Visited the KXL presentations and booth at the Vancouver conference today. Good showing, lots of KXL people there, crowded booths. For a recession, the booths were surprisingly mobbed.

In Meeting Room #9, while the computer slide show was being set up, Bill Chornobay regaled us with a story about Golden Gate. He had been doing some serious exploring there, but was unfortunately not using a marlin reel. The rod bent down deeply into the ocean and his buddies had to strap him in to keep the line in check. Long fish story, in the end a 10 foot blue marlin landed. This was Golden Gate Reef off Mexico.

Then the presentation began. Brian Maher did as usual a superb public speaking job. All the essential data is already in the .pdf you got in your email / on the KXL site. All samples have been reported, although these is still a mountain of data to analyse to figure the drilling for next year. Better understanding of Golden Mile structure gained, with multiple shoot directions. About 65,000m drilling done so far, to be 90,000m+ end of this year. 300 km of lineal strike extent to be explored - an enormous amount of prospects.

Good deal of focus to be on denser-spaced drilling to define Golden Mile. The more information gotten from the infill assays, the more magenta and hopefully red high-grade zones get filled in. Golden Mile moving firmly into resource definition stage. Most drilling will be shallow up to a few hundred meters, although there will likely also be a few deep holes.

By the way, Brian is happy/amused with the "Agoracom KXL Site Geophysical Department", if you can call it that here, and our attempts to map out the length of Golden Mile + Golden Extension. I asked about it. Total length is 8 to 9 km, impossible to be more precise because endpoints are unknown / fuzzy. Golden Mile main section is 3 km. From last significant finding in NW Golden Mile, up to Sage border, gap is 3 to 3.5 km (6 km KXL total as per .pdf). However, the veins split and don't run in a straight line, and the relatively unexplored space is in a very swampy region. Some drilling will happen while ice is in.

The main drill efforts are going into finding more gold in the main section of the Golden Mile - "stratigraphal" holes (my father was a stratigrapher - would warm his heart). Gold Rush (Kaby Lake) also had good drill results, better than even channel sampling suggested, and that deposit is very wide - not the 10m reported initially, but 30 or 40m wide gold deposited in potassium feldspar-replaced intrusion. Gold Rush will get a lot of attention, plus exploration of the many veins and systems parallel to the Golden Mile. Total spending this year to be approx. $6m on Hercules, plus a bit for elsewhere and Uranium.

There is an error or update needed on total land holdings - 1400 sq km should read 2400 sq km, according to land man. Two drills starting up on Hercules 1st week of February. There are no backlogs in the laboratories any more, and KXL is one of the very few with money - many others won't be able to afford to drill, so the labs should keep up well. SGX has a bit in the kitty now ($3m?) and will actively drill this year.

The horrible state of the junior explorer stock markets was acknowledged. But, nothing goes down or up forever. In the meanwhile, KXL has one of 300 or so greenstone-hosted deposits around the world, and apparently an average grade for the others is ~9g/t, so we are in good company.

Uranium - much more happening now, even though it's very early days. This looks to become a major part of the company. Keith Metcalfe presented West Millenium, a very lucky parcel to have with a serendipitous 1988 historic hole that just happened to find the grey (graphite altered) clay and radioactivity associated with a uranium plume. I believe he said property is 16 x 18 km = about 300 sq km. Electromagnetic survey in progress and I believe there will be a drill hole and results in the next few weeks. Any uranium plume would be just above bedrock at 600-700m deep. Compares very well with Hathor, and with the Millenium property of Cameco next door. Presentation a bit overwordy and underslidey (needed many less words and more slides, especially 1st slide with 15 lines of dense text) but I got the gist that the property is great and so is the geo talent - in addition to Keith, "new" old pros Paul Ogryzlo and Rodney Koch joined.

Trevor Bremner presented Otish / Big Bang. Trevor is a superb speaker, very classy. Otish exciting because of accidentally-found very high showings including yellow uranite discovered under very shallow overburden of 1 to 3 metres - i.e. findings are at bedrock which is directly under the surface, instead of 600m down. Small backhoe will be helicoptered in. Similar situation to Strateco's Matoush uranium project. Extensive exploration to be carried out in Summer, camp already in place. Geomag impressive. Que gov't covers 42% of all exploration costs. Multiple other parcels also in region, next to e.g. Cameco. Land holdings 440 sq km - I wasn't clear on whether that was just Otish, or all of the Que properties.

Stephen Roach was to be found in the booth and in his understated way further illuminated me. More sophisticated and detailed geomagnetic/geotechnical & geophysical work to be done in Hercules area.

Further data of interest in one or more areas is likely to be released before PDAC show March 1-4, 2009 in Toronto.

I intend to return tomorrow, so if you have specific questions I might be able to pose some of them. All best / cedartree