Full Steam Ahead at Manh Choh and a New Acquisition for Contango Ore

0:07 Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to Contango Or's live investment summit today, hosted by 6. I'm pleased to introduce President and CEO Rick Van Nuenhuisen. Rick's gonna walk us through a company presentation and after that we will be accepting questions live. So as a reminder, you can submit your questions at any time on the Q&A panel on the right hand side of the screen and we'll get to them after the presentation.

0:30 And as always, the summit is being recorded and will be available to watch afterwards on SIX.com. You can also download a copy of the presentation that Rick will be going through under the handouts tab on the right-hand side as well. So without any further ado, I'll hand it over to you, Rick, to kick things off. Great, thanks, Dasha. And good morning or good afternoon, everybody, depending on where you're located. Pleasure to be back on the SICKS platform and to present an update on the company here. Of course, I'll be making forward-looking statements and just draw your attention to our disclosure on. On not on resources and on non gap measurements. So high level. I want to provide you an update, of course, on our on our man show project. On, we'll give you Friday update on that, but I really want to spend a bit of time early on here to talk about our new acquisition of lucky shot. I'm very excited to get.

1:29 A new opportunity in the company that one of this caliber And I'm eager to present that to you. I'll also give you an update on our exploration activities on our other projects, Shamrock and Ecolona. So we'll go through all 3 of those today. Just a brief update on our share capitalization. 6.7 million shares, outstanding. We've got about $29 million in cash as of the end of the quarter, which actually we'll get the quarterly out today. You'll see that probably later today or tomorrow. We did do a strategic investment with the Alaska Future Fund, which is a joint venture between Barings and the Alaska Permanent Fund. So very, very important strategic investor into the company. They put $10 million to work for us, And we're very pleased to have them as a new shareholder.

2:25 So here's the Lucky Shot mine. This picture was taken in the 1930s. It was a significant operator in Alaska at the time, and it mined quartz and free gold in quartz veins and processed them at the nearby mill there. I like this project because it's simple, it's high-grade, and very, very simple from a processing standpoint as well. So just some historical metrics. The mine itself, the Lucky Shot Mine, produced over 250,000 ounces of gold from ores averaging about 1.5 ounces per ton. So very, very high grades. There was additional production at the immediately adjacent War Baby and Coleman mines. They're actually along the same vein structures I'll show you later.

3:17 The district, the Willow District, produced about 600,000 ounces of gold from ores, similar ores, quartz veins with gold, free gold, ranging from roughly 1 ounce to 2 ounces per ton, 30 to 60 grams. There is a more recent historic resource

3:40 on the project containing a little over 200,000 tons of 18 grams per ton for 120,000 ounces of gold. It is a historic resource. It was done by the former owners, basically the folks that we bought the project from. And it's not a bad place to start from a resource standpoint, good grades and very, very accessible. This is what we purchased, 2 different groups of patented claims outlined in orange here that include the Lucky Shot and the adjacent War Baby and Coleman mines at the main area and then across the valley over at the Gold Bullion mine. And then that those 2 patented claims are then surrounded by state mining claims outlined in blue here. So it's a pretty substantial package of land well over 8,000 acres.

4:34 And in fact, we just added to it, we stake some additional claims up to the east and north of the project area as well. We just got that finished this weekend. This is a view looking, a satellite image looking straight down or an air photo looking straight down. You can see the old historic workings are then projected towards the surface. You can see the war baby over on The east side and the main lucky shot at it and then the Coleman at it. Those are all the historic workings and then more recently in search. Which is an oil and gas company had the project in the early 80s and they put an added in. Underneath the or body to access it and we'll, we'll talk more about that. And our plans as we, as we go forward to develop this project and explore it further.

5:25 As I mentioned. One of the things I really liked about the project is it's got great infrastructure. You can see the location here. The blue there outlined the various roads that access the Lucky Shot project. We're not far from the communities of Palmer and Wasilla. There's about 100,000 people that live out in this general area outside the main city of Anchorage, which is of course the hub of Alaska. You can see the infrastructure is great. We've got a lot of good roads that go right out to the project. Also included in the acquisition is this mill building located just near the town of Willow. There's no mill in the building, but it was by the former operators was was planned to be the mill.

