Earnings call transcript: Fortitude Gold’s Q2 2025 results highlight strategic growth

Fortitude Gold Corp reported its Q2 2025 earnings, showcasing a net income of $800,000, or $0.04 per share, on net sales of $4.9 million. The company’s stock remained relatively stable, closing at $3.65, reflecting a slight decrease of 0.01%. According to InvestingPro analysis, the stock is trading near its Fair Value, with a market capitalization of $89 million. Despite being closer to its 52-week low, Fortitude Gold’s strategic initiatives and strong cash position indicate potential for future growth, supported by a healthy dividend yield of 3.29%.

Key Takeaways

• Fortitude Gold’s net income for Q2 2025 was $800,000, translating to $0.04 per share.
• The company maintains a strong cash balance of $17.1 million.
• Strategic development continues with multiple mining projects in Nevada.
• The stock price remains stable, with minimal movement post-earnings.
• Gold prices near $3,000 make deeper mining economically viable.

Company Performance

Fortitude Gold Corp’s performance in Q2 2025 reflects a stable financial position, with net sales reaching $4.9 million and a net income of $800,000. InvestingPro data reveals impressive fundamentals, including a strong gross profit margin of 63.43% and exceptional liquidity with a current ratio of 14.6. The company’s strategic focus on expanding its mining operations in Nevada positions it well in a favorable regulatory environment. This aligns with industry trends, where gold mining continues to be lucrative given current gold prices. For deeper insights into Fortitude Gold’s financial health and growth prospects, investors can access the comprehensive Pro Research Report, available exclusively on InvestingPro.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $4.9 million
• Net income: $800,000
• Earnings per share: $0.04
• Cash balance: $17.1 million
• Working capital: $26.6 million
• Mine gross profit: $2.6 million

Outlook & Guidance

Fortitude Gold plans to conclude mining at Isabella Pearl by mid-2026 while exploring production from new sites such as Scarlet South and County Line. The company aims to secure permits for multiple properties before potential political shifts, leveraging its control over a 10-kilometer trend with promising gold deposits. InvestingPro analysis indicates the company maintains a strong financial foundation, with more cash than debt on its balance sheet and liquid assets exceeding short-term obligations - two of several bullish indicators available to Pro subscribers.

Executive Commentary

CEO Jason Reed emphasized the company’s adaptability and strategic positioning, stating, "We’re just trying to be in a position to do what we can to produce as much to take advantage of these gold prices." He also highlighted the importance of securing permits ahead of political changes, saying, "Our goal is to try to permit everything we can before the next federal election."

Risks and Challenges

• High production costs per gold ounce could impact profitability.
• Dependence on volatile gold prices poses financial risks.
• Potential political changes may affect the permitting process.
• Energy costs, despite plans to transition to grid power, remain a concern.
• Execution risks in expanding and developing new mining sites.

Fortitude Gold’s Q2 2025 earnings call underscores its strategic initiatives and stable financial footing, with a focus on expanding its mining operations to capitalize on favorable market conditions.

Full transcript - Fortitude Gold Corp (FTCO) Q2 2025:

Conference Call Operator: Day, everyone. Welcome to the Fortitude Gold twenty twenty five Second Quarter Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen only mode. After management’s prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call over to Jason Reed, CEO and President.

The floor is yours.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Fortitude Gold Corp’s twenty twenty five second quarter conference call. Following my brief comments and associated presentation for those who joined online, we will have a brief question and answer period. Joining me on the call today for the Q and A portion will be Ms. Janet Turner, our Chief Financial Officer.

Let me remind everyone that certain statements made on this call are not historical facts and are considered forward looking statements. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties as described in our annual report on Form 10 ks and other SEC filings, which could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by our comments. Forward looking statements in the earnings release that we issued yesterday along with the comments on this call are made only as of today, 08/06/2025, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update any of these forward looking statements as actual events unfold. You can find a reconciliation of non GAAP financial measures referred to in our remarks in our Form 10 ks filed with the SEC for the year ended 12/31/2024. Second quarter financial results and highlights include $4,900,000 net sales, 800,000 net income or $04 per share, $17,100,000 cash balance at June ’15 100 gold ounces produced $26,600,000 working capital at 06/30/2025 $2,600,000 mine gross profit 1,300,000.0 exploration expenditures, $11.31 total cash cost after byproduct credits per gold ounce sold, $14.52 per ounce total all in sustaining cost, 1,500,000.0 dividends paid and six nineteen ounces of gold rounds or bullion at 06/30/2025.

