Exploring & Mining in Top American Jurisdictions

0:01 Okay, as folks start filtering into the room, I will say good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from. I know there's lots of people in the room today, so I really appreciate everybody joining us for, I think, a pretty exciting event on mining in American jurisdictions, the top American jurisdictions, really, more precisely. I think there's a lot to go over today, so I do want it to be an interactive event. There's a chat button at the bottom of the screen. Please feel free to ask questions at any point during today's event. It's very likely I'm not going to get to questions about individual securities, but don't worry, I've got a lot of questions to help all these speakers update you on their individual projects. If you do have any questions I don't get to, I'd still love to see them in the chat. I'm just going to make sure they get to the appropriate speaker after the event ends, and their team will be able to get back to you using either the email or the phone number that you used to register with.

0:50 So please do put comments in the chat, even if we don't actually get to those questions today. I'll also say that there's a meeting request button at the bottom of the screen. Really encourage you guys to use that if you'd like to meet with any or all of the speakers today during or following the event. Once I close the room, it will still be up. I encourage you to take advantage of it and press that button just so you have a chance to potentially meet with some of these teams after the event is over to learn more about the opportunity. I will be asking questions about individual securities, but if you want to really do a deep dive, please feel free to visit any of their websites or also hit that request meeting button at the bottom. Last piece of housekeeping before I get into the good stuff, the protein, is that today's event is being recorded and will be available for replay probably in the early afternoon Eastern time. So expect around 1 or 2. It'll pop up at the same link, but it'll also be on Six's YouTube channel.

1:42 That's the boring stuff out of the way. I want to get into talking about the US of A and some of the best jurisdictions to mine there. I want to set the table though first because as recently as a couple of years ago, when I think all of us in the room are still working in mining, American mining was a bit more of what I would call a talking point in Washington. It was still mining, but it wasn't really as front and center as it is today. Where gold's holding above $4,300, which even

2:04 in a bad week for gold, still a good number. Margins are still great. And silver is still in the mid-60s. And everybody in the room here is spending real money in the ground in Arizona, Alaska and Idaho. So what I want to know, and Rick, I'm going to start with you from where each of you said, what's actually changed about operating the United States over the past year and what's more press release than reality even now? That's a great question. I think the single thing that means it's the most important is that we have both sides of the political aisle in the United States talking about metals and even got a name now, they call them critical metals. And So that's a significant difference from several years ago. It's taken several years to sort of build this case up. But I think both sides of the political aisle recognize that we're 30 years behind China.

2:57 In the 70s, we passed Clean Air and Water Acts, which were absolutely necessary to clean up our air and water. But the consequence of that was shutting down all the smelters and having a very anti-mining

3:12 lobby, a very effective and very active anti-mining lobby. And I think politically, we recognize that we paid for that now and we offshored that mostly to China. China has been very active in that space, gaining ground for the last 30 plus years, not only in their own country, but in places like Africa. You can't go to Africa and not run into a lot of competition from China. So I think the political recognition that we're way behind and we need to catch up. Things like FAST-41, President Trump has used to accelerate the permitting process. And I don't really like the FAST moniker, the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act is why it was named FAST. It was about getting through the permitting process more efficiently, not really going around things.

4:07 Of course, the NGO lobby is who they love the term FAST. They think it's great to raise money on. It's been, we're using it now with our Johnson Track project. I think that's what permitting ought to look like. And basically, it's really simple. We agree on a timeline with the federal agencies that we're permitting with to review projects and to review documents. And we stick to the timelines. That's all it is. And it's what makes it nice is it's on a public transparent dashboard

4:40 that the public can see. And so if we're on schedule and they stay on schedule, we get our permits in a reasonable amount of time. And 1 to 2 years, depending on your project and depending on all the inputs, that's a reasonable amount of time. And so anyways, I'm sure we'll talk more about litigation reform as well as permitting reform. Now That isn't the list. I do like explaining to Canadians that the names of American legislation don't necessarily mean what they say. It can be a little misleading. But Kevin, I'll throw it to you for what have you seen on the ground that's different in the kind of modern, modern era for American mining? Well what's different? Well, Number 1, for us being in Arizona, you've really got to start with the geology.

5:27 We're there to make mineral discoveries. We're not a producing store now, but the geology has to be favourable. Arizona has a long history of mining, going back to the late 1800s when patented claims came about and they said, okay, look, you go West and we'll give you the mineral rights and the surface rights. That's really for us the combination. There are many reasons. What's changed? The geology has always been there. It's always been great for us. It's a long-standing, known legal basis in which to advance projects, and also having the ability to own, as we do.

6:09 There's no federal nexus for us. And that's just 3 great words, because we are on private patented ground. That hasn't changed in well over 100-years and for us that's key to advancing our project.

6:27 As Rick's pointed out, the whole environment for mining has changed. There are millions and millions of dollars that are being pumped into the system, obviously for partnerships, not just loans, but equity investments into companies. The awareness around that there's going to be further education, that we're losing mining engineers, we're losing geologists. There's a lot of competition by other industries for these talents. The US government specifically has come out and said very clearly, we need more talent and we are willing to invest into the infrastructure to create more talent. That means schools. That means education.

7:08 That's really what's changing in real time. You've got a significant awareness around the US government for sourcing their own critical minerals, but of course precious metals as well, which is the space we're in. So, that's really, obviously, as Rick, just to jump on what Rick was saying, the environment has changed and for the better for mining. Awesome. Appreciate it. And We will get to critical minerals later because there's certainly somebody in the chat who's already asked about it. That will come up today. But Oliver, I want to give you the last word on what's new basically for mining in American jurisdictions as America's Gold and Silver is. Yeah, for sure. And thanks for having me on. In Idaho, there's a long history of mining and obviously where Galena is, which is America's primary asset or flagship asset located in Idaho.