6:10 Don't know whether we'll use it or not. Certainly a nice asset to have. And again, it just emphasizes the great infrastructure that we have in place here. I like the geology here is we've got great infrastructure, we've got high grades, we've got district scale potential, we've got a substantial claim ownership in the area. The geology is well understood. The veins, the quartz veins are hosted in a granodiorite. It stands really well. There's very little underground support that's needed for this granodiorite, which just requires very little support. So there's district scale geology here in terms of the scale of the vein systems.

6:55 You can see them over on the bullion side. There's a number of veins that have been identified on the hilltops there. Likewise, over on the Lucky Shot side, and of course, there's been no exploration between the 2 and nor has it been exploration down dip of the Lucky Shot which is where we're going to focus our initial efforts.

7:15 Just a scattering of drill holes from that 120,000 ounce resource of roughly 18 grams per ton. Again, you can see the high-grade intersections here that are over-mineable widths.

7:35 This is based on about 34,000 M to drawing completed by full metals back in the 2005 to 2009 period. In search when they put they put they put that tunnel in, And they also did some drilling from underneath the vein, up into the vein. And so we know the down dip extension of the vein exists based on this historic drawing.

8:00 Just the summary of the acquisition, we've paid $5 million in cash for the acquisition along with a promissory note to be filled with common shares of the company once we're listed on the New York Stock Exchange American, which I'll update you on as well. Or if later we'll pay it in cash, but we're confident we'll be able to get ourselves up listed onto the New York Stock Exchange by that February 28th timeline. There are 2 milestone payments that are envisioned. The first $5 million in cash and $3.75 million in core shares based on a running average, 20-day VWAP probably. And that milestone payment is either 1 or 2 events. Either we announce a SKA 1300 compliant 500,000 ounce gold equivalent deposit, or we produce 30,000 ounces of gold equivalent.

9:00 And similarly, a second milestone payment of 5 million in cash and 5 million in shares once we achieve 1 million ounces or produce a second or an additional 30,000 ounces of gold. We were going to make expiration commitments of 5 million over the first 18 months and 10 million over the first 36 months. So. Basically, outlining a program, a 3 year program. To outline somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million ounces. And look at a plan to develop this project into a second producing mine for the company. This slide really shows our plan and the existing infrastructure. It's a bit of a detailed slide so you might want to just spend a bit more time with it.

9:49 The upper diagram is a plan view, and then the lower is a cross sectional view across the across the veins. And then you can see that we're using the insert tunnel. We're going to refurbish that. It's actually in really good shape. We're going to extend it and then go underneath the vein and then with a drift or sorry a tunnel and then we're going to drift parallel to the vein. That's the green dotted lines and then from and then now draw your attention to the cross section and then drill across the vein structure from underneath. And then that's phase. One's phase 2 will be to refurbish the lucky shot level, which is the red line, the upper red line there, rehab that and drive that tunnel further to the north and be above the vein system and extend it beyond, continue to extend it beyond there and drill downwards into that vein structure.

10:51 That way we can control where we can access the vein from either the Lucky Shot or the insert level. That gives us 2 alternate access points and exit points, which are required by MSHA, the Federal Oversight of Mine Safety. And so this is an exploration plan, but it will also sort of double as a development plan when we get to that stage. If you look at the existing underground workings highlighted by the detailed sort of spaghetti map of the in yellow there, that's the existing lucky shot workings. That's where 250,000 ounces of gold was mined from. The red block then outlines sort of the next phase, one of exploration where we would hope to outline another 250,000 ounces of gold.

