Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're signing in from today. I know we've got a big crowd, so really appreciate all of your time today as we discuss some recent news for Contango. I've got with me today Dave Larimer with his fresh title at Contango, our Vice President of Exploration, and Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, the company's CEO. Gentlemen, how are you today? Doing good. Gold doing well, so we're happy. That's all good news. I know there was a Hawaiian T-shirt theme today. I tried my best with a T-shirt with a Hawaiian shirt, so I'm trying at least to fit in with you gentlemen for today's conversation. We do have quite a big crowd and some exciting geo news at Lucky Shot. I wanna get through the housekeeping real quick, so I can get into the good stuff. There is a chat button on the bottom right of the screen. Please use it any time during today's event. I would love to hear from you. We'll try to get to as many questions as we can. Hopefully I'll cover a lot during the questions that I have, but anything I'm missing, please do bug me there. I'll try to get to as many questions as I can today. Only other thing that I'll say is today's event is being recorded, will be available for replay before the end of the day, Eastern Time. It'll both on our YouTube channel, but also right in your inbox, especially for the folks in the room. But enough boring stuff. Rick, I want to talk right away with the headline number, 60 g over nearly 6 m from LSU25031, with a subinterval pushing almost 295 g. So it's a bit of a wow number there for sure. Walk us through what you're seeing with this vein and why the orientation matters specifically. We have named this the KM Vein after Keith Miles, one of our employees who has been having some surgery done. We wanted to honor him with that. It is a different orientation, and of course, this is the, you know, sort of the first series of drill results from this campaign. We are very excited about this is a, you know, new discovery, a legitimate new discovery. It is an orientation. It is at right angles to the Lucky Shot shear system. We could nerd out and have a discussion on why that is an important thing, but the fact is it is different. What excites me about it, you know, besides the structural connotations of what this means is that it's not something that, the, any of the mine, the historic mining would have even known about because it's down underneath them. Where they mined historically is above us, and they never drilled holes down below the system. They mined the system. It outcropped on the surface. They went in on the surface. They, they mined it, and they just kept following it down, and of course, you know, the government shut them down in 1942. That's what's really exciting about this. It's a, it's a new orientation. We understand what it means geologically from a structural standpoint in a, in a, in a general sense. We've got to do a lot more drilling to really see if it goes anywhere and how extensive it is. When you've got grades like this, it, one, it shows the strength of the system, and two, you know, the fact that we've seen it in multiple holes now, gives us, gives us some, you know, hope that this thing will continue. You don't see big, strong veins like that, just disappear, generally. Now it is right next to the Lucky Shot Fault, which offsets it, and that makes it difficult to drill on the, on the, west side of the fault. We're having some discussions on how to, how to attack that, and Dave will probably maybe talk about that a little bit. On the east side of the fault, Lucky Shot Fault's, you know, it's a high, relatively high angle fault structure. We know where it is, but, you know, what does it mean on the east side of the fault? Well, we got to figure out how much displacement there is on the Lucky Shot Fault. Work to do, but a very exciting discovery. That's separate from all the good results in the known part of the system, the Lucky Shot shear system. Dave will talk more about that. Not only are we seeing, you know, what I used to call the hanging wall quartz vein, the main Lucky Shot vein, which is gonna be referred to now as the L2, we're also seeing an L1 and a number of other L1A, B, C. You know, we'll have an alphabet of other veins that we're seeing there. Very positive. Very, very positive for an initial release on what amounts to about 12% of the drilling plan for this year. Awesome. No, I do find the numbers certainly exciting. Dave, I wanna get you in here, cause you now have the KM Vein from three different drill stations. When you overlay those intercepts with the exposure you mapped in the West Drift last fall, the 139 g per ton gold over 1.5 m in channel sample, how is the structural picture coming together? Is this thing open? Yep. Yep, definitely. You know, this definitely continues what Rick was saying. You know, I would like to back up briefly. When we originally mapped and did those channel samples, we were all scratching our heads. It was totally contradictory to what we kind of had been known, kind of the structures that we were looking at. Being able to map that, to drill it and get these intercepts and having grade coming back, it's really starting to clear up that structural picture. It's starting to snap together in little pieces together, like little Lego blocks. We understand this piece. We now understand the offsets, now we can start piecing the rest of this together. What I really like about the KM Vein is it's really proven that it's not just a one single high grade pod. You know, it is discrete, it's shallowly dipping, it's mineralized, but it's showing us that these are more distinct veins within the L2 system together, that we can target, that we can pull out. As far as openness, yep, it is open. We consider it open until we've drilled it out, up dip, down dip, along strike. What we're doing now is systematically getting our drill plans to see how we step off this vein, continue pulling those expansions, wherever we hit the fault, where we know that offset is and drill it