At our Isabella Pearl, we continue to move waste for the Pearl pit layback. Our goal is to access the mineralized gold zones trending Southeast deep from the bottom of the Isabella Pearl Pit in the next few months. Between ongoing residual leach of our heap leach pad and the mineralization in the Pearl deep, both areas are expected to provide the bridge to obtaining and putting County Line into production. We are excited to see the Pro business and Pro mining federal administration work through the permit backlog. The Bureau of Land Management is moving our County Line project closer to permit approval and we remain optimistic we will be granted all the necessary approvals to build the project in the near future.

We look to take advantage of this momentum and are pursuing permits and programs including South Scarlet, North Scarlet and Golden Mile for future mining. I am pleased to report after all these years, we have finally been granted the permit to connect to the local power grid. This will allow us to lower our energy costs by moving away from higher cost diesel powered electricity. We are now working with NV Energy on setting up a preconstruction meeting and we look forward to connecting to the grid. Other permits we are pursuing include an exploration EA for our East Camp Douglas property to allow us significant additional acreage that could be disturbed for exploration above the standard five acres provided under the BLM notice of intent permits.

We are also pushing the BLM for our Golden Mile project to be added to the FAS 41 transparency, a web link that will allow investors to see the status of permitting directly from the regulatory agencies. It’s great to see the Trump administration take a proactive approach to fixing a broken regulatory permit system. On June 30, the Energy Department published this announcement. And for those not attending the online presentation, you can go to energy.gov to find this information. Energy Secretary announces updated NEPA procedures to end permitting paralysis and unleash American energy.

While this specifically focuses on the energy sector, statements they make in the announcement like this, as part of a government wide effort to restore common sense to permitting, makes me optimistic there will be spillover from this streamlining into the mining sector. This administration is making strong and bold moves to return this country to some semblance of common prosperity in attempts to position the country to compete for vital resources that provide our way of life. We continue to defensively position the company to overcome the challenges created by the Biden administration while targeting to offensively position the company to permit and build our next minds under the Trump administration. With that, I would like to thank everyone for their time today on this conference call. And operator, if you can please open up the lines for possible Q and A.

Conference Call Operator: Certainly. The floor is now open for questions. You please pick up your handset if listening on a speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. Please hold while we poll for any questions.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Okay. Operator, I have several questions that came in on the web portal. So let’s take those before any live questions as people queue up. The first one is from Harvey Bolan, a private investor. Question is after County Line is permitted, when do you expect production to commence and in what amount per quarter you expect other properties to be permitted while County Line is producing?

Harvey, good to hear from you again. I’m not going to start calling out quarters of production yet. We have all our production going forward as the TBD as a function of when that timing comes in. But let me just give you our worldview on County Line. We’re awful close to getting this permitted.

And it’s great to see some action and movement in this regard. Now we have a choice in front of us once we do get this permitted. It’ll be a function of of managing capital. And what I mean by that is we’re spending a lot of money to go deeper at Isabella Pearl. And it may make sense to go ahead and complete that and then move over to County Line.

Now we obviously will be doing some basic infrastructure what little there is over there, roads, etcetera. But that would be one path forward. The second path is we feel confident that we can go at both of them full bore. So we’ll just wait and see, but the most important thing is to get that permit and we’re just out of the thirty day comment period and so we think we’re very close, to getting these permits. Another factor in this is that we have an area close to the Isabella Pearl called Scarlet South and Scarlet North.

Scarlet South, can be encompassed in the current mine plan, and we’re moving forward in that regard. And it is highly likely that that permit could drop in soon as well. Let’s assume for the moment that happens, we would actually and plan to cycle equipment between Isabella Pearl Deep and Scarlet South to chase some ounces over there. So we’re we always try to position for optionality especially coming out of that brutal four years of the Biden administration basically locked down a permit. So that optionality hopefully comes to fruition here where we may actually Harvey be mining from Isabella Pearl Deep and Scarlet South before we actually start mining County Line.

So a lots influx, but I like the optionality. That’s why we create the optionality because Plan A rarely works and you’re usually stuck with Plan B, C or D. But at least we have those. So great question. Thank you.

The next question is from Rayleigh. Is the civic cat deposit exhausted? What is the goal with the bullion treasury? Why did the leach pad inventories go up by $10,000,000 Okay. The first part of your question Ray, good to hear from you.

Is the civic cat deposit exhausted? Yes. For all intents and purposes, yes. We’re still picking away a little bit there, but that’s for the most part done. What is the goal with the bullion treasury?

We’d love to add to it. We’re glad that we created it when we did. And before the big move on gold, we’d love to add to it. We’re just not in a position to do that. So it’ll be in a holding pattern, so to speak, for the time being.