11:42 And then from the insurge tunnel level and then from the lucky shot level, continue that down and get to 500,000 ounces and then continue to go beyond that. Over at an outline in green there at the Coleman, that's where the 120,000 ounces that are on the book, so to speak, have been outlined. And of course that's open down dip as well, as well as over on the war baby. There's only been a little bit of work done there and some more exploration work with we would envision more extra work exploration work there as time goes on. Right now, phase 1 access from the in-search level, outline 250,000 ounces. Phase 2 from the lucky shot level, outline another 250,000 ounces and then ramp up from the in-search level up to the existing resource at the Coleman and then bring that into the overall line plan. So again that's over a three-year time period is what we envision here.

12:43 So I'll, like I said I'm really excited about Lucky Shot. High grades are hard to come by these days and having high grades with great infrastructure in Alaska is just a, it'll be a great project I think for the company to add value for the shareholders. Now I want to switch gears back to our our Manchuro project, of course, located over towards the Canadian border. And this is the joint venture with with Kinross. We've outlined 1.3 million ounces of gold, 4 grams, a very high quality project. Again, located right off the Alaska Highway, which is why we'd have the business partnership with Ken Ross. We can truck our high-grade ore up to the existing mill facilities at Ken Ross, which lowers our capital, creates a smaller environmental footprint, and of course reduces permitting timeline and overall execution risk.

13:44 So this is the Vancho deposit. For those of you who are new to the story, sits on top of the hills in the Tetlin area. We formed the joint venture last year. We've again, the idea of trucking the ore to the Fort Knox mill. Fort Knox is, I should say Kinross has outlined a plan to mine over 1 million ounces of gold equivalent over a 5 year period of time. This year's budget. We're spending $19 million of the lion share that, is already, ensure that program is already beyond us now or past us now. Most of what we're doing now is taking all that data and working on a permitting plan, which we expect to start permitting in the last quarter of this year. And then of course, working on the feasibility study, which will be completed next year.

14:38 One of the updates we've seen is that we're going to start construction probably in 2022, and with completing construction in 23, with production in 24, and of course ongoing exploration. We did do some exploration work this year, although it wasn't a big part of the program, and we'll look forward to updating you on those results as we get the data from the assay lab. Bit of an update on the costs. Tinros put out their quarterly reporting about a month ago now and did revise costs before the capital envisioned was $110 million. Now they've actually provided a range of costs for capital from 105 to 130.

15:29 So it's a bit more of a spread, if you will. Certainly we're seeing inflationary pressures across the board, across the country. So I'm not overly surprised to see this range and the potential increase in capital. At the same time, when the $110 million number was done a year ago or more, the average gold price that they used in those assumptions was $1,250 per ounce. And now Kinross is using $1,500 per ounce. So I think what you're seeing in action here is this is exactly what gold does. When you see bouts of inflation, you see the gold price increasing and you see the operators, producers' expectation of what the long-term gold price is go up.

16:19 Obviously gold prices is trading more like $1,800 now, but they're using conservative pricing to project their, to base their economic decisions on for the future. Likewise, Kinross' guidance on operating costs did not change, but I'll, from my view, you know, if we're seeing inflationary pressures on capital, I won't be surprised to see some inflationary pressures on operating costs as well. Obviously, these will all be updated with the feasibility study that's planned for late in 2022. So that will really be the next main guidance that we'll be able to provide going forward. So in addition to having a robust project to be successful in the mining business, you also have to keep your employees safe and healthy. I'm proud to report that both Manshaw and our own 100% owned projects at Contango, we've had 0 LTIs.

17:18 We hire locally when possible and Manshaw has a very good program on this. When contango operated there for 10 years, we always had local higher and training projects underway. And this is another way to engage with the local community. And of course, the third thing is just having community meetings. We did a lot of meetings with Tetlin when we were the operator there. And now you're seeing with the mine plan or the plan to truck our ore up to the Fort Knox Mill. Ken Ross is now expanding or obviously continue the dialogue with Ketlin Village. But they've now expanded that dialogue to all of the communities along the road route up to the Fort Knox Mill, which includes the list here, along with some other important stakeholders in the region, the Tamrachese Council going on, and as well as other industry support groups, like the Chamber of Commerce and Alaska Mining Association.