across the fault and offset it and just basically keep expanding this out as we go. Awesome. No, I appreciate that. One thing that jumps out in the table, visible gold, obviously always sexy, showing up across multiple veins and multiple holes. Dave, from a geo standpoint, what does that tell you about the plumbing system at Lucky Shot when you're seeing visible gold in the L1C, the L2, and now the KM as well? Yep, absolutely. I will caveat, these are definitely hydrothermal systems and plumbing is key. How are we pushing fluids? How are we getting that dilated space? What we're seeing with the visible gold in the L1C, the L2, the L1, and the KM veins is these are all linked. We have that connectivity of fluids to, again, be passed through, and we have repeatability of fluids that's being able to generate our coarse gold. They're just not isolated systems or a single fluid pulse that just managed to hit one through there. It is a multi-vein stacked network gold-bearing system. This is very interesting and gets you really fired up because it gives you extra exploration potential now. When you're doing exploration, you generally find what you're looking for. If we were just trying to target the L2 vein system, we'd probably find that. Part of our mentality at Contango in drilling this is we gotta keep our eyes open geologically. We gotta look at those orientations of our veins, and this is what opens up these other variations in these other veins. The L1B, okay, she's sitting right underneath it, and now we know the KM's a different one, but they're stacked together. It's all coming together. It's great to see the visible gold out there. It's great stuff. I do just wanna caveat quickly that VG is qualitative. You know, we systematically log the core, we log where it is, but it doesn't 100% guarantee, you know, grade, continuity, metallurgy, economics. We let the assays speak for those, but the VG is great to see in the core and a great indicator for us geologists that we're on the right system, in the right plumbing, and we're in that system. No, awesome. Rick, one thing I noticed you talk about, and I'm always curious about terms like this, so I'd love if you could just give us some more information. I noticed you talk about using PhotonAssay. Can you explain what that is, and how it's adding value? Yeah. If a PhotonAssay is a relatively new type of an assay, it was developed in Australia by a group there. It's, you know, the handheld XRF. It's basically a very, very large one that would, you know, fit in a typical living room size piece of equipment. It's a big piece of equipment. It's X-ray fluorescence, so it does have, you know, you're using a lot of X-rays, which, so you have to have a safety thing around it. It's shielded basically, and which is part of why it's so big. It's, so it is basically an XRF, and it... What the advantage of this type of assay as opposed to sort of a typical gravimetric assay is that you don't destroy the sample. You have that sample forever as a reference. It's a much bigger sample. We're drilling HQ core, which is, you know, about that size. We're sampling the entire core, so it's a large sample with the department. They're kind of the rule of thumb, the larger the sample, the more accurate it is. If you split the core, that's half as accurate as a whole core. If you quarter the core, et cetera, when you take half a core, you take a 50 g sample from that, you're not sampling a lot of the... Sure. -core. This samples the entire core, so it's a much more accurate sample and with it, which is exactly what you want for a gold assay, particularly when you have lots of VG like we've been talking about, the coarse, you know, relatively coarse free gold. You wanna, you know, if you sampled half, only half the core, did you get that piece of VG or did you not get it? What is the real number? Well, now you've got a better assay. It's better quality. It's a bigger sample, so it's more representative of what you're drilling. And you get to have that, keep that sample. It's not, you haven't, you know, used it up in a fire assay. It's, if you can go back and look at it again and do more testing on metallurgical testing or, crush grinding testing, whatever you need to do. Great. No, appreciate that. I always love those. Just nerdy explanations help me, so appreciate it. In the same vein, actually, Dave, I see that you noted that intercepts do not represent true widths. Can you just tell us what that means and how that's gonna be addressed, going forward at Lucky Shot? Yep. Absolutely. I mean, true widths are something we will define down the future. It's actually the true width of that vein with respect to continuity and how we wanna mine it. Right now, our programs is to be able to attack the veins, find the veins, and basically it's a geometry fight. We wanna increase our knowledge in that geometry. Right now we're actually just reporting true intercept lengths because we don't have 100% continuity of what that looks like. What I mean is as we get increased drill hole density into our vein solids, these veins roll, and they kinda come up and down, and they come around. By being able to drill them with these tighter drill holes that we're doing now with repeated fans going down the drift, we're increasing our knowledge and confirming our geology through there. As this program progresses, it's systematically designed to do this. As we progress through this system, we'll have a high enough confidence that when we come back and do our estimate or our resource estimate in our TRS, we'll be able to confirm what these true geometries are and these true thicknesses. Right now, drill hole lengths, you know, some could be smaller, some could be bigger based on that orientation. You wanna put this all together with your highest confirmed knowledge, and that's gonna be at the end of this program when we put out our next resource estimate for the vein. Awesome. No, appreciate that extra context. Rick, I got one for you. I've heard you be called Mr. DSO at conferences before. I like it, and I know you've been pretty deliberate about framing Lucky Shot as a direct shipping ore play. For folks who understand the economics of high-grade underground gold, can you talk about what DSO means in just practical terms for a project like this, what it takes off the table, from a CapEx perspective? Yeah. For us, DSO really starts with grade. You have to have a good grade deposit. There are really kind of three criterias we look for in evaluating projects that fit the DSO. Certainly, you know, obviously open pit versus underground is different. For an underground mine, you know, something that we have a 14. 