But it’s nice to actually hold gold in the treasury. The second part of why did the leach pad inventories go up by $10,000,000 I’m going turn over to Janet, who’s on the call, our CFO.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Hi, good morning. The reason that leach pad inventories went up was a function of the average cost of the leach pad inventories increased over the from the last six months due to the fact that we’re mining higher, higher cost ore. There’s a lot of waste for phase five. So as those higher cost ounces go in the pad, the cost per ounce goes up. And so that is the reason for the increase in leach pad inventories.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Okay. Thank you, Janet. And Ray, thank you for the question. Next question is from Phil Dinsmore. Jason, what will be the ramp up time to preliminary mining and then full production accounting line once you have the permits?

How fast can we see results from IP layback? Meaning can the quarterly mined ounces increase prior to County Line production? All right, thanks for the questions, Phil. The first part of your question, what will be the ramp up time to preliminary mining and then full production county line? Kind of addressed that in the last question, but I guess to reiterate, come back to that on the bigger picture of ramping it up.

It’s going to give us a couple of years of production there at about 20,000 ounce run rate, but it’s not going to be clean years. It’s never a clean year in as much as January to December. So as a function of whenever we get the permit and when we choose to start for the aforementioned reasons on the other answer I gave for the previous question, there’ll be some preparation. Not a lot because we’re not building much at County Line. You guys all know that to follow us, we’re not building a heap over there.

We’re not building a process. We’re basically mining crushing and hauling it. It’ll be put into production once we go at it hard fast as fast or faster than any mine. So the full production, it’ll probably let’s just assume it takes at least six months before we’re in full production as a function of mining. But also keep in mind that County Line is an old open pit.

There’s a gold left. There’s actually two pits. There’s the County Line Pit proper and then the East Pit. The East Pit has a lot of exploration potential to the north of the County Line Pit has a lot exploration potential. We think we’re going to be here longer than just the two years that we’ve identified now.

But there’s gold in the bottom of the pit right now in County Line. So we could potentially get some gold, a nice shot in the arm early on and then as we do a pit layback to chase more deep, there’ll be a little bit of work there. So a lot going on. I hope that kind of gives you some insight as to what we’re looking at at County Line. The second part of your question, how fast can we see results from the IP layback?

The IP layback is basically and those were the pictures for anybody who joined in the conference call presentation online. You could see the pictures of the pit layback. We’re moving along really well. We only have a couple more benches and we should be into the ore. Yeah.

I’m not going to I don’t want be held to a time frame, but we fully expect to be mining that by the end of the year. And we don’t expect it to take very long to see some results and a shot in the arm, so to speak, on some production, which will be good. That coupled with potentially bringing in Scarlet South, which I’m mentioning earlier. We’re just trying to be in a position to do what we can to produce as much to take advantage of these gold prices. Let’s see.

I think I got to your questions, Phil. Thank you. There’s another let’s do one more writing question before we see if there’s any live questions. Craig Hooper, as far as the 1,500 ounce produced in Q2, is that calculated based on what you pull off the leach pad or some other calculation? What percentage of the pad is emptyfull?

Can you estimate number of recoverable ounces currently on the pad? That’s what we actually produce. So that’s gold dore that we’re producing. So hopefully that’s clear Craig that that’s not an estimate on gold on the pad or anything. That is a production ounces and which also varies from sold but not by much.

So I think that gets to your first part of the question. The second part is that calculated based on what you pull off the leach pad or some other calculation? I got to that that’s just their production. What percentage of the pad is empty or full? Okay, the pad is it’s almost like its own living entity and as much as you have all these various levels on the pad and then you all have all these different what we call cells or smaller areas like a checkerboard that you go in and leach them.

Sometimes you’ll do a couple of cells at a time, sometimes just one. And so it gets very dynamic, very complex as it relates to how much in any given area, etcetera. And you’re working off the best estimates on how long you’ve A, a cell under leach, how many levels it’s going through etcetera. But we have an estimate on total ounces on the pad and that’s we’re seeing a lot of the fruition of that. It takes time on residual leach and that’s commonplace for the industry, but that’s what we’re pulling off now is a lot of residual leach.

So hopefully that got to your question, Craig. Thank you. Operator, are there any live questions?

Conference Call Operator: Yes. There are some live questions. Your first question is coming from Jeff Plone with J. Paul Consulting. Please put your question.

Your line is live.

Jeff Plone, Consultant, J. Paul Consulting: Jason, can you hear

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: me? I can. How are you, Jeff?

Jeff Plone, Consultant, J. Paul Consulting: I’m doing great. Thank you. Great job moving forward and couldn’t be more excited about the prospects. I have two questions. First one is on the Isabel Pearl and and your movement forward there.