18:16 So a lot of activities going on in terms of community engagement with the mentor project. Of course, just quick reminder of this project is located just off of the Alaska Highway and see it just behind the bushes there in the low hills of Tetlin. And this is why this is this good infrastructure is why we're able to just truck the ore from from the Manchurian deposit and process it at the Fort Knox mill, because that infrastructure is in place. It also makes for very little actual permitting that's going on at the mine site itself. Fort Knox, of course, has been operating for 25 years. The mill, you can see here, it's been operating for 25 years. Fort Knox processes through the mill grades about 0.6 to 0.7

19:07 grams per ton. So very low grades. It's a big mill. It's a 50,000 ton a year mill. It's only about half full so we'll be providing another million ounces roughly of ore. Now about 10 times the grade as what is being processed from Fort Knox mine itself. We'll be providing ores that are gonna average about 6 grams per ton gold equivalent. That's gold plus silver. So very small amount of ore relative to how much is processed by. From port Knox, but a very significant contributor in terms of balances because of the high grades that exist. At the man show deposit So again, low capital and low execution risk because we don't have to permit all of this. We don't have to capitalize this. We don't have to build it. All that infrastructure is in place. We just take advantage of it being there.

20:01 So this year we got started on our exploration program in the winter. We were well set up. We've been operating out there in the winter on and off over the years, so we were fortunate to get our drill program done pretty early. We were wrapped up by early July With the drilling portion of the program, including the expiration, so we pretty much went off without any any issues pretty much on target and on on on budget. Budget was $19 million.

20:31 A large part of it was for infill drilling. So we're now trying to convert and for indicated, sorry, indicated resources to measured and inferred resources to the indicated category. And this is all in preparation, of course, for the feasibility study that will then give us a bona fide reserves. Along with that, you do condemnation drilling to make sure you don't put your facilities on potential ore bodies in the future. We've done a lot of there was met work, metallurgical work, drilling done. The drilling is done, the testing is still underway, preliminary results are indicating no changes in the overall plan to process the earth with very little changes to the, to the Fort Knox mill. To the Fort Knox Mill.

21:18 Hydrology is important for managing water around the project. That's always the biggest issue you have any in mind is managing your water. Either you have too much or too little and so having a good hydrological models are important. Stability of course, so knowing how steep you can put the pit walls.

21:38 The steeper they are, the less waste rock you have to move, but you want it to be safe, so there's a fine balance there that you have to work out. Along with placement of all your other facilities and making sure they're on on a stable ground and in our case we want to make sure we don't put things on permafrost. So we've got a lot of room up there to put for placement of our facilities. And as I mentioned, we did do some exploration and we'll be reporting on those results in the next quarter. Very simple mine plan, 2 open pits, the north deposit, the main Banchot deposit, waste materials would be right immediately adjacent to the pit. So very short haul again. No mill. No tailings facility, so very, very small footprint.

22:30 The engineering and environmental studies are all underway to support both permitting and the feasibility study. Permitting again getting going by the end of the year, sometime in Q4, and then the feasibility study next year in the second half of the year.

22:48 Ken Ross did make mention in their quarterly update that they do envision some construction activities in the summer of 2022, so they were kind of referred to them as early construction projects. So these are things that don't require or are not subject to getting a federal permit. And so we'll, I think we'll start to get more clarity on that when we outline our budget for 2022, which will be later in the year, probably November, December timeframe. So but they're on target for a production ramp up in 2024.

23:24 So while Kinross is busy working through the process here, I'd say we're you know we're kind of right in the middle of this diagram with working on permitting and feasibility. Next year will be detailed design and procurement in 2022 and 23. And so you'll see remaining on task for production by 2020, full production by 2024. So while INROS is busy doing that, we'll be exploring, or continue to explore our projects in the Tintina Gold Belt. Of course, the Tintina Gold Belt, a very prolific belt of rocks that host a lot of gold deposits.