5 g current resource for the 110,000 oz of resource we have, that's good grade for an underground mine. Sure. That's first criteria. Second criteria is location relative to existing infrastructure. Road, rail, and a port or, you know, access to Tidewater. That's, that's how you move your product, and your transportation cost is the next most important thing if you're not going to build your own mill and tailings facility, which is the whole point of DSO. The third is so, you know, proximity to infrastructure. Lucky Shot, as an example, is 20 mi from the railroad. The railroad goes to the Port of Seward, down to the south, which is a Pacific Ocean port. It's all set up for exporting. It can go up to Fairbanks and to the Fort Knox, you know, close to the Fort Knox operation. That's the second criteria, proximity to transportation. The third is how easy is it to permit the project? By far, the easiest land to permit on, yeah, I'd say anywhere in the United States is private land. Mm-hmm. Lucky Shot's on private property. In fact, it's already permitted for mining. We have a valid mining permit. So long as we don't build a mill and a tailings facility and a big power plant, we don't really envision that we need any more permits to mine and put rocks in a box, literally, and put them on a truck, haul them down to the railroad. Railroad can go north or south. We don't need additional permits to do that. These are boxes, steel boxes. They're a little different geometry than a sea can- Mm-hmm. ...roughly the same size as a sea can, just not quite as tall. They hold about 25 tons of ore. They have a lid that goes on them, so you don't have fugitive dust issues. You're not forming stockpiles in different places, so you don't have contamination issues related to forming stockpiles. They basically just load with a forklift or an overhead crane, just depending on your setup. Simple, and we like simple. Perfect. Thanks. Simple is great. Now, Dave, let's turn to you for a second. I know you're drilling from four stations along the West Drift, kinda working your way east. How are L1B and L1C veins behaving relative to what was modeled in that 2023 technical report? Are you kinda seeing them where you expected, and are they carrying grade? Yeah. We're definitely seeing what we expected. I'd almost say it's a little more than what I expected. What I mean by that is we had a higher confidence in the L2 vein. That's our primary target in there. It's the larger one. It's the primary target. We designed our drilling program off of that. We knew the L1B, the L1C veins were there, but they were very, very under-drilled in the original model. When we went through there, being able to target coming across through those, we were able to target not only the L2, but the L1B, and we continually got some good intercepts with it. As we step through the stations, as I talked about, the geometry's really, really firming up on there and being able to pull together through all those. Additionally, as we step across, now we're starting to get those continuity through farther and further, and we're seeing those great continuities exist, and we're seeing that this is a multi-system that does connect all together. It's actually a little better than my expectations, and we're really excited about how we're going to progress with these sub-stack veins underneath the L2 there. Awesome. Rick, I wanna zoom out and talk about the whole exploration program for a second, 'cause I know you got 20 holes done and roughly 40 holes more, I think, planned through April. When you think about what the second half of this program needs to accomplish, to set up the feasibility study, which is on schedule, I think for H1 2027, what boxes do you still need to tick? As I mentioned earlier, we're about, you know, 12% done with the overall program, roughly 18,000 m program. Most of that will be underground these relatively short holes that Dave and the team have been drilling in what we call sort of the fan shots. You know, starting from the underground drift and drilling, you know, near vertical, near to near horizontal. It's a four-step program plus we've got some drilling on the surface we wanna do up on the Coleman and basically to drill down -dip from the Coleman to sort of tag it into the level that we're working on from the Lucky Shot. Sorry, end search level- Mm-hmm. where we're currently working. Those are the, you know, the different programs that we'll have going over the course of the summer. The 40 holes that you mentioned, and it, by April, we should be wrapped up with that. Chris Kennedy, our mine manager, will get the underground mining team to build some new tunnels for us to continue to drill. In addition to the drilling and the assay, the PhotonAssays that we're receiving and, you know, the modeling that goes on to develop a mineral resource estimate, we will be collecting a lot of geotechnical information and a lot of metallurgical information. The metallurgy here is relatively simple, being in the range of, you know, complex metallurgy to simple metallurgy. This is definitely on the simple end of the spectrum because it's basically quartz, free gold, and a very small amount of sulfide. I think the average sulfide content is 1% or so. So, that's a really simple ore, the process, and, it, you know, there's lots of places it can go and, you know, so. That's the other information. Of course, we're underground so, you know, we, you know, from a mining standpoint, we're actually