What is the company hoping for really in terms of maybe ounces and or time to get those ounces maybe over the next six months or half a year or whatever once you get in there. What are we hoping for there? If you could give us a little color there.

Conference Call Operator: Yes.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: I appreciate the question, Jeff. I’m not going to give ounces. Let me back up for a minute of why we went deep on the Isabella Pearl. At the time we made that we at the time when we made that decision to go after deep, we always knew there was an area of mineralization that trended to the Southeast under. But when we ran our initial pit shell under those gold prices way back when, it didn’t make sense to chase this gold.

And Jeff, I see here a lot of background noise on your phone. So I don’t know if you can mute because I can hear talking on

Jeff Plone, Consultant, J. Paul Consulting: Sure. Let me see if I can mute that. That that’d be perfect. Sorry.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Okay. No problem. So, we are looking at a situation where we’re dealing with the Biden administration. We’re dealing with the BLM head of Theresa Stone Manning, who’s focused only on green energy, and she’s basically making sure that everything grinds to a halt and very few permits are issued. So we’re living in that world at the time we made the decision to go deep.

Now we had the choice, do we basically stop mining, send the miners home, or do we be a mining company and try to go deep and chase this? Well, when we originally ran the pit shell, it didn’t make economic sense. For one, I think it was about $1,800 gold. Two, the waste and overburden to remove it and make the pit bigger on that side, it didn’t make economic sense. You fast forward to a situation where you’re now under $3,000 gold, it made sense to chase it.

So, I don’t want any people to grab on to this, oh, you’re going to do this many ounces and therefore it’s going to be this kind of revenue and try to calculate in that regard because we’re spending a lot of money, they’re kind of costly ounces to do the pit layback to get these ounces. So, but what we do believe is it keeps us in the game. And that’s the decision we made based under this, the awful Biden administration that we had to live under for four years. It was never the goal to chase this, but we had the opportunity with the gold price that really helped us. It’s not the panacea.

It’s not our future. It just is the bridge of additional ounces between that and the residual leach till we get the County Line permit. So while I hate to not give you a number of ounces and what you can expect and all that, I don’t want to do that because I don’t want people to grab onto this and then back calculate any kind of we’re confident that we’re going to get ounces and we’re going to make some money. So let’s just leave it at that. But again, it’s just a bridge.

It’s just it’s a function of having to deal with a really bad administration that was anti mining. So now we’re fast forward into where we are with this positive situation with an administration that’s pro mining that realizes how important minerals are and is trying to clear up the backlog. And we’ve seen movement that we haven’t seen in four years under Biden administration in a matter of months since this administration took office. And I think that’s a sign of what’s to come. So I think we’re going to get these county line permit.

We’ll then be able to start forecasting again what we might be able to produce. But until we do this, until we get these permits and have additional transparency, we’re not going to be forecasting anything. So any more questions that come in on what are you going to produce, I’m just we’re not going to answer them right now. That’s just a TBD to be determined based on timing of permits. But we are seeing tremendous movement of this administration clearing up the backlog.

And let me just emphasize this by saying, just to put a power line in. Now somebody can point and say, federal government didn’t have anything to do with that. And those holdups, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I don’t think we were under this awful Biden administration for four years and we couldn’t even get a power line in. And all of a sudden, the new administration takes hold and our power line is now approved.

I think it’s part and parcel of this overall tenor where you have from the top a federal administration, this pro mining, this pro permit that is trickling down and we’re seeing the fruits of that. So I’m excited because this gives us a lot of optimism going forward that we’re going to get not only permits, but I hope to get every permit we want under this administration. In case it goes back the other way and we have to deal with anti miners again, at least we have several mines in the queue to build. So Jeff, I hope that helps and thanks for your question. You don’t know if

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: you’re still

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: ahead, Jeff.

Jeff Plone, Consultant, J. Paul Consulting: I couldn’t be more excited about where you are and what you’re doing. That’s fantastic. I guess as far as getting this new story out, Jason, I know there’s a big conference as there are all the time but I know there’s something going on here at the Beaver Creek Gold Conference coming up at September. Will we have any kind of a presence there at all? Or I guess what how do we get this exciting new story out to our shareholders and possibly some new shareholders?

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: No, great question, Jeff. We attended the Beaver Creek long ago. It’s often or more often focused on just exploration companies. And so we attended years ago as a producer and it was a great conference. They put on a great conference.

I have nothing but praise for that conference, but it doesn’t focus on producers. So to come back to your question, how do we get the news story out? In September is our biggest conference of the year called the Denver Gold Group and it’s held in Colorado Springs at the Broadmoor Hotel. And we will be presenting at that conference and there’ll be a webcast and obviously new shareholders could potentially attend via webcast either live or after the fact. But that is the biggest gold conference of the year and we’re pleased that Fortitude will have a presence there at that conference.