24:06 We recently staked the Shamrock project, which we own now 100% of course. We had a big soil program completed this year. We sampled about a little less than 800 soil samples and about 7 to rock samples across the 2 main areas on the claim block, the hilltop area to the north, and then the banner area to the south. No results back yet, but when we combine that with the database that we purchased from Coor Mining, the former owner of the project, before they dropped it last year, We bought their database and you can see how extensive a database it is from extensive rocks, soils, stream sediment, pan con samples, a big geophysical, a number of geophysical surveys and some historic drilling that was completed by previous owners.

25:04 We're going to compile all this information, use the information that we gathered on the soil sampling that we did this year to target areas for drilling in 2022. The soil program is wrapped up. We're going to be doing some more trenching here in the next couple of weeks. But, otherwise, you know, for the most part, our programs pretty much wrapped up here. Looking kind of scaling out and you can see where our man show project is located there, and then we have our other projects in the immediate area, the Eagle Hona projects and the ZZZ project. No activity at ZZZ. We're still waiting for the transfer of the land title from the federal government to the state.

25:51 There was progress made, they got surveyed done and so that was one of the key steps that the BLM, Bureau of Land Management had to complete before they can sign off on the land transfer. So it's a bit of a process to get this done. We certainly now with the survey completed, we think the. The land transfer would be done over the course of the winter here would be in a position to be able to drill triple Z next

26:15 year. Meanwhile over at the Eagle and Hona projects, this is the data that we had prior to 2001, and we had some interesting areas to follow up on. The hot pink colors are all the high gold and arsenic and copper values. They were kind of focused in 3 or 4 areas. So we did a lot of work this year to sort of fill in the mineralized or the potential, identify where the potential mineralized areas are. A lot of rock samples, We collected close to 2000 samples across the, both the Eagle and which is a Northern block there and the Hona block down to the South there. So

27:00 We have not received any results yet. The blabs are traditionally kind of slow this time of year, so we'll hope to have results come in over the next course of the next month here and be reporting on that as we go forward. But Very high grade results on the Eagle Prospect. Specifically, you see those hot pink colors there. We did a lot of work in the area, and that's the area that's in the photo there. Looks pretty interesting. We've put some trenches in, and so we've got some good areas sort of highlighted or detailed samples that we've that would come out of the the exploration work done this summer. Hats off to the crew out there. This is very steep terrain and they did a great job of collecting a lot of samples and safely with no lost time incident, and that's a. So.

27:52 Attribute to the folks working out there. So thanks. Thanks to them. I will wrap it up there. We've got proven operator working on men show. We've executed a good plan for this year. And I can see that we're on time and on budget and on schedule for getting this project into a place where we can be in production in 2024. We'll continue to add shareholder value by acquiring other projects like LuckyShot. We're very happy to get that project required. We think in a three-year time frame, we could potentially have a second mine lined up to be producing or adding value for our shareholders. And of course, we'll continue to explore on our existing properties and add value there as well. So I will stop there and turn it back to you, Dasha, for Q&A.

28:45 Great, thank you so much. So now we'll jump right into the live Q&A. So if you do have a question, feel free to submit them now. But to kick things off, Rick, can you outline what you believe the lucky acquisition means in terms of potential future production of gold for shareholders?

29:02 Sure. Well, I hope it is lucky for us. And we, as I said, it's high grade. It's a simple geologic target. We've got a vein that's produced 250,000 ounces. Down, it's down dip from the surface down to about 200 meters. And we know the vein continues because it's been drilled. There's been lots of drilling done that show that the vein continues. So it's just getting the existing infrastructure and the insert tunnel, drive that underneath the ore body and drill up and outline a resource there. And then, as I said, second phase 2 is to get reaccess the Lucky Shot tunnel, connect the 2, and then continue the exploration to outline perhaps A0A million ounces or better there, and then put a mine plan around that. What do I see sort of big picture, long term in terms of production potential?

30:02 Again, It's probably 2 to 3 years out before we really can put our arms around it, but this kind of a mine, I can envision 20,000 to 30,000 ounces out of Lucky Shot and 20,000 to 30,000 ounces out of the Coleman, which we already know has got a well-established resource. So that's 50,000oz to 60,000oz of production, additional to the average of 65,000oz to 66,000oz that we're going to get to Manchuria. So maybe not quite a double but maybe with some luck we can get to a point where we can actually double our production profile. Again, we've got a lot of work to do before we get there but that would be the concept. Great, thank you. And then what are the next steps for the early stage projects like Eagle, Hona and Shamrock?