mining, so we're gathering lots of geotechnical information as we're doing that. Sure. We know where the fault structures are as, because that's in addition to, you know, worrying about where the veins are, we also wanna know where the faults are so we know where we, where we have to do a little extra work from a safety standpoint. The fault zones are what are broken up and then, and so you have to deal with that rock a little differently. Just, you know, more bolting and some screening and things like that. We're getting, you know, good hands-on experience as we're, as we're doing the development work, to create the exploration, tunnels. You know, I think by this time, next year, we'll be in the middle of doing our feasibility study. Awesome. Okay, great. Dave, I have one question that is just something that struck me. Mm-hmm. The intercepts in L1C are interesting. You've got that 82 g hit in LSU25041, 64 gram hit in LSU25044 and a 28 g hit in LSU25045. They're narrow for sure, but they're also scorching. Is the L1C becoming a more significant part of the resource story than originally anticipated in your eyes? I would say, to initially answer your question, yes. I would tie in the L1C, the L1B, and the KM veins. Again, targets of opportunity for us right now, how we can pull those off. You know, we specifically designed our program for the L2, and this is just the icing on the cake. You know, as the system evolves, as we step east through here. With some of the skinnier ones, I'm not too concerned about the skinnier intercepts. You know, we got screaming grade, and grade just came through there. It is interesting to note, A, how our plumbing system comes. A lot of these systems in this type of deposits pinch, swell, pinch, swell through there as the fluids pass through there. Sometimes your skinnier intercepts have higher grades, they've been concentrated through there, might not have been diluted out as much. The L1B and C are definitely very high on our priority list. We'll have a very, very strong eye on looking at that, those intercepts, that variography when we put our next technical report together on our mineral resource estimate of the Lucky Shot site. Yeah. Awesome. Can I just jump in here a second? Please. I just wanna. You know, Dave was the chief mine geologist at Pogo Mine, and Chris was the mine manager at the Pogo Mine. These guys have a lot of experience in these kinds of systems. Mm-hmm. It's very practical experience of this is how you mine these things. Mm-hmm. Obviously that's why they're working for us now. Always helps to pick those guys up. That makes sense. Now I know the fact that you're drilling underground from established infrastructure rather than the surface, I'd love if, and either of you can jump in on this, talk about the advantage that gives you in terms of drill orientation and targeting those steeply dipping structures. How much more efficient is this compared to trying to hit them from surface? I'll definitely start off with this. It is extremely more efficient. Underground drilling is great 'cause you're closer to your target. You actually have better orientations of how you can attack your target through that drift. Additionally, you have better control. Not only control of how tight you wanna place your intercept pierce points through there, but also controlling the deviation of the drill holes. You're not as long, you've got better surveys, you've got better control on your drilling to optimize where that intercept is. Additionally, it's not cheaper at the end of the day, but you're not paying what we like to call that distance tax. Sure. We're not drilling 600 m, you know, down to intercept it. We're drilling shorter holes to get where we want. What this also does for this is it also helps us speed up our program. With these shorter drill holes, we can turn around and crank out holes, you know, one per day, you know, one per shift. Our drillers, High-Tech, have done a great job being able to sustain this rate, drill these holes, get it to our geologists in our core shack. They can log it, and our logging technique right now is digital. We log on our tablets, it goes right to our internet connectivity. That all gets uploaded, and then I can refresh, you know, our project geologist down there can refresh, and we can see in near time, you know, within a couple of hours of what we drill, how that model's behaving. That data that we can look at can next influence those next drill holes. "Hey, I need to shallow this drill hole up. Hey, we need to cock it over to the right 15 degrees or push it another 15 m." That just all increases our efficiency. While we have a similar program on the surface, they're longer holes, longer time, helicopter supported, it's definitely more efficient to drill these veins with this underground with the development we have right now. Great. No, no, really appreciate that. I just wanna, I'll just add that, you know, in addition to when the surface drilling, you've got, you know, helicopter logistics and weather logistics and all the other things that can affect a surface program. It's not warm underground, but it's not cold and it's not snowing and raining and so that's a big thing. Only other thing I'll say is the back to the PhotonAssay is, it's a very efficient system because you're logging, you know, that night or the next day when you get your core, and then within a day or two, it's going off to the, to the assay lab. Now we got short, you know, we don't have short turnarounds from the assay labs because I think everybody in the world is suffering from the same. Everybody, yeah. ... same thing that, you know, that it takes a lot longer to get assays than you'd like. You know, it's pretty efficient. As Dave said, it's all digital, so every day I look at what the results are, and I can see them. You know, I'm a geologist, so I can, I can call up, call Dave up and bug him and say, "Geez, hey, how come you didn't do this," or whatever. You know, I'm sure he gets tired of hearing from me, but. It's, it's really an impressive system. Okay, great. One