So yeah, we are working to get the story out.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Okay.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Thank thank you, Jeff. Are there any more live questions?

Conference Call Operator: Yes. There are. Your next question is coming from Doug Johnson with Five Management. Please pose your question, your line is live.

Doug Johnson, Investor, Five Management: Hey, Jason, congrats on all the hard work you’re getting through the regulatory issues over many years. I’m really clear that you want to be very cautious about describing Isabella Pearl as anything other than a bridge. I get it. It’s prudent of you to do that. And yet I still want to ask you a couple of questions.

Number one is how many ounces have you pulled out of Isabella Pearl over the past five years? And can you give any estimate of or just general terms about how deep you’re going and how long you expect to be there?

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Okay. The first part of your question, you know, we probably pulled out close to 200,000 ounces, out of that thus far. What was your second part of your question?

Doug Johnson, Investor, Five Management: Well, how long would you expect to be there? At Isabella, again, you characterized it prudently as it’s a bridge. It’s not the future of the business. And yet, you you are laying it back. You are going deeper.

How long would you expect to be there?

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Yeah. Not very long. I think once we get deep and access this mineralization, we did a tremendous amount of studies, on the material because it’s deep and the way it’s trending, it’s moving toward what we call transitional ore. Meaning the oxide goes from strictly oxide into a transitional, which has some sulfides in it into a full sulfide. We cannot process the latter.

So there are a lot of ounces deep in Isabella Pearl that are heavily sulfide ounces that would take a completely different process than we have to extract the gold. So in the future, we could potentially sell that if it made sense to one of the bigger dogs in Nevada, one of the big mining companies that has the facilities to process and extract that gold out of the sulfide rock, but that’s not our business plan. So we don’t expect to be mining at Isabella Pearl all that much longer. In fact, I would guesstimate that we’re done mining by the 2026 at this point. From we’re still

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: a

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: couple of months out from reaching the mineralization and I think we’ll be done mining before the end of the before the midyear. So that gives you some perspective that it’s not a long term thing. But we believe it will help along with the residual leach of ounces already on the pad that come off, albeit residual leach comes off slower. Give the bridge and buy more time. In no world did we ever think that we couldn’t get a mine at County Line permitted that you effectively mine as a gravel pit as an aggregate.

You’re not building anything. You’re not putting a heat pad. You’re not putting a process. You’re literally just mining it as if it’s a gravel pit. And under the Biden administration, couldn’t get that through.

In no world do we think that was going to be the case. I it. I don’t think anybody on these calls knows where I land on politics, but I knew it was going to be bad. I never thought it would be that bad. And it wasn’t just us, was across the board, any resource, any extraction, timber, oil, gas, whatever.

It was an awful time. And we always planned early on as a company to just keep building mines. And so you layer new fresh ore from new mines on top of old residual leach heap and that’s how you keep the train rolling. Well, we hit a pretty big, speed bump there with the Biden administration who we couldn’t get a permit under him, not even as an aggregate pit. It’s ridiculous.

And then to hear after the fact, by, the offices of the BLM that okay, so we didn’t even really look at your county, your Golden Mile permit you turned in two years ago. We didn’t really even look at it. Wow. You know, what do you do with an administration where you turn something in and they don’t look at it for two years? Like how do you operate in that world?

So, thankfully, we’re now back to now they’re looking at it. They’re looking at everything we’re throwing at them. Before they’re like, hey, you need to pick and choose what’s the most important. We’ll look at maybe one or two things. Now they’ll look at everything.

That didn’t just that light switch didn’t just flip on coincidentally. Now that’s a function of who’s at the top. And we have a pro business, pro mining administration. So things are going to start changing for the positive I believe. It’s just unfortunate that the previous administration causes some damage along the way and we have to work to dig ourselves out of that hole, no pun intended.

Okay. Doug, does that answer your question?

Doug Johnson, Investor, Five Management: It did. Thank you very much. A very thorough answer and keep doing what you’re doing.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Hey. Thank you.

Conference Call Operator: Okay. And you do have one last question coming from John Bear with Ascend Wealth Advisors. Please pose your question. Your line is live.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Thanks. Good morning, Jason. Thanks for taking the call here or question rather. Hi, John. Actually, two I questions.

First, on the Power Connection situation, what do you think is the timeline there when you actually will be able to hook up and utilize that? And what as a percentage of your power costs and needs versus diesel, how much do you think you’ll be able to save there? Can you quantify that at all? Are you willing to quantify that at all?