30:55 Yeah, good question. We got a lot of work done this summer. I'm really excited about the Eagle prospect, I guess because I'm a geologist, you can go out on the terrain and you can see what you're looking at. There's some really interesting looking rocks that we were trenching on and that we got out in the field and I was able to sort of bang my hammer on. So we don't have any assays back yet, but assuming we get some interesting results from all the sampling we've done out there, the 2,000 samples we've collected, we could be in a position to potentially drill next year on the Eagle target. At Shamrock, we've got an extensive database that we acquired from core mining and the soil program that we did this year, Again, no results back yet, but presumably we'll get some indications of some good anomalous soil areas. We're going to do a little bit of trenching this fall over the course of the next month here, and particularly in the Banner area. It's a pretty easy area to access and we've got some good geologic control there. So I could see it where we could be drilling both at the Hona Eagle and also at Shamrock to test out some of these target areas.

32:12 And as I mentioned earlier, Fingers crossed the land transfer gets completed between the federal and state government and we'd be lined up to be able to drill the Triple Z project, which is more of a porphyry copper gold system, but very, very close to infrastructure is right off of the highways back. It's between the Taylor Highway and the Alaska Highway. So that's another project I could see us drilling. So I would envision a lot of drilling next year to test these targets. Yeah, I was actually just going to ask what the status is of Triple Z. Yes, again, the state did complete the survey this year. And this is a bit of a history here, but it was originally surveyed, but they've had a number of fires in the area. And when they put out the fires, they put little fire roads in. And unfortunately, it took out all the survey points when they did that. And so the state had to re-establish the land boundaries in there, which were all tied to those survey markers that got taken out by the fire. So that resurvey has now been done. It will be signed off on by the Tetlin Village Corporation, which is different from the tribe that we're in business with at Manchot.

33:31 Same general area, but different entity. So once they're signed off on the survey, and then it goes to the federal, what they call a federal registrar, which then is sort of an official platting of the land that recognizes the survey and then the feds can transfer it to the state. So a bit of a process here, but we should be in a position next year to be able to drill. That then validates our claims, they give us a permit to be able to drill it. We're getting there. Okay. And what are the effects of inflation on the development of the Mancho deposit? Well, I think we're seeing, we're seeing the, you know, we do have inflation. The Federal Reserve continues to maintain that it's transitory.

34:19 If that's the case, we might see costs come back down, but right now we're definitely all feeling inflationary pressures, whether it's the price of milk or the cost of a house. It's certainly all gone up. Along with that, we're seeing what we also are used to in the gold business and why people invest in gold is that gold is the ultimate hedge against inflation. So when Kinross put their original plan together and said there was $110M of expected capital to get to production, they were assuming a $1250 Gold price. Now, when they're updated, they've given it a range, so they're being a bit more cautious, I'd say, because of these inflationary pressures, and they're saying it's 105 to 130.

35:07 So maybe a little, could be a little lower, but only $5 million lower, but it could be $25 million higher, or $20 million higher. But they're also at the same time saying our long-term forecast for gold is $1,500. So it's, I think gold again is sort of playing the role that it's supposed to play, or at least that's why investors invest in gold is to hedge their bets on inflation. Thank you. Kyle has a question here. He's asking were there any material environmental liabilities from the historical mining activities assumed by Contingo with the Lucky Shot Mine transaction? James, next please. Yeah, great question. Short answer is no.

35:54 It's an incredibly clean ore. The only process was using gravity. The old mine there that I showed the picture of, that was basically a gravity recovery of gold only. And so there was never any cyanide or any other chemicals used, and so none to clean up. The tunnels are all, the existing tunnels are all on private land. Those were all patented mining claims. So from a safety standpoint, we have a gate at the front, access to the mine site. We have a gate there so we don't get sort of visitors, unwanted visitors. There's doors on all of the old mine sites, tunnel sites so that people can't wander in there and get lost or something.