7:57 In the Silver Valley there, there's a long history of mining. Mining began there in the 1880s, rather. In Galena, it began in 1893. So the Silver Valley really is an area where, you know, mining has been going on for well over 130 years. It's actually an area that has a multi-generational history of mining talent and strong mining talent pool there. So while there's definitely a shortage, I'd say nationally speaking, there's no shortage of talent in the Silver Valley. It's fed by areas such as Coeur d'Alene, you've got Kellogg and then Wallace where we're located as well. Building on what Rick and Kevin have both said, there's definitely investment happening right from the mining school level. We've seen a lot of injection of capital into mining schools across the United States, which is great. It takes time to build these talent pools, whether that's geologists, miners, engineers, the full gamut. There's been a lot of investment there. And then on the project level, look, Project Vault, a $12 billion initiative by the US government to invest into critical metals and secure stockpiles. So for the viewers there that are not familiar with Project Vault, The United States has had a critical reserve of oil for decades now, basically since the 1970s.

9:09 And now the country is looking to build a critical reserve of multiple critical metals. And all the metals that we're talking about here on the show today are all on that critical metal list. Of course, silver is our primary metal at America's Gold and Silver, but we also have antimony, we also have lead, we also have copper, and we have a small bit

9:28 of gold ourselves. So huge initiative by the US government to basically secure domestic supply chains. To Rick's point, with all the smelter going offshore to China, there's a big initiative to build more processing facilities in the United States again as well. So having that mine to mill, to smelter and complete a product right into a critical metal stockpile is something that the U.S. Government is pushing. And that benefits all the projects here on this call today with your oil in Alaska, Arizona or Idaho. So really sort of the golden year of mining is restarting. From a permitting perspective, as I mentioned before, the Silver Valley, mining has been going on there for generations. Our mining permitting process, we are a fully operational mine and have been since 1893. It's more just small tailings, expansions and things like that that we have to permit. So no issues there whatsoever. But at the federal level, we're seeing a huge push across the board to get more of these projects started.

10:24 Awesome. I appreciate that. One thing I noticed putting this panel together is there's kind of a, I'll call it a pattern, hiding in plain sight. That's Rick. He renamed the company Contango Silver and Gold this year, following a merger with Dolly Varden. Kevin acquired 3 past producing Silver mines, his newest drill holes loaded with Silver and Zinc. And Oliver, you guys obviously have been building a Silver company through most of this cycle. Silver has gone from more of a forgotten metal almost to nearly $70 really this week. Now settling back around

10:55 $65. The industrial demand from solar, data centers, electrification, eating up a lot of supply. And I'm curious, and Kevin, I'll start with you here. What are you each seeing in Silver that made you commit real capital and even some corporate identity to it? And how much room do you think this trade has left? Well, we love Silver, number 1. Our geological system is very Silver-rich. The McCabe mine, which is our key asset, is on trend with these past producing Silver mines. It's donational and we have some extremely high-grade Silver mines. It's really for us a function of geology and it's strategic to us to do these acquisitions.

11:41 But of course, we love Silver. We are very constructive on price and typically Silver trades in a ratio to Gold. It's been higher and it's been lower. It seems like it's sort of in the mid-range here. And from our perspective, We're constructive on the whole metals complex. We do have, as I mentioned, we have Zinc and Copper targets as well, but primarily a Gold and Silver asset. We're very constructive on the price. And why? Well, it really boils down. I think you get it 80% right if you figure out where the monetary policy in the U.S. Debt is going. You kind of get it 90% right. Of course, there's more industrial demand for silver and those types of things, which will, of course, chew away at the margin. But fundamentally,

12:32 the big picture here is U.S. Debt. As long as U.S. Debt's going higher, gold prices are going higher. And that's just been the trend since the beginning of time. And really seen since the early 2000s, going from 2 trillion in debt now to north of $40 trillion in debt, not including unfunded liabilities. You know, you've seen gold prices go lock and step with U.S. Debt. So yes, where do we think it's going? We think it's going higher. As long as you think U.S. Debt is going higher and the monetary policy has to follow, then we're very constructive on Gold and Silver.

13:05 Awesome. And I for 1 see no shortage of U.S. Debt in the future. I think we went across $40 trillion recently. I see that number getting unfortunately higher. But Oliver, I'll throw it to you for What's America's Gold and Silver's position on where Silver can go from here? There's still more to this bid. Oh yeah. And look, Silver is obviously no stranger to this company. It really is the anchor of what we do at America's Gold and Silver. I should point out that it's America's Silver and Gold because about 85% of our revenue does come from Silver at the moment. And we've been a Silver-focused company for a long period of time now. Galena, which is our primary asset in the Silver Valley, is one of the highest-grade Silver mines in the world. We're running about 500 to 600 grams silver there, over 200 million ounces of silver. So also one of the world's largest silver mines.

13:53 And our neighbors are some of the highest grade mines in the world too. In fact, I think in the 1970s or early 1980s, the Silver Valley accounted for over 50% of all the silver mine in the US. So it really is a massive silver producing region. And we happen to be sitting on top of some of the highest grade assets anywhere in the world. We'll talk about some of the exploration successes we've had later. But taking a step back on silver itself, Kevin mentioned there's sort of 2 sides to it. There's the monetary side, the industrial side. So it kind of benefits from both aspects of what's going on globally. Obviously, global macro forces, you talk about the debt balance and everything that's driving up those interest payments, of course, and then the inability for basically the Fed to realistically hike rates on given what they're sitting on. That's going to be positive for all precious metals.