more comment on that. You know, drilling underground is great, like Rick said. You know, I was worried about our drillers when it was 40 below, you know. I went up there, "Hey, let's check on these guys, make sure they're okay." I had no issues with those drillers. They're down there in T-shirts, you know, it's 55 degrees. They're sweating, they're doing a great job working. I just turned around and said, "No, you boys are fine." Walked out. Underground drilling is really effective. You know, in the summertime, when it's 90 degrees outside and hot, you go underground, 55 degrees, nice and cool. Actually sounds like perfect weather all year underground. That's, that's not so bad. Rick, I'm gonna ask you a question I've asked you, probably 100,000 times, but every time you have news, I just wanna know how you're thinking about it. You've got Manh Choh generating cash flow, Johnson Tract sitting in portfolio, and now Lucky Shot, with, in my opinion, great results advancing towards feasibility. Not to mention the soon-to-be likely assimilated Dolly Varden project, Kitsault. How the heck are we thinking about capital allocation across all these assets in the next year and a half? Yeah. Obviously, there's definitely a lot going on. I'd say it's very measured. Then I'll start with Manh Choh, we're in addition to the cash flow we're getting from there, I'll be obviously also spending a little bit of money on exploration there. On 100%, there's about a $5 million spend on exploration. That's actually included in our all-in sustaining cost, because the way that all gets accounted for is we just basically get a check from the joint venture, right? That's the distribution that we talk about. Mm-hmm. That, you know, pretty much running itself. At Lucky Shot, our 18,000 m program, that's roughly gonna take a year here. That's a $25 million program. That includes the drilling that Dave's been talking about, and then the underground development work that Chris Kennedy and his team will provide the access for the drilling. Next year, the feasibility study and, you know, the expectation that that will be a positive feasibility study, Continue to develop the underground so that you can now start mining the resource or the reserve at that point. That's in rough numbers, another $25 million. Obviously, we'll adjust these numbers as we gain more information and understand, you know, do we have a 250,000 oz reserve or do we have a 400,000 oz reserve? That's Lucky Shot. Johnson Tract is relatively simple in that The main event there is permitting. Mm-hmm. There's, you know, as we've talked about before, it's the boring part of the Lassonde curve. We are going to construct a road that goes between the campsite and the portal site. That's something that's in the planning stages right now. We'll upgrade, look to upgrade camp for wintertime operations so that the following year we can operate year-round when we're actually building our tunnel. This year's program is a $15 million program at Johnson Tract. That leaves Kitsault, which, you know, with the acquisition of Dolly Varden, I think their cash position is in the neighborhood of $60 million-$70 million. Mm-hmm. The 50,000 m drill program that we have planned there will largely be infill. The first thing we're gonna do in this year is complete a resource estimate for the roughly 200,000 m of drilling that's been done since the last resource estimate was done at Dolly. I think, Dave, your target is probably like May or sometime. Yep. for wrapping that up. Yep. Getting that out. Obviously, that resource estimate will dictate where a lot of the drilling is done. As, you know. Sure. Heads up, a lot of it will be infill drilling to start thinking about doing an economic study. Where do we expand the resource? Where do we need some more information to infill it and, you know, get to a good quality indicated, measured indicated, sort of category of resource? These are vein systems. They're so great continuity is important. That's a 50,000 m program. I think it's about CAD 20 million. Those are Canadian. Yep. That makes sense. This will not be the last time I ask you that question. Appreciate you bearing with me every time. I got a second last one for Dave. I know you mentioned the geological model doesn't fully capture the structural complexity yet. Mm-hmm. With the KM vein sitting at roughly right angles to the main shear zone, does that change how you're designing the next phase of holes? Are you chasing this thing specifically now? What's up? It definitely gives us an eye-opener of what we wanna look at for the future. This program was specifically designed, you know, to optimize, you know, our resource potential, you know, sticking in the Lucky Shot L2 main systems as we sweep across. The discovery of the KM at that right angles and different orientations, we did our initial drilling, confirmed that. What we're programming into our drilling now is as we step back, what are our targets of opportunities to reach down and target the down-dip extensions of the KM as we continue east? We wanna maintain that continuity, reach down, tap it, maintain that we know exactly where it's at. Further, we're dividing our plan for our next phase of drilling of how we wanna attack this on the up-dip side to optimize the resource through there. It is a combined approach, but we wanna stay disciplined to the payoff of the program, is to optimize our resource for that resource estimate next year. Great. Rick, what do you think are the implications for future exploration of the district, for just from what's gone on here? Yeah. When we had the, you know, the results from the KM vein, you know, I'm a bit of a nerd structural geologist. You know, you go back and you look at, okay, well, what's this whole system about? This is a district that's produced a lot of alluvial gold and a little bit of hard rock gold from basically from two mines, Independence and the Lucky Shot. There's a bunch of other prospects, trenches, and some short adits all over the place. The I think our map, one of the maps in our in the