36:47 So we're there's I'm very pleased that there's, we did a pretty exhaustive research on this at site, there's really no environmental issues and not really any safety issues as well. Great. Christopher is asking, are there any royalties to deal with at Lucky Shot Projects and how did those figure into the acquisition terms? Yeah, so There are underlying royalties. I probably will need to add that to our slide, I think. So thanks for the question. Yeah, so there is an underlying royalty to the owner, the claim owner. And that's depending on what lands it's on, it's either 3 or 4%.

37:33 And there's another royalty to InSearch, which is the company that built the tunnel. They're an oil and gas company that's still in business out of Texas. And they have 0.5 percent royalty. Thank you. We have a long question here from Kyle. I'm going to divide it into 2. Essentially, he's just asking for if you can provide more details related to the background of the deal. How did it come together? What was the timing like? Why is it available? And why was a project of this quality available? And also, why is Contango or best suited to create value with this opportunity versus other entities? Sure. That's also a great question. So short history here.

38:19 Project been explored by a number of groups over the last, there was a lot of activity in the 80s by InSearch, and then a bit of a gap until Full Metal showed up in 2005 and with an agreement with the underlying owner. They were operational from 2005, I think, to 2009 or 2010. Drilled a lot of holes up at the Coleman, which is on top of the mountain, but basically ran out of money. So they dropped the property another bit of a hiatus there and a joint venture group of Miranda Miranda mining and Alaska gold torrent acquired the property and with a plan to Put the Coleman into production.

39:06 So the hundred 20 roughly 120,000 ounces up there unfortunately there as a junior company they they took on debt with a fund out of Singapore called the Cartesian Group. And it was effectively a gold loan. And this was in 2016. And the gold loan and the debt instrument provided that they needed to be in production by 2018. And of course, they didn't meet that timeline. If you recall, during that time period in 2016, the gold price went up, had a nice move up and then had a nice move back down. So they weren't really able to get investors to buy into the story, but they'd already put out this gold loan to Cartesian.

39:56 So long story short, Cartesian ended up owning the asset. Cartesian's a big fund, and they don't know the first thing about mining. They effectively wanted a gold loan. This thing sat here for a number of years. I've been talking to them over the last 2 or 3 years about the project. I think they had higher expectations than we were willing to pay. And so until we got to a price that, as time went on, we just kind of stuck to our guns in terms of what we felt it was worth. And we viewed it as an exploration project, not a mining project yet. So, we could revaluate it as an exploration project, not as something you'd go put into production right away. So, I think we were able to get a solid deal out of this.

40:45 I will have a press release out later today that announces we have hired a new mine manager, a new person to our staff, Chris Kennedy. He's operated the, he was the operator of the Pogo Mine for a period of 8 or 9 years. He's also worked as a senior position down at the Greens Creek mine, now operated by Hecla, but when he was there, it was operated by Rio Tinto, so big, big company. He also worked in the senior position at Fort Knox Gold Mine, so he has a lot of mining experience in Alaska. He understands the whole safety culture that is necessary for a mining operation. He's the perfect guy for the job. So that's another reason I think we're well suited for this project is we have people to be able to execute on our plan and we have the capital and access to additional capital to be able to bring this second project into production. And so, you know, not only I think are we now on solid footing with Man Cho, with Ken Ross in the operator seat there, but now this gives us 100% on project that we can over the next 3 years, outline a plan to get this thing where we've got a resource and then feasibility study and a reserve and put a mine plan there. And I like the fact that because this is underground, our exploration plan kind of quickly changes into our development plan

42:16 because the main thing from a development standpoint is just getting all the underground infrastructure there. And the exploration program will do that. Perfect. Well, thank you. You actually also answered a second question, which was about your involvement and how long it's taken. And So thank you. Christopher is asking, at Lucky Shot, do you envision just simple processing with gravity separation only, or hydro-metallurgical processing as well? That's a really simple lure. I showed you the pictures, and historically, they were getting 80% to 90% recovery with just gravity. So I like that plan. I'd say it's too early to say that's definitely what we're going to do. But it's certainly a very simple plan.

