I went. Talked to Jeff Clevenger a lot offline, as well as Mike Mason, Deborah Friedman, Warren Rehn(a little) and Dave Drips. All one on one.

My impressions from Jeffs presentation and these talks is that they are totally focused on Velardena, making it profitable, by getting the mill throughput consistent and increasing the recovery grades. They seem very pleased (Dave) in the progress in increasing the mill grades and making the operation a functioning silvermine. This guy really impressed me, and was very candid about the challenges in creating a profitable operation at Velardena. He's been really hurt by not having the equipment from Argentina. My number one concern in this company is that we will be acquired by some other entity for peanuts and once again be left diluted, and speaking with Jeff and Deborah I felt a little better in that they had some strategies in place to ward off hostile takeovers, like being incorporated in DE, and some other things. But in talking to Dave I got another impression of why at this point it's unlikely that a takeover would happen, and that is that the industry knows that Velardena is a very challenging project, and that other bigger players would sooner let Golden deal with the challenges and then in the future when things were stabilized and profitable would be more interested. And by this future time the market will also have recognized this is happening and the value (market cap) would reflect this. This makes a lot of sense to me and also gives me a greater understanding of why the market has been gunshy of this company.

I also got the impression, some from Jeffs presentation and some from private conversations that the company will be looking to sell some of it's exploration projects to raise cash for developing Velardena. They really want this to be the cornerstone of Golden Minerals going forward, and are prioritizing other properties to monetize. They are turning this from an exporation based company to a producing mid sized silver mine. (I know, duh!)

All of this is based on my impressions only, take from it what you will. I think IF they can breakeven with Velardena by year end, and IF they can monetize some stuff, that this will pay off for us long suffering stockholders. I'm sticking in and crossing my fingers.