grow under their feet in exploiting this merger to the fullest.

C