14:41 But on the industrial side, we produce about 1.1 billion ounces of silver annually. Sorry, we have a demand for 1.1 billion ounces and we produce about 800 million ounces. There's about 200 to 300 million ounce per year shortfall and that's including all the recycling that we have globally. Over the last 15 years, you've seen enormous industrial demand out of solar production, predominantly out of China, who's gone from essentially no solar production to now generating more energy from solar than they do coal. So it's the old blink of an eye, which I know when they decide to do something they do it faster than anybody can believe. And they've done that with solar and you're seeing solar rollout through other parts of the world as well. You've also got obviously the data center aspect of demand. You've got actually solid state batteries that are being

15:27 rolled out in several vehicles. China is dominating the global EV game. What does that mean for silver demand? These batteries are using more silver, not less. So the industrial underpinning of the demand isn't going away anywhere anytime soon. And we've had 7 consecutive years of a shortfall. Let's talk about the supply side. There are very few primary silver mines in the world. 70% of silver comes as a byproduct from other metals, predominantly base metals. So what that means is with silver prices moving up, you basically have a supply that's inelastic. It's not like a whole bunch of primary Silver mines are being discovered. Some of the guys in this call right here are actively looking for more Silver in their areas to deliver into that supply deficit. But it is very hard to bring primary silver mines online. As I said, most of it is driven by large base metal operations.

16:19 We have a period of time here. You talk about how long is this trade still alive? I don't think it's a trade. I think it's a structural deficit that we're in and that's going to persist for a significant period of time here because you just do not have enough physical silver to satisfy the demand side of things. It is very hard to bring on any meaningful new supply. Look, some of the largest silver mines in the world are producing about 20 million ounces of silver a year. I just talked about a 300 million ounce deficit. How many mines do you need to find? Your viewers are no strangers to mining. It takes 15 to 20 years to find a new mine and then bring it online from grassroots discovery all the way through to permitting and finally production. So it is tough to find more silver. So to answer your question, silver will go much higher on the industrial side. You've got Big Brother in gold leading into what is a very dangerous fiscal situation for the United States and for the world over the next 5 to 10 years here. So I think both metals are going much higher and the leverage that Silver companies have to the metal is unbelievable. We traded about 1.51 times on a beta basis. So if you're interested in Silver, you're listening to this call, own some of these names because when it moves, and it has moved over the last 2 years, but you haven't seen anything yet, It'll move a lot faster than what we've seen. So very exciting.

17:34 Awesome. Appreciate it. Rick, I'll let you close it off. Actually changed your name this year or late last year to Contango Silver and Gold. Obviously a bet on Silver. So I'd love to hear your perspective. Yeah. I mean, as Kevin mentioned, it's really about the geology and that's what we liked about the Gitzelt Valley. I think both Kevin and Oliver talked a lot about why Silver and its uses, and with all the AI robotics, military battery technology, we're going to see a lot more use of silver, continued use of silver. And that's, it's insignificant that it's now called a critical metal as well as a precious metal. That's the first time we've seen that. So that's a good thing. I always call silver the emotional metal because I also call her a drama queen because it just moves so much more radical than any other metal.

18:25 Part of that's I think related to what Aller was talking about, this paper, the creation of paper silver, which dominates the price, the day-to-day price. But for the people who want to actually, like Samsung, who built a $5 billion battery manufacturing facility, solid-state battery manufacturing facility, they need physical silver. They don't need that paper crap. And so when you look at what the spot price for physical silver is in the Shanghai exchange, it's $8 to $10 more than the paper price. Well, that's part of that whole deficit that we're

19:04 talking about. There's a if you need to if you need real silver to build real stuff, you're going to pay a premium for it. And when it gets out of whack and it gets out of whack quite frequently and because it because of the supply inelasticity in the supply chain that Kevin, that Oliver was referring to, that's why it gets emotional. And it just, it's, you know, you saw silver go to 120 bucks And now we're back in the, we're almost 0.5 that. But that's what Silver does. It's why it's a drama queen, goes up and down, doesn't know whether it's precious, doesn't know whether it's industrial. It's both. And so it reacts that way. That's a bit of a reality TV star compared to gold.

19:51 Keep track of it more day to day. It's a little trickier. Rick, I'll start with you on this next one, because I know you've been finding and building mines in Alaska since the late 70s, not to date you. He looks a little older than he is, folks in the audience, hate to tell you. But I do want to start with you. American districts like Silver Valley, McKay Belt, Interior Alaska are all discovered by prospectors over a century ago, right? And then abandoned by modern exploration for decades while the industry went chasing projects overseas in Mali and Latin America, etc. Do you think what we're looking at now is the great re-rating of American brownfields, where the best returns aren't coming from a grassroots discovery, but from putting all our modern science and modern metal prices on the ground that the old timers already proved. Well, certainly, look, the old adage is the best place to find a mine is next to the headframe.

20:43 And AI will tell you the same thing, in fact. If you've got lots of data, lots of information, that's where AI is going to tell you to start your drills. Grassroots is a lot of fun. As an exploration geologist going to new jurisdictions is a lot of fun, but there are huge, huge challenges. Mineral deposits are basically formed as leftovers of fluids evolving from rock-forming processes.

21:17 They travel around and then they find a nice spot that they like because of the set of circumstances, heat, pressure, chemistry, and they form a district scales. And so That's the thing that we focus on as geologists, is we're looking for that district scale potential. And once you understand, once you put enough knowledge and enough money and talent to understanding the district scale controls and form a predictive model, that's where you can get your exponential growth and your success rate in terms of having a drill hole actually hit something. Grassroots is you're starting with a clean slate and you've got to do a lot of work to figure out what's what geologically. What kind of a system are you looking at and how do you go about exploring it?