Lucky Shot section of the website has, you know, a bunch of stars on it that show, you know, somebody dug for gold here, somebody dug for gold there. It's significant because it's relatively accessible now, but when these people were digging the holes back in the day, this was a tough, you know, this was a hard slog to get to. Sure. Yeah. You know, we didn't have the infrastructure didn't exist that we do today. When they were out there on the top of a mountain digging a hole or digging a trench, it wasn't for nothing. They found some gold. Sure. At the time, there were, like, 10,000 people, all over the place out here. There was a little town, you know, just down from, where the Lucky Shot Mine is. I'm very excited about the implications of finding, you know, multi-ounce vein orientations that none of those folks were focused on, none of the people. Sure those people who were mining at Lucky Shot were focused on. I went back and looked at the Independence mine, the other mine in the district, and they were actually mining some things in this orientation. There's definitely a history here of discovery. I'm excited because we, you know, we're basically controlling the district for the most part. There's, you know, a few bits and pieces here and there that we don't control, but for the most part, we have a whole district to explore long term. We're gonna start this thing out with, you know, as I mentioned in, you know, we're targeting a feasibility study to support a five-year underground mine plan producing 50,000 oz of gold a year. That's not like a. You know, we're not trying to find 25 million oz of gold like a lot of other junior companies are. Sure talking they're gonna go find. That's not our shtick. That's not our plan. We wanna make money, 50,000 oz of production from high-grade veins that are running, you know, 10 g-15 g per ton will make a lot of money. That's the plan. In the money game, I think that's a good game to be in, so I like that. Dave, I'm gonna ask you one last question. Might come up from the chat, but last one from me. I love asking geologists this because people who really aren't in the industry don't know, so you guys are adrenaline junkies, like jumpers, like Red Bull advocates. What has you most jacked up about Lucky Shot, the remaining exploration there? What has me the most jacked up is finding how these veining systems are coming together, right? That KM vein is, you know, is just a total, you know, icing on the cake. We're pulling together the L1b, the L1c, the L2's coming together through there. So I get jacked up pulling this system together. You know, I'm not as a structural nerd as Rick is. I'm more of a geochemical nerd. Sure. This is why, you know, this team works well. Seeing this coming together gets jacked up. I'll tell you what the highlight of my day is being able to get up and go to the core shack, the drillers are pulling off the core from the night before, and we're all just sitting there. "All right, put it on the table. Put it on the table." "All right, get it down. Is it straight?" We're hunting for that VG. We're hunting for the mineralization. Boom, there's my intercept. All right, dive in there. Where's gold? This is really cool. Okay, we got that out of the way. All right, guys, let's get back. Okay, let's systematically log this, and then we come back, systematically log it, put it in the computers, look at the models, get all excited again, and then recon and do it again the next day. Awesome. Hey, lots to be excited about. That's why I like asking the question. Rick, I got one more for you, then we'll get into the questions both from the chat and that came in over email. Us, the market wants to know, I wanna know, people texting me wanna know any updates on where you plan to send the DSO ore to be processed from Lucky Shot? Yeah. No update at this time. You know, no drum roll or anything. You know, look, as I mentioned, we're 20 mi from the rail. The rail goes to Seward. To Seward, and the Port of Seward goes to the world. We know there are opportunities to DSO process ores like this in Taiwan and in Mexico and in BC. We are looking at and evaluating those opportunities. We also respect our relationship with Kinross and the excess capacity that remains at the Fort Knox Mill. We'll definitely have a conversation there. It doesn't make sense to have it now. It makes sense to have it when we have, you know, more of a resource defined. Just, you know, I guess we'll have to be a little bit patient on this, but we are working on a number of fronts, and there are a number of opportunities out here. The old adage that grade is king in our business oftentimes gets forgotten and because everybody wants, you know, 20 million oz of gold. Sure, sure. I love 20 million oz of gold, but I actually want to get it mined, you know, while I'm still alive. We found Donlin 25 years ago, and it still isn't a mine, so. Yeah. That's, you know, that's the reality. We wanna make money. We wanna make money for our shareholders, we think, we think Lucky Shot's the next one to get into production. Okay. Appreciate it very much. Now I got two questions that came in over email. One that I know you can't answer quite as asked, but hopefully you can give some clarity, and one that we've kinda gone over, but it's good to reiterate. The first one is somebody wants to know the best way, which you can't answer, on how to invest in the upcoming combined Contango Dolly Varden Silver. If you could just speak to what that combination process will look like. Yeah. The SEC won't let me give. They will not. ... financial advice, so I am not doing that. No. But so just how the, how it works, the proxy's gone out, the shareholder votes on March 17th. We should close the following, I think March 26 is the date that's been chosen to close. And so in terms of buying shares, there's a set ratio that was fixed when we signed the agreement in December. And it's 0.16. Was it 52 shares of Contango for every share of Dolly Varden. So, you know, there's an arbitrage that plays out always when you have an M&A