43:05 We know it worked historically. They recovered 250,000 ounces of gold out of Lucky Shot itself. So that'll certainly be part of the plan. Whether we end up processing, adding another step to process and get, you know, 96 or 97 percent of recovery, that's typically sort of the upper end of recoveries for gold, you know, 97, 98. But if you're getting 80 to 90% with just simple gravity, you're doing pretty darn good. And again, from a permitting standpoint, if you can not talk about using cyanide, I think you'd probably make your life a whole lot easier. Great, thank you. Kyle is asking, can you provide an update on the New York Stock Exchange uplisting on the timing and the process and all that?

43:57 Yeah, great. Thanks for the question, Kyle. So now we have the LuckyShop transaction completed. We are going to finalize our 8K filings, which will come very soon, and then incorporate that into what's called an S1 filing and get that into the SEC for review. We plan to have that done by the end of September and then a 30-day review process, probably a little bit of back and forth with the exchange. I'm sure they're going to have questions. I've never seen one of these things where the SEC doesn't have questions. And so overall timeline, 90 to 120 days, we expect to execute the IPO and get uplisted onto the, or I should say a re-IPO and get us uplisted onto the NYC American.

44:50 That's great. Okay, last question here. You've kind of already answered it, but Christopher is just asking about the location of Lucky Shot being that it's near a historic district and a popular tourist road. Do you foresee any potential conflicts in the future? It's a good question. And there is a state park kind of over the, 2 mountains over, And there's a lot of activity over there, and we'll just stay away from that area, or we'll access it from the Willow side, which there are other mines in the area on the Willow side. There's active plaster mines, as well as a couple of small hard rock prospects that are, I'd say, seasonally operated. So we just got through staking some more claims to give us a bit more of a buffer to the east and north.

45:46 So, you know, there's, we're, one of the, I think one of the things about being successful in the mining business is you have to engage with the community. So we'll start our engagement with the community. Another good reason to have a guy like Chris on board is that he's done this before. He's worked, he knows how to work with local communities. I've got a long track record here in Alaska with working with a variety of stakeholders. So, you know, yeah, there will be challenges. Absolutely. I don't know a mining project that doesn't have challenges. And a lot of it's just communicating early and often with the community so that they understand what you're doing and what you're not doing and working through that. So yeah, we'll, this is, There is a management plan for the area in the Matanuska Susitna Borough. There is a borough management plan and mining is part of that plan for this area.

46:43 The state park and The recreation area that's associated with the park is, like I said, 2 mountains over. It's accessed by a separate road and the roads do connect, but a lot of that activity is winter activity. There's a snow machining and cross-country skiing over there. And that in the wintertime, they don't connect to the road. There's a steep part of the road that the state does not maintain. Or I should say that the borough doesn't maintain. Okay, cool. Thank you so much. Just last comment here, which is a nice note to leave off on. Christopher is saying, Lucky Shot has great fundamentals. The locals are very supportive. Bring on those jobs. So with that, thank you, Rick, for taking us through the presentation and the live Q&A. And thank you for everyone who attended and submitted these great questions.

47:34 There is the contact of Contango OR on the slide up right now. We will also be sending out a brief survey where if you do have any other questions, we'll be able to put you in touch with the Contango Org team and they will be happy to follow up with you directly. And you can also find more information on their website at www.contangoorg.com. And I'll pass it back to you, Rick, for the final word. Yeah, thanks, Dasha. And again, Thanks everybody for joining us today. We're very excited about Lucky Shot. Manchose on a good track. So, and obviously want to see what our exploration results from our Shamrock and Eagle Ona areas are. When we get those results, we'll put them, you know, analyze them and put them out to the public and let them know what our plans are based on that.

48:21 But a very exciting time for the company and the next big job ahead of us is getting the uplisting done onto the New York Stock Exchange and look forward to reporting on that as well.