22:08 You know, exploring new terrains and whether it's Northern Canada or Greenland or remote part of Alaska or Angola or Indonesia, wherever, not only do you have to, you know, you don't have a lot of geologic knowledge, but you're also, you don't have a strong mining history there. And so when you're going, you know, when you're trying to sit down with the government and talk to them about developing a mine, they really don't have any history. And I think both Kevin and Oliver mentioned that when you go into an old mining district in the United States, people understand mining. It's on the license plate in Arizona. It's on the crest in the state of Alaska. It has a miner in the corner and it's got those fishermen and a timber guy.

22:59 Those are where it starts if you want to actually build a mine, you have to have a community that understands mining. If you don't, you've got a long uphill battle. In Alaska, we've got a regulatory environment with not just the federal government now, but the state government has always been very pro-mining. And Alaska Need Corporation selected land that was focused on mining because, frankly, the state and federal government took all the oil and gas potential. So they had land that had mineral potential to explore, to select and

23:37 have it become their private land to generate wealth for generations. Grassroots is fun, but it takes a long, long time. And when you're raising capital, certainly as a junior explorer, you have to really understand whether you're going to allocate capital to that long-term game of going somewhere new. And you can be very successful. Companies like Snowline have done it. But those are 1 in 10,000.

24:11 The odds are certainly tougher, as fun as it is. Kevin, I'll throw the same question to you. Do you think this is really a renaissance for brownfields in US jurisdictions? Well I think we have metal prices where they are and the huge move we've had in Gold. Gold 2000 was the hope for a very long time. And then it blew through that and now we're in where it is. Prices have moved significantly. Copper is almost US$7.

24:44 These projects have been around geologically for a lot longer than, you know, hundreds of millions of years, in some cases over 1 billion years. So yes, the shorter answer is metal prices are driving this and the demand is driving it. There are lots of exceptional projects, including the one that we have, a high-grade past producer that sat in private hands for 40-years.

25:10 Why did we go knocking on that door? Why did we do the deal? It is because we believe that there is going to be continued demand for precious metals and all these different metals for the foreseeable future. So yes, that has certainly reinvigorated the metal space and these projects that have been, you know, maybe non-economic at a $1,000 Gold or $1,200 Gold, $4,300 Gold, $4,500 Gold and $70 Silver, people start to peel back the dirt, do some work for sure. The math certainly changes. I try to explain to people, even the pullback from $5,000 to $4,300, there's still a lot of money to be made in an ounce of Gold. Well, I mean, go back 2.5 years. If you had said you were going to have a $5,000 Gold price, people would have, or, you

26:03 know, $120 Silver, people would have looked at you like you were crazy. But this is where they go, right? I mean, this is where they go. And I don't think that, you know, there's any chance of them slowing down. I mean, They may pause for a little while, as they do, and certainly there's profit taking, but the cycle seems to be firmly intact. With the Renaissance that's taking place in the space of technology and the 100-year-old infrastructure in the US that needs to be updated, excluding the fact that we're going into this AI world and everything else that goes with it. The electrification of everything, Certainly Silver is only going higher and Copper is only going higher. And as you know, of course, we expect Gold to go higher.

26:55 But project quality is project quality. And at the end of the day, a project really has to work at a long-term Gold and Silver price that makes sense. So even though there is a new renaissance in projects, for sure, it will always come back to grade and still projects that have other challenges will always remain. It's about having quality projects at the end of the day as well. Great. Thank you, Kevin. Oliver, I'll let you finish off on this question before we jump into permitting. Any other thoughts on Renaissance, Brownfields and US jurisdictions? Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, obviously there's the old adage, the best place to find a new mine is next to an existing mine.

27:42 And sometimes that even goes for restarting other mines. So in the Silver Valley, we've obviously got the Galena complex, which did a huge amount of infrastructure there, took over $2Bn of infrastructure, 4 shafts, 120 miles of underground development, massive resource, 2 mills on surface, as we talked about, all fully in operation. But late last year, what we did is we went out and bought another neighbouring mine. In fact, all of the mines in the Silver Valley, due to fragmented ownership over the course

28:08 of the last 150,140 to 150 years, are actually connected underground. So we hopped over on the other side of Sunshine and we picked up the Crescent mine, which is neighbouring Bunker Hill as well. So That was a mine that hadn't seen any production in decades. We're now in the process of revitalizing that mine, leveraging all the existing infrastructure, infill drilling the resource, which is a very high-grade resource as well as doing some exploration deep. The door is wide open for these opportunities. Now, as Kevin said, it's really metal price that unlocks the doors for these projects, but you also need to be in a jurisdiction that is amenable to groups such as us doing this. In Idaho, what we have here and what we have in the Silver Valley, everybody talks about a long mining history there.

28:53 I said it probably 5 times on the call already, but what you don't necessarily get without that is predictability. We have very predictable permitting environments, whether it's for tailings expansions, whether it's for restarting operations, air quality permits. We also have predictability in terms of the workforce. We have that predictability in terms of the supply chains. We have predictability right across the board and everything that's required to service these things including community relationships. So that's a strong advantage here and I think with the environment that we're in now, restarting these past producing operations or brownfield explorations is an area that is really going to continue to accelerate, unlocked by metal price, but really by the way that various states decide to do their business and how they let groups such as ourselves, you know, basically roll into to move these projects forward. Now, all of that to say, there are very strict requirements still in place and they need to be in place. Rick started talking about them in the beginning of the call here.

29:53 We all need to abide by these timelines and abide by these strict standards and we are. Those standards are in place, but things are just moving faster, which is excellent. And

30:02 we're all taking advantage of them, no matter which state we're in. Now, there's one other comment, I don't think it'll come up in some of the future questions, but I think one of the things that investors need to appreciate is the margins that companies that are in production and producing Gold and Silver are just so vastly different from what they have traditionally been. I don't think investors have caught on to this because when I started in the mining business, Gold mining business in Nevada in the 80s, a good mine, Gold price was $350, $400. A good mine had a $50 to $100 margin. A good mine today has a $2,000 margin in gold. A good mine, a good silver mine has a $40, $50 margin in silver.