transaction. Again, not giving advice, but I honestly don't think it matters what, which one you buy because they're tag. Yep, appreciate it. Follow the ratio, and you can see that the ratio is, you know, ±5% every day. Yeah, appreciate it. Another question, we've kinda touched on it, but good to reiterate. Somebody just asked, when is most likely first ore produced at Lucky Shot? You're gonna do the drilling. Obviously it's an approximation because, hey, if Dave's and his team are, you know, the next 20 holes we drill are in the KM vein and it's sizzling again, you know, we may adjust our plan a little bit here. Okay. The plan is a year's worth of drilling, 18,000 m. Take that drilling, do it in a mineral resource estimate update. It will update the 110,000 oz that we have. We're targeting 400,000 oz-500,000 oz. From there, with that mineral resource estimate and along with metallurgy and geotech that we'll be doing, we then put a feasibility study together. We kind of refer to it as feasibility light because it is a mine plan and a transportation plan. Part of that transportation plan is where the hell is this going? Is it going up to Fort Knox? Is it going down to Seward? Sure. Is it going over to Taiwan? Where is it going? That'll be part of that study. Obviously we'll be working in advance of that on looking at different opportunities. But it's feasibility light because it doesn't involve building a mill and a tailings facility and a big power plant to run all that. That, that saves a lot of time. It certainly saves a lot of time in completing a feasibility study because as I said, it's a mine plan and a transportation plan. Perfect. I've got a number of questions that all cover a similar topic. I encourage everyone in the chat, if you don't think I've covered your exact question perfectly, please let me know, 'cause I'm eager to get this clarified. 'Cause there are some people in the chat asking about share count generally. I think to sum them up, there are concerns of increasing authorized shares from 14 million to 250 million. I think some people believe that there's going to be 250 million shares, you know, filled out. I'd love if you could both explain what... where the equity counts or the share count is gonna be after the Dolly merger, but also why the increase in authorized shares and what that actually means, so we can clear that up for everybody in the chat. Sure. No, good question actually. Today we have about 17 million shares. I'll just use some rough numbers to keep the math easy. 17 million shares issued. There's some warrants. Some of them are actually, I think, maybe slightly in the money, so, but just leave those aside for a second. There are not that many of them. When we combine with Dolly Varden, we'll have about a little less than 33 million shares outstanding again, independent of any warrant exercise. Mm-hmm. The reason we asked shareholders to authorize increasing our share count to 250 million, it's not that we plan to issue 250 million or up to 250 million shares. We had an abnormally small amount of share issuance that had been authorized before. You know, we wanna grow this company. This just gives us flexibility to do M&A, to do other things that will be accretive for shareholders. I'm a major shareholder, you know. From my own personal wealth standpoint, I'm, you know, a lot of my wealth is tied up in Contango. I have absolutely no interest in diluting my own value in this company. But I do wanna grow the company. Having, you know, this, a more realistic number of shares out there, that are available, if we want to do things, that will be accretive, that's why we have asked shareholders to approve that and authorize that. It's not that we have any plans to issue a bunch of shares anytime soon. As we've mentioned many times before, when we combine with Dolly Varden, we'll have well over $100 million in cash in the bank. We'll be generating over $100 million of free cash flow from Montrose on an annual basis. And we'll have 33-ish million shares outstanding. Perfect. If anybody has additional questions or don't feel that covers what you wanted to know, please do let me know in the chat. Eager to get this one clarified because I know there were a couple there. Clash Kid from the chat asked, "What's the ballpark on Lucky Shot reserves total?" Obviously forward-looking statements, yada, but, ballpark on Lucky Shot reserves. Well, you know, stay tuned for the reserve number because we got to complete a feasibility study. again, I don't look good in orange, so I'm not gonna. You know, I can make certain forward-looking statements, but that sounds like one I probably shouldn't make. Sure. Stay tuned for that. What we're targeting for a resource is 400,000 oz-500,000 oz What we're targeting as a subset of that resource is a mine plan that can deliver 50,000 oz of gold a year on average for five years. That's a fairly typical underground mine plan. You don't often see underground mines with, you know, 10-15-year mine lives. You seem to have resources out there that can, you know, You can envision a mine life that long. In terms of reserves, typically the underground mine will have about a five-year reserve life. Great. The other big group of questions that I'll combine together, again, bug me in the chat if I didn't quite answer, is the same question, to be honest, that I have, and I don't know if you have an answer for it or a guess. People wanna know the disconnect because of their view of the Lucky Shot drill results obviously being great, the market seemingly staying about static. We're not being as excited as the results seem to speak to. Curious if you have a perception on why that's the case. Yeah, I woke up this morning not in the best of mood, because I thought the drill results were awesome. Sure. They are the first time we've had any sort of substantial release on Lucky Shot for several years. You know, we're excited about the drill program and we're excited about what we're seeing in the drill program. I'm disappointed, frankly. I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out