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Yes. Now we did the analysis long ago when we made the decision to hook to the power grid plus we have all intents and purposes to be here long term and this is kind of the hub and spoke as you know where we hope to bring in material whether it’s direct shipping or carbon gold infused carbon into the Isabella Pearl for processing from our satellite properties. So it made sense at the time and I don’t have those numbers at the top of my head, but they absolutely are beneficial at the time we ran them. And I can’t imagine them being very much different than that. So I’m not going to give you the exact just because I’ll be wrong.

That’s been a long time since we ran that analysis. As far as when we’re going to connect, we don’t know yet. This power line we’ve been working on for four year or plus four years, we have spent, and Janet is going to correct me if I’m saying something wrong here, over $2,000,000 already. Given them $2,000,000 to install this thing that they had asked for. And for all the reasons we all can speculate why it never got pushed through.

It never got pushed through even though they sat, they’re sitting on $2,000,000 of our money. So I’d like to think that’s some leverage to say, hey guys, you guys have had this $2,000,000 for a long time, how soon can you put this in? It’s not going to be very costly for us since we already front loaded the bulk of the funds to put this in to close the loop and pay for the balance. I think it’s like 200 or $300,000 left to pay them. But as I mentioned in the conference call or in my statements, we’re now able to set up and that’s what our team is trying to do, up a construction or preconstruction call with NV Energy to get some clarity on timing.

This just happened two days ago, John. So I don’t have the answers. We got this information just a couple of days ago and put it out in the press release yesterday. So it’s a little bit in flux, but what’s wonderful is we’re going to save on cost and that’s good for the long term. It also might free up, we can maybe take one of our generators depending on timing over to one of our satellite properties and not have to buy more generators or as many anyway.

So anyway, it’s just a good thing all the way around. It makes my head spin to think what how inefficient is a country when you can’t get a power line in in four years? Again, I come back to the previous administration and prepay it into the tune of millions. It’s not like we’re being cheaper. They would didn’t have money to do it.

We paid them the money to do it. So it it just shows you and underscores for me how awful the previous administration was on all fronts. I mean, you know, my associate Greg did right by having me exclude some stuff out of my pre pre written statements. But I’ll say it now. We now are all waking up to the fact that that president wasn’t even running the country.

He wasn’t cognitively around for the most part, and it was his team. I mean, no wonder we couldn’t get permits. No wonder we couldn’t get power line we paid for put in until this new administration comes in and boom, it’s like a light switch. The week after, I said this on the last conference call, the week after he was elected, he wouldn’t even in yet and the BLM changed their tune immediately. So, I just think it’s great and it gives a lot of hope and positivity to the resource space again, which was lacking under the previous one.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Sure. So just kind of to wrap that part of that question up. So when you’ve got a meeting coming up with NRV, right? And do you feel that they will give you some sort of an idea of what the evaluation timeline construction might be? I mean, they say, we’re going forward on this, we’re going to get it done, you think that they will you’ll get better clarity on when that might be up and running?

Yes. Will help that. Would hope so. And then should you put something out? Do you think you’ll put something out to as like a press release or

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Like a construction start? Yeah. Possibly.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Yeah. Yeah.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Think that would help you to bring in question. Yeah. Having

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: been involved in a absolutely major power line crossing Southern Mexico from a really remote transfer station across some of the roughest Canyon country there is in Oaxaca, Mexico. And watching the Mexican energy companies crush it. They crush that. Like once they got permission, they put that thing in in some of the most remote toughest country in such short order. Now you look at where we are.

We are relatively flat. We’re across the highway from a major transfer station. It shouldn’t take long. I mean, don’t want to be held to this, but in the world should this take more than a couple months. Like that’s that would be generous.

I mean, there it’s not like we’re going very far to the transfer station. You go from that transfer station to the highway and you go down the easement on the highway and over to Isabella Pearl and it’s not very far. So I can’t imagine a world in which, you know, once the powers that be are motivated, they can’t get this thing done in in short order. We just don’t know when that is.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Let’s say have a problem with the the supply line, you know, the lines of the physical lines themselves to hook it up.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Don’t We know that’s an have no indication of that at all. But, yeah. We don’t have any indication

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: that that’s a problem. Data centers, I guess, is what I’m kind of hinting at.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Oh, yeah. Like, Bitcoin miners and stuff pulling energy. Who knows? Yeah. We’ll just see.

But, all the interaction we’ve had with them over the years because believe me, we’ve had a lot, enough to where we’re getting invoices and paying $2,000,000 yet nothing’s getting done. Never once did it come up that they’re not gonna have enough energy for us. That would be a kick in the teeth at this point.

Doug Johnson, Investor, Five Management: Like, to

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: to know the physical

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: I meant the physical lines, the actual, you know, connectivity connecting the line.