30:52 So they're just in the producing companies, ourselves included, are generating a huge amount of cash flow. So that's it's a different business than it has been. And that's because these metal prices are where they are. And if you think gold's going to 2000. Well, you shouldn't be investing in gold. So you know, so if you think Silver is going back to 20, you know, 20 bucks or $15, you shouldn't be investing in Silver. But if you think $40 trillion of debt is meaningful, those prices, all the metal prices are going higher. So that's just the way it's going to be. I definitely appreciate that. And certainly agree. One

31:32 thing I want to talk about before I get into individual questions for your projects, because there's one thing that I think all of your stories have in common that makes them some of my favorite projects. None of you are betting your flagship on a decade long federal permitting fight, which is something I appreciate with working with what 60 some mining companies. That's not always the case. Kevin, you're anchored on private land, patented claims. Rick, you're on private Alaska Native Corporation land. Oliver, you're in a 140 year operating district. So my question, Oliver, I'll start with you. Is the real secret to mining in America less about the state flag or who's in Congress or who's sitting in the State House and more about just land status? I'd love to know how much that shapes what you're each able to do. Oh yeah. Without question, if you don't have a minimal permitting environment, reasonable timelines and infrastructure that's set up to service these projects, once they are kicked into development, nothing can move forward here. I think all 3 of us are in outstanding states. The one obvious sort of notable exclusion that's not on this call right now is Nevada, right?

32:36 That's another state that has a long history of wonderful mining permitting situations and moving land forward. So yeah, absolutely. You know, I mentioned before previously, having that predictability and understanding who you're dealing with, whether it's at the regulators, how long things can take, what you can expect, and then moving through the various processes with clarity, that really, really matters. And in Idaho, it's been that way for quite a period of time. And then look at the Silver Valley, as I said, in continuous operation for 140 plus years. So, you know, trying to

33:06 push an exceptional, we all know them, that there's some absolutely fantastic projects globally speaking that, you know, would have been developed 50 years ago had they not been in the jurisdictions that they are, some of the greatest minds in the world are located in very tricky jurisdictions and that makes them for a lot of people quite uninvestable. So coming back to the United States and the states that we're in, it's really, really important to have that clarity. And I think all of us have that and all of us have strong relationships with regulators in our various jurisdictions and move that forward. So that's something that you don't get in every country in the world, but you certainly do in the US. Definitely. Rick, I'll throw it to you for your strategy on picking projects on which land? Well, I haven't worked on federal land for 30 years, and there's one reason. It's just a complete pain in the butt.

33:55 And the reason is, by law, you're working on federal land. The public gets a say by a public comment on EAs and EISs on whether mining is the best use of that land. So this is where the anti-mining NGOs have a field day. They raise money and stop projects because the land is better used as habitat for fill in the blanks. The last great wilderness, it's endangered species, pristine water, I like to canoe there, hiking, air quality,

34:27 just enjoying nature. It's just mining wasn't, the public says mining's not the best use of that land, then it's really challenging to get a permit on federal land. And that's not going to change until we get permitting reform and you have to have permitting reform as 1 step. That means, you know, getting, basically creating a system like FAST-41 where everybody agrees here's the timeline and we're gonna get it done. That we can do that under FAST-41, but that's executive privilege. That's, this administration sees as important, so they're using FAST-41 to get things done. Next administration might not see it that way. So until you get Congress to act, and I don't have any great hopes that Congress can do much of anything right now.

35:20 So I'm not going to hold my breath. But if you're if so, if you're working on federal land, most Western states have federal federal land or waters. And that's this WOTUS terminology, Waters of the United States, that means you have to deal with feds. And so until we get permitting reform, that's going to be the way it is. Now in Alaska, I mentioned this earlier that Alaska, under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Alaska's native peoples had the right to choose land. Well, again, the federal and state governments got to pre-select all the potential lands for, federal lands for oil and gas, some might say stole,

36:06 but that left the data corporations to select land that either had mineral potential or forest. Obviously, the forests are in southern Alaska, so if you're up north, there are no trees. NANA selected Red Dog, it became one of the largest Zinc mines in the world and fundamentally changed the Northwest Arctic. They formed their own government. So that's the state of empowerment, right? If you have your own government that says, this is how we want to do business and this is how we want to live. In our case, Cook Inlet Regional Corporation or CIRI chose Johnson Track and the Tetlin tribe, they already own the land, their traditional lands at Moncho. So we're all working on private land. So again, you're not going to get around needing federal permits generally because you're going to have to build a road or in our case was build a road and you're building a road, you're disturbing wetlands, that means you need a wet 404 permit. So, you know, our whole business model was to try to minimize how much federal permitting we had to go through. So, you know, Montreal, we built an 18 mile road, a Johnson tractor building about a 20 mile road. So you're going to have federal, that federal nexus is pretty hard to get away from, but if you can minimize it, you're saving yourself a lot of time and effort. So that's what we've done as a business plan.

37:30 Like I said, until Congress fixes permitting and litigation reform so that you can't drag out things forever in court, I'm still going to avoid working on federal lands. There you go. I think shrewd. Kevin, I'll throw it to you for what you think land status matters in US states. Well, I mean, it's I think it's all been said. We're on private patent ground as well. And we're a new company. We only enlisted since March. And this asset, it was just critical for us for that it's on patent and private ground so that we weren't having to deal with the federal government. So for us, it was a box that needed to be checked in order for us to go forward on the project. So for us, it was critical.