what markets do day-to-day. Which it's, you know, somebody decided they needed a new refrigerator or had to send their kid to, you know, get braces or, I don't know, wanted to go on vacation. We had more sellers than we have buyers today, apparently. Look, it's a healthy market. These are great results. I'm not gonna, you know, say that they're not great results because they're awesome results. Sure. We're excited. Dave and I are both, like, ecstatic here. We're, like, pretty excited. You know, we're talking about do we get another drill? Do we, you know, push the west drift forward and go drill on the other side of from underneath, you know, drill up for the new KM vein and see if it's there or do we focus on trying to drill deeper on the side of the Lucky Shot Fault and see the depth. We got lots of options. I'm excited. Look, sometimes it takes a while for people to sift through results and understand what does this really mean. Hopefully this forum answers a bunch of questions on what does it really mean. Right now it means that Rick and Dave are really excited to get more drilling done. Like I said, we're only 12% into the program, so more to come for sure. Great. Two versions of the same question. One of them is funny, so I'll just read them both. Somebody says, "What are the chances of Contango getting some real sell-side coverage?" The other version of it right under is, "I am curious when we'll have some people with functional brains covering us in the press. I probably should not comment on that. Those are good questions. Good legitimate questions. There you go. I'm actually through, I think all the audience questions, but. Oh, actually, I'm sorry, that's not true. One person shot in asking the Manh Choh AISC and the Lucky Shot likely AISC. I will, I'll hold off on Lucky Shot, likely, but I'll say what we're targeting is sort of a $2,000 AISC. I think, you know, in today's world, a $3,000 margin is not bad. One of the things that Trump mentioned this in his speech last night, oil prices are low. Oil prices and diesel prices for mines is a big component of any operating mine. I'm hopeful that as, you know, the gold price tells you that we still have inflation, currency inflation. In terms of mining, if one of the main components like diesel is not going up, I think I looked at the oil price today was $65 a barrel. Outside of something not good happening in Iran and the Straits of Hormuz, That's a big component of our cost increases. Now I'm kinda transitioning to address the question of Manh Choh. This year we're gonna have higher costs. We're waiting for specific guidance from Kinross, which we'll release with our year-end results here coming in about three weeks. I'll say stay tuned for that number. What I can say is, based on our discussions with Kinross, that our life of mine number, in their estimation, hasn't changed. I think, you know, rough numbers, we're still guiding as we have to that $1,600 number life of mine. Mm-hmm. This year, you know, every year's a little different. I think we've guided certainly that this has always been in the feasibility study for Manh Choh. This was always the lowest year of production and the highest all-in sustaining costs. Next year is the reverse. Mm-hmm. Part of it is timing, when you mine and when you actually get paid for the gold out the other end. That's just, that is the way, this year and this year's going to play out to be a low year. Next year is going to be a high year. Perfect. I'm gonna give people in the chat one last chance to ask a question because I already asked Dave what has him most jacked up. Rick, I'll ask, what has you most jacked up as we go towards Lucky Shot, over the next year? Dave, or is that a Dave question or a Rick question? No, that's Rick. I already asked Dave. This is. You already asked Dave. I, you know, we're both geologists. He's more of a geochemist, I'm more of a structural guy. Like I said before, the fact that we've found a high-grade vein that nobody's put a rock hammer on before. You know, when these guys were mining here for 20 years, they never found it because they never looked for it. The whole act of discovery is about being there and observing. You know, when we built the West Drift and we said, "Crap, what's that? That's a nice looking vein." We go out and sampled it, and it was like, "Oh, geez, that really is a nice looking vein. Wait a minute, it's not like the other veins. What's going on?" That's exciting. In a whole district, as I said before, where we've got, I don't know, two dozen stars on a map that somebody said there's gold over there's a lot to do here. We're gonna stay measured, as Dave said, and disciplined. We wanna make money. We wanna find a resource that can generate a reserve, that can generate a five-year mine life producing 50,000 oz of gold. We're gonna maintain that objective and stay focused on that and not get distracted, you know, trying to chase something that may or may not exist. We're well aware of it, and we understand it. At least I think we understand it structurally. I think we've got more work to do to figure out where how far it goes and all those things. Look, we're on track. We're. It's right there. It's not, you know, we don't have to drill a 2,000 m hole to find it. Perfect. Jan had one last question that snuck in, and that's, "When are the Manh Choh Q4 numbers looking to be released? Yeah. year-end is in about three weeks. Three weeks? Perfect. Yeah. Sorry, one last thing snuck in. Nope. Somebody just said, "Thanks, guys," with five exclamation marks. Rick, Dave, I will echo that and say thank you so much for letting me grill you. I know a lot of technical questions. Tried to keep it as nerdy but also layman-y as possible. Appreciate you guys playing ball. Looking forward to chatting with you guys again soon. Everybody in the chat, I know there are a lot of you, thank you so much for joining. If you do have other questions additionally, please send them in to me. I'll get them to the Contango team as soon as possible. Rick and Dave, thank you so much. This was awesome.