Doug Johnson, Investor, Five Management: Oh, poles and wires and stuff.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Right. Because that’s somewhat of an issue too. Okay, well that’s good. Hopefully by the end you’ll have it. Okay.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: I hope it better be. Again, we’ve paid them already.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Good them when question to ask you have your meeting.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: No, appreciate I appreciate that, John. Did you have another question?

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Yeah, I sure did. So if I’m understanding kind of the timeline of the various activities, you’re continuing to deepen the pit at IP. You’ve got Scarlet. And hopefully, let’s assume for, say for a second, you get the county line permit to go forward. Conceivably then, you could possibly have two or three operations going on where you’re actually pulling ore and sticking it on the putting it on the leach pads.

Is that am I kind of understanding that correctly?

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Yeah. But it probably it won’t be more than two. Like, you followed us long enough, John, to know we always intended to layer at least one on top of the other, and we’re trying to get back to that. So where I see in the near future is a strong possibility assuming we get Scarlet South permitted and brought in under the mine plan, which things are moving in that regard well. We would be mining deep in Pearl while taking that because it gets tighter and tighter the deeper you go.

So you have availability with the equipment to just have them drive over 700 meters and start working on Scarlet South And then go back and forth and back and forth. That I see happening hopefully in the near future while we’re working on County Line. But again, coming back to what I stated earlier, we don’t expect to be deep in the Pearl past midyear next year at the latest So we’ll be done, done there. So at that point, then you’re still pulling from Scarlet Hopefully and County Line adding new. And then eventually, just County Line, while we permit which we are actively trying to permit Scarlet North.

That’ll be a little more in-depth, because it’s just a different area and we can’t pull it into the mine plan as easy because it wasn’t originally included in the boundaries of the mine plan. So it’s a little more in-depth. But that would be another layering, if you will, once we get permission to do that. But we’re a ways from that. We’re a ways from Golden Mile, but we’re working on all of them now.

And they are they are looking at them all, which is great. So again, our goal is to try to permit everything we can before the next federal election in case it swings back to an anti mining, anti business stance. And hopefully, we have a handful of permits that we can weather that storm too.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Right. One last quick one,

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: and that

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: is you had mentioned that and I know this, you’re able to do able to mine and process sulfide ores. Has there been any interest from any of the companies operating in the area that do have that capability to look at this Bell Pearl asset to where you could perhaps get some residual monetization of it?

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Yeah. I’m a, I’m limited on what I can say, but b, there are groups that have seen some of the high grade we hit deeper, and I’m sure they’re looking Okay. You know, watching. But yeah. Who knows?

I mean if gold keeps screaming like it’s doing and these big big companies, the biggest ones out there in Nevada that have the processes to actually be able to extract the gold out of the sulfide ore, Who knows? Maybe they need this what we know in the past they needed to feed. Maybe they get more interested. I don’t know. But that’s not our game plan.

I don’t want anybody

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: on the call that

Doug Johnson, Investor, Five Management: we’re gonna do anything with that.

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Yeah. No. I understand that. If prices keep going up, then obviously, you can just like deepening the Pearl pit, right? I mean, it was all a matter of pricing, so of gold prices.

So play fun with numbers and decide what number do you want to put on it and when does it become attractive to somebody to come in here and say, Okay, yeah, we’d like to work a deal with you. Okay, very good. That answers the question.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Appreciate it. Thank you

Janet Turner, Chief Financial Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: very much. Good luck and keep Thanks, John. Okay.

Jason Reed, CEO and President, Fortitude Gold Corp: Thanks. Appreciate it. I’m going get back to some of the questions on write in. Any update on the Golden Mile permit? This is again from Ray Lieb.

Yeah, they’re looking at it finally. So as I mentioned earlier in the call to find out kind of at the end of Biden’s term that they didn’t even look at it. It was heartbreaking. After two years, they sat on their hands. But one of the things we’re finding with these permits that we turned in years ago that then they didn’t even look at is that then they come back and say, well in those two years, hey, we’ve implemented this new burrowing out issue.

So you didn’t do an analysis on the burrowing out when you turned yours in. Now we obviously didn’t because that wasn’t part of the permitting process. But you need to do that now. And we’ve gone back and say can’t we be grandfathered in because that wasn’t a regulation when we turned it in and you guys chose not to look at it for two years and can’t we be grandfathered to not have to do that? They’re like, nope.

So we have to go back and do some of these new baseline background studies. But I come back to the Theresa Stone Manning’s of the world, the BLM head under Biden who is so anti mining that, know, is it a coincidence that they put in all these new burrowing owl studies and all these things? That’s how you grind permitting to a halt. And she did that successfully. So we’re having to overcome some of these things they did from the point in time which we turned in the permit.