38:21 Awesome. And I'm going to get into some project specific questions because people are asking for it over email and in the chat. And Kevin, I will start with you because somebody specifically asked pretty early about what you think about latest results. So I do want to get in the news. You just wrapped phase 1 with, to me, a genuine surprise. Holes 5 and 6 hit zinc silver, BMS-style mineralization, only about 150 meters below surface, on trend with the Iron King mine that historically produced 5.7Mt of polymetallic ore. It was mined below a kilometre depth. So you went in drilling for Gold veins, came out with a second style of mineralization. What are the holes telling you about what's sitting in this district? Yes, what's really interesting about our project, we've got 2 very robust mineral systems.

39:09 The first being, or the youngest, Laramide Orogeny, really Rocky Mountain building timeframe. We have a mesothermal Gold system, which is what the McCabe system, McCabe Gold mine and Silver mine

39:22 was formed from. Now, this structure, it has parallel structures, many parallel structures all formed through these Rocky Mountain building events, created these Mesothermal Gold and Silver deposits. But in the same area, in the same geological environment, we have much older rocks as well, which are protozoic. They're well over 1 billion years old. And this is ancient seafloor. This is volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits, which Arizona is also well known for. That is what the Iron King mine is, which we drive by on the way to our mine. It produced nearly 1 billion pounds of Zinc, 1 million ounces of Gold and many millions of ounces of Silver. And that coincidentally is completely on trend with our cave deposit.

40:08 Without getting into too much geology, yes, on hole number 6 we hit 28% Zinc, a little over a metre, but it was really 90 feet of what looks like to be VMS style mineralization. It was a very small drill program, but we're getting these things that were outside of the scope for the mesothermal Gold. We did have, Of course, we had Gold hits and Silver hits, but we're seeing this VMS style mineralization, which is obviously very interesting for us, for sure. Absolutely. And in August, you also closed the acquisition of 3, as we kind of already talked about, past producing high-grade Silver mines about a kilometre northeast of McCabe, consolidating what you guys are calling the Eagle Silver project. You commissioned a SkyTem airborne survey over the whole package. This is a ground that hasn't really, we mentioned this earlier, hasn't really seen modern exploration. So what does it mean to be the first ones flying modern geophysics over mines the old timers were kind of working by hand?

41:08 Well, no, I mean, it's incredibly exciting because, you know, back to the Brownfield thing, you know, what brought us to this district was the McCabe Gold mine. It's a high-grade, it produced nearly 12g Gold, 70g Silver. It has a high-grade historic resource. We also have a 15ft concrete line production shaft that we're investigating the merits of getting underground. Well, even though the merits are very high for getting underground and drilling from underground, but it's this system. On trend, we have these incredibly high-grade, we've sampled as high as 850g per tonne Silver at surface and 0.5oz per tonne Gold on these silver past producing silver mines on trend, kind of between our mine

41:52 and the Iron King mine that produced many millions of ounces of Silver and million ounces of Gold. So it's an incredibly prolific system and these things were only mined to shallow depths, mining what can be considered the oxides, which would have been easier to recover before milling was a thing back in the early 1900s. They had stamp mills, but they would typically recover the high-grade oxides. For us, they're open 5, 10X the depth, but they start at surface and only go to 150m. So very strategic in the sense that yes, they are past producing, they are high-grade, but we have 12 of these past producing mines on our structure. So consolidating these was very important. And of course, again, we love the Silver complex. So it was very, very important for us to get these assets.

42:44 Okay. And last one for you, Kevin, before I jump on. You're an hour from Prescott in Yavapai County, working on private land, as you said, one of the deepest mining workforces in the country. What investors might not know about Arizona Eagle, maybe, is that there are over 10 past producing mines on your project, across nearly 8km of strike length. And the McCabe mine itself has a 15-foot diameter concrete line shaft. That's a lot of infrastructure and history. What does that mean for the project to have all that already existing? Well, it's incredible. I mean, The fact that we have this 15-foot concrete line shaft would cost us probably US$40M and take us from get-go, probably over a year to put in. That infrastructure for us is incredible.

43:33 We've got kilometres of underground workings as well, which we could theoretically establish drill stations. We work very close to power lines. We're actually working on getting easements to re-establish that infrastructure. We're off a paved highway.

43:48 The infrastructure, as far as we're concerned, is second to none. So having this, again, the guys who had it last, Magma Copper, which was ultimately bought by BHP in the early 90s, there was probably CAD$100M of infrastructure invested. And we just get to pick up where they left off. And what's changed is Gold price has gone up 15 times. There you go. That's a decent change. Rick, I'll throw it to you. I don't think I asked you about Johnson Tract enough, so I want to start there. At Johnson Tract, you've already been through the federal permitting process to build the road connecting to the proposed portal site. I'd love if you could just give folks in the room who follow Cotango Silver and Gold or hear about it for the first time. An update on how that's progressing and what's going on at Johnson Track generally right now.

44:39 Well, we've almost finished building the road. We had 2 bridges to put in across some large, well, 1 we call Double Glacier Creek, but it's actually quite a substantial run of water, and then also Johnson River. So all of that is actually completed. We're actually building the portal pad right now. We'll probably have a press release out just and show this on our website with some photos. But, you know, we are also, in addition to, you know, been doing all the hard construction on the ground, we're in the FAST-41 permitting process for building a road down to the coast and building a barge landing facility. We are using our direct shipping model where we are mining at site, but a very small environmental footprint at the mine site.