They implemented new things. They then tell us, okay, picked up your permit. Now you didn’t do those. Now we have to go back and do them. I mean, that’s the thing.

That’s the thing about the previous ministry. I can’t I could speak all day long on the headache that, when you have an administration that doesn’t want mining and wants to grind things to a halt, that’s how they do it. And they do it without having to shut it down completely and say we’re not going to issue anymore. They just make it so difficult. So we’re having to go back and redo a lot of the Gold Mile stuff, which is a shame.

Had they looked at it, picked it up and got it in the process, I would argue we could have got grandfathered in to not have to do this new regulations. I just hope that the direction that the new administration is going that NEPA thing I mentioned even though that was on the energy side, that’s the attitude is they know this system is broken and they’re trying to fix it and that’s what we need. All right, Ray, hopefully that gives you some insight, but they’re looking at it at least. Another one from or not another one, but this is from Brian Mullen, Palm View Investments. For a new investor, very good color thus far on the call.

What is the IP bridge primary purpose? What I mean by the bridge is that you may have you probably heard me address this in one of the previous questions is we had to make the decision or do we stop everything or do we mine deep? And because the gold price was higher, it made sense we could go chase this gold deep. It just gives us time. That’s what the bridge is.

It just buys us time. It just interject time with bridge. It buys us more time to put up with the BS that the previous administration put us through, not issuing permits to get the permits from this administration who’s pro. So that’s what that is. Hopefully, answers your question.

Your second part of your question, is it to bridge resources, keep resources active or get cash generated? It’s just cash to stay in business so that we find the next Isabella Pearl or that we find a million ounce plus over at East Camp or that we find these big deposits that we have potential to find, but we need to be in the game long enough to find them. So let me use that as a segue into Isabella Pearl. If all we had as a company was Isabella Pearl, we’d have a very exciting story. When you look at what’s happened in this trend, HomeStake mined across the highway, they’re no longer mining there, but Homestake is an old mining company that mined over 300,000 ounces across the highway in a deposit called the Santa Fe.

And then a couple stone throws away, you cross the highway and you hit Isabella Pearl and we’re going to do over 200 plus. Well, we have locked up on this trend 10 kilometers of this trend that the company controls. I believe there will be more Isabella Pearls. The question is who will find them? There’ll be another Santa Fe on this trend.

The question is who will find it? So the bridge is the time. It just buys us time through a rough administration to be in stay in business to find these bigger deposits. We can find one or two more Isabella Pearls, my goodness. Yes, that would be wonderful and that’s our goal.

So we have this area just 700 meters from Isabella Pearl called Scarlet South and Scarlet North. Are we on the edge of perhaps another Isabella Pearl or Santa Fe? Maybe, maybe not. But what we do know is there’s gold mineralization at surface and near surface and we’re going to mine it. And we have to move quick.

We don’t have years to delineate, drill it out and all this. We don’t have that time. So we have to move quick and start mining it while we continue to generate cash, while we continue to explore. But hopefully, we find one of these, another one. And hopefully, there’s several more.

I’m convinced there’ll be numerous. It’s just we want to be the ones to find them, not some other company. So hopefully, gives you some insight. The last part of your question of both then does it tilt one way or the other? Thank you.

I guess I’m not. No, okay. That had to do with cash generation resources. So sorry, I don’t that Yeah, it’s all about cash. Okay.

Moving on to the let’s make this our last question. This is going longer than I thought. T. Sturek, a shareholder, are you expecting a need for any external financing capital or capital for development of the new mines and projects until cash flow develops? Thanks for the question, Tee, Stirik.

We do have cash flow first of all, albeit it’s not as much as we used to have. But we do have cash flow. We’re trying to manage our cash so that we don’t have to dilute. So my goal would be that we don’t have to rely on any external financing or capital. We’d like to continue to do it in house.

We still want to be a dividend company if we can be. And yes, we want to keep a tight capital structure to do it. So Plan A, B and C of this is to do with cash flow. If we have to go into D, E and F and have to do something that’s a discussion for another day. But right now our goal is to do it with cash flow.

So hopefully that answers your question. Hey, this went on much longer than I thought. If you’re in the queue or on live or otherwise and you have a question that I didn’t get to, feel free to pick up the phone, call Greg or myself. We’re both in the office. We’ll answer.

We’ll get to any questions that we didn’t get to on this call. But with that, let’s operator, if you can close out the call. And thank you everybody for joining the conference. And we look forward to updating you on the next quarter. Thank you.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you everyone. This does conclude today’s conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.

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