45:31 We are permitting a quarry operation, which is done completely under state regulations. There's no federal nexus because we're working on private land, you know, what we've been talking about. But to get down to the coast, we've got to cross wetlands and we have to build something, a barge landing facility in the water. So those are, those both have federal nexus and we're working through the permitting process with FAST 41, which is, again, that's the way permitting ought to work. We all agree on what the, what we need to submit in terms of information

46:03 and how we're going to build this, how we're going to operate it, how we're going to reclaim it. That's all part of the permitting process in today's modern mining world. That's what's going on at Johnson Track. I'm excited. I was just there last week. Other than the snow creeping down the mountains, it was a really good trip. Other than snow in August, which I suppose does happen in some parts of the world. But I do want to talk about your producing mine, because Moncho, and I don't get to say this but a lot of companies I work with has paid back its entire investment on the project already. North Pit's mined out, you're moving into the higher grade South Pit. The third campaign of the year guided at 11,000, 12,000 ounces to your account. So as the mine heads into the back half of its life, What should investors on this call, and there's a few hundred of them, understand about how it finishes? And kind of interestingly, just a curiosity, what the site looks like when it's done? Because I think the footprint is going to be a little different than a conventional mine. Yeah. So, in our model, we don't build mills, tailings facilities, and don't need a big, huge diesel power plant to run all that.

47:05 When you get to the end of the mine life and you're doing your reclamation plan, there's a whole bunch of stuff we don't have to do either.

47:16 That's a big deal as well. We can always continue to explore the land. The Tetlin tribe would love us to continue to explore and either extend the mine life or find something new. So that's something we're looking at. So,

47:35 using this direct shipping ore model, not only is the small footprint to get the mine started, but it's also a small footprint when you're wrapping things up. I was just recently at a mine site here in Alaska that was reclaimed back in the mid-90s. It was an open pit mine. It's now a lake, teeming with fish, stocked with Grayling and trout. That's what a reclaimed mine site can look like in Alaska. And Kunross is the other operator at Moncho. They have an exemplary reputation. They've been working with Trout Unlimited. So, I'm confident the reclamation plan for Moncho, basically the open pits will become lakes.

48:24 It won't cost a lot of money. In our operating budget, we set aside money for the reclamation plan. That's the way we do things in Alaska. It's just how you have to operate. The state of Alaska doesn't want to get stuck reclaiming the thing. So they may just put money aside. And that's the reclamation fund. So it's already

48:44 pre-funded if you will. So that's the way the modern mining industry works. It's not like it was 100 years ago. That makes sense. And I do want to briefly bring up Lucky Shot because that's kind of your encore, in my opinion, to my show. Feasibility starting first half of 2027, production targeted for 2028, aiming at 40,000oz to 50,000oz annually, which is certainly no slouch. And the underground drilling keeps hitting new spectacular grades every time I take a peek at it. So what are, let's say 2 or 3 things need to go right between now and then to prove that DSO isn't a one-time trick for Contango Silver and Gold, but it's the repeatable way to build a Goldmine in Alaska. It's all about execution. I think you've been saying that for over a year now.

49:30 We keep the drills turning. Our objective is to outline 400,000oz to 500,000oz of ore grading, plus or minus 10g per tonne. We'll have a press release later this week on numbers so People can say, are they hitting this sort of stuff that is actually looking more great? And just a metric to keep in mind, at a US$4,500 goal, I know it's a little lower today, but at US$4,500 a gram of Gold, 1g of Gold is worth US$150. If your mining costs are US$100, I'm not saying we're going to use a 1g cut-off, but again, the margins we're dealing with here at the metal prices where we have, It doesn't take, you don't need 50g to make a good ore body for 50g of Gold.

50:24 But we're looking at, we're focused on high-grade. That's what the DSO model forces us to do that. So we're looking at 10g, that's a third of an ounce. So you're talking about $1,500 rock. So it's not hard to make a lot of money on $1,500 rock. No, it's a decent margin. And Oliver, I'll throw it to you Because I do want to get into the guts of your project. Because for anybody who hasn't looked at America's Gold and Silver, and like I said, I'm sure hundreds of people in the room today haven't since before you and Paul Hewitt's team arrived. It's a

50:56 very different company. Consolidated Silver production grew 52% last year. You added the Crescent mine this quarter. You cleared the remaining Sprat and Royal Gold delivery obligations with, as I understand it, US$89M still in the bank. Give us a two-minute version of the turnaround and what exposure to US$65M to US$70M Silver means for the business today. Yes, I'd be happy to. Look, It's been a sort of fast and furious almost 2 years now. We basically stepped into takeover management of the company in late 2024, early 2025. And really, the turnaround efforts have been focused on operational understanding and then optimization at Galena. We have another operation down in Mexico, which has been executing very, very well. And then, of course, a lot of cleanup and efforts at the corporate level as well.

51:43 So, you know, starting off with Galena, you know, I've talked about the location of the asset, where it is, but really Galena is an asset that has been around through so many different metal cycles that there's been periods of investment and then long periods of underinvestment, obviously with Silver prices moving so violently up and down over the years. There's been periods of time where there hasn't been mining in certain parts of the mine, particularly over in the core area when Silver was under US$5 an ounce. Now that has led to a huge amount of infrastructure, a very, very large resource, but of course, lots of remaining opportunities. So When we stepped into the business in early 2025, we raised a significant amount of capital with our followers from Corora and Klondex before that. Then what we did is we went to work understanding where the bottlenecks were in the operation. Just to reiterate, at Galena, We have over $2Bn of infrastructure. That's 4 shafts heading down to 6,000 feet, 120 miles of underground development, 2 mills on surface, combining for about 1,300 tons per day. Very well-established amount of infrastructure there that we've been using for mining. We identify bottlenecks in the hoisting in the shaft, so skipping ore out of the mine, and of course the mining method as well. So starting off with the hoisting, we've invested about US$10M to US$12M in upgrading the primary hoist at the number 3 shaft.

53:01 And we've managed to triple skipping rates out of that shaft, which is huge. We've also revitalized the core shaft and we're now able to put equipment up and down that shaft without disrupting production. That's very, very significant. And then the mining method. Look, for over 100 years, 100% of mining in the Silver Valley, and particularly at Galena, has been done using jack legs, using underhand cut and fill. A very labour-intensive, higher cost mining method. This mine is very well set up for narrow vein, long-hole stoping. So We've been transitioning the mine from 100% cut and fill to a targeted rate of about 70% long-hole stoping over the course of the last year. We put 13 new pieces of equipment underground. We changed drilling patterns. We've changed the approach of the mining team down there and we've had phenomenal success. We've now taken 13 panels out of it, about 1m wide. Why is that significant? When we talk about exploration later, I'll come back to that. But basically, we're able to mine at the same widths that we do with cut and fill using a long hole, narrow vein stoking. So very, very successful turnaround. As I said, tonnages are ramping up very quickly out of the mine.

54:08 And really what we're doing here is we're bringing Galena back. Phase 1 is bringing Galena back to its former glory. In 2002, this mine produced over 5Moz of Silver. Since in the last 10 years, it has struggled to produce about 1Moz to 1.5Moz of Silver. We produced 1.5Moz corporately in the first half of this year. We're going to bring it back to 5Moz, but this mine can go much larger than that. A 200Moz system, you divide that by 5Moz a year, you kind of get where I'm going here. There's certainly an opportunity to increase the production rates there. A lot of effort has happened underground and really that's where our strengths lie. That's what we did at Karora and that's what was done at Klondex previously as well. Corporately, you touched on a couple of the items. Look, we inherited a lot of very colorful debt structures.

54:54 Obviously, this company was on its knees for a while and kudos to the previous management team for keeping it alive during the period of tough metal prices. Absolutely. What we've done over the course of the last year is clear a lot of that up. A lot of promissory notes, there were some derivative liabilities as well. The most significant 1 you just mentioned, earlier this year we wiped out about $80M in Gold and Silver linked liabilities. That really made earnings a little bit more challenging to predict, but also was a cost of a $28M a year in debt servicing obligations. So we wiped that out for about 3% dilution to the company. So that's now gone as well. So a corporate turnaround alongside the operational turnaround at Galena. And then we added Crescent in next door as another source of feed. This is a very, very, very different company than where it was 2-years ago. And you talk about in the context of the Silver price. Look, our guidance is for about US$30 to US$35 an ounce first half of the year. Remember, this is a growing operation.

55:53 First half of the year, we produced Silver at just over US$36 an ounce in AISC. So at these metal prices, that's a pretty healthy margin. We're obviously in a growing and capital to deployment phase. We're putting about $120M into these assets this year. So a lot of the margin that we're generating is going back into the ground. But very, very healthy margins at these prices. And I don't even need to tell everybody what happens if silver prices keep going up here. The operating leverage of these companies is absolutely phenomenal. So we're really enjoying where we are today. Awesome. Now, I know we're really towards the end of time, but I'd be really remiss if I didn't talk to you about Antimony, Oliver, because I know Galena is the largest active antimony producer in the United States. As of January, you're actually getting paid for it, which is great. You partnered with the United States Antimony to build processing right at the mine. So it gets captured at site at market prices instead of disappearing into a concentrate, shipped to a smelter. So if you could real quick, just break down the economics that for us, because essentially this is a margin you were already mining and giving away.

56:53 Yes. Very good point you made there at the end, actually. That's one key thing for

56:56 investors to realize. Look, we have 2 types of ore at Galena. Tetrahedrate and then Galena ore. The Silver Copper antimony is the Tetrahedrate ore. That's where the antimony is located, obviously. We're already spending the dollars to drill, blast, hoist and crush and mill all of those tonnes. We're already spending the dollars to get that ore out of the ground. But what this mine was not previously doing was getting any of the economic value of antimony or copper. The mine is only getting paid for silver and lead. So we renegotiated our agreement with Tech Resources last year. That kicked in Jan 1, 2025, where we're now getting paid for some of the antimony that comes out of the mine. The payability right now is low. It's no longer a penalty. It is low. But as you said, we've now joint ventured with U.S. Antimony to build a new Antimony Processing Facility in the Silver Valley. What a lot of people don't realize is Galena has produced antimony every single day since 1942.

57:54 Galena was part of the US war effort to basically supply munitions over in Europe. Now, Every single day, antimony has come into that mine, but now we're finally capturing the value for it. And it will scale linearly with our silver production. So I talked about taking silver back to 5 million ounces per year. Antimony will grow with that. It essentially comes for free because we're already paying the cost to bring that out of the ground. We'll obviously have an additional processing cost to process that antimony, but the margin capture will significantly increase. And of course, that'll go to the bottom line when it comes to AISC. So really looking forward to providing guidance there for next year as we start to scale Antimony. But all of that comes for free. And then of course, Copper at the same time. Awesome. Now, unfortunately, I usually give people an opportunity to pitch their stock, but I do think that Kevin Oliver and Rick have done a great job explaining why you should look at Contango Silver and Gold, America's Gold and Silver, and Arizona Eagle Mining today. You do have an opportunity to press the request meeting button at the bottom of the screen. Please do request a meeting with any of these teams if you want more information. I know there are a lot of you in the room today and I did not get to any of your questions. I apologize for being a jerk, but I hope you enjoyed the conversation. I'll make sure those questions get to the correct team so you can get back to them. But Oliver, Rick, Kevin, thank you so much. I think it was a really fun discussion and couldn't be a better time to be mining in America. So good to talk to you guys. Thank you very much. Thanks much. Cheers, everyone. See you, everyone. Bye.