Fortitude Gold Corp.

Good morning. I’d like to thank the Denver Gold Group for allowing me to present to you today. I will be making forward-looking statements and encourage you to become familiar with this safe harbor and the risk factors in our 10-K. Our investment thesis is simple: gold and dividends. 99% of our revenue comes from gold. We’re also in a catalyst position in that we’re building two new mines that we got permits for this year. You’ll hear me talk about those.

We also have exceptional exploration targets with eight properties. We also this year completed a $40 million joint venture on East Camp, which I’ll go into, and we provide a yield. Some of the past industry successes of this management include 14 years of gold production, 14 years of operational profitability, $1.2 billion in revenue generated, $165 million in cash dividend to shareholders. We built two mining units and six mines.

An overview is that we have a unique business strategy where we garner both an equity and a yield valuation in the mining space. We’re in the premier mining jurisdiction of Nevada. We are a low-cost open-pit heap leach producer. We target high grade. Most of you in this room are familiar with grade, but if you’re not, many mines, most mines in Nevada are 0.5 grams. You’re gonna see everything we look at around a gram or higher, and obviously a dividend focus.

Our strategy targets projects with low operating costs, strong return on capital and high margins. We wanna grow organically, remain debt-free, and distribute substantial dividends. We wanna leverage our ultra-tight capital structure to distribute dividends. We have a very exciting pipeline of projects. We have three mines in production, Isabella Pearl, County Line and Scarlet South. We have permitting phase projects in Golden Mile, Scarlet North, delineation properties you’ll hear me talk about and exploration properties you’ll hear me talk about. Our revenue is 99% gold. We do produce some silver, but we use it as a credit against our production costs.

Milestones. For context, we got our Isabella Pearl permit under the first Trump administration. We put that into production from groundbreaking in just ten months. It should have been six, but I dealt with a very difficult contractor. We had to rebuild much of it, but still, ten months is very respectable. We ramped up to our targeted 40,000 ounces, and we hit that for over three years. Our business plan was predicated on new mines coming online to hold the production profile, and we were hit by the Biden administration permit backlog, which derailed us, knocked us off our horse, if you will.

Fortunately, to the Trump administration’s back in, we immediately got two new mine permits, and we’re climbing back on the horse. We also this year did a very exciting $40 million joint venture on our East Camp, and you’re gonna see some phenomenal drill results that have come out on East Camp in the last couple weeks.

So here’s our production profile. As I mentioned, 40,000 ounces. If you look at all the yellow bars on the right and slide ’em left, that would have held our 40,000-ounce production profile. We got derailed by the previous administration. Again, opportunity for those who are just now looking at us, seeing that, “Hey, got knocked off the horse. We’re getting back on.”

County Line, we just got this year a permit to put this into production. It is in production. Obviously, mines take a little while to fully ramp up, but we’re fortunate that this is close to our Isabella Pearl processing facility, so we direct ship ore right to the facility. It enabled us to get this in production cheaper and quicker than most any mine could ever be built, and we did that. There’s 64,000 ounces in situ on this, 40 of which sit below some overburden that we have to remove for the balance of this year and maybe early next year. But then that will supply us with good production for the two years prior or after that once we get that overburden removed at County Line. County Line does have expansion potential. We’re looking at that.

This is our Isabella Pearl project. It’s a good bird’s eye view of what we are doing. You can see our heap leach. You can see our process facility. You can see the Isabella Pearl open pit. It’s been a wonderful deposit. I wanna find more of these. We’ve been here two years longer than we originally planned because it keeps giving us gold. We’re also expanding our heap leach ’cause we have a lot more tonnage being put on the pad with these other deposits. It also shows you where Scarlet South is. It just went into production, and Scarlet North, which we’re targeting future production.

Scarlet South, again, the new administration came in, very pro-business, pro-mining. We got our permits right away, and we were able to put this into production. Again, 500 meters from our process facility. So we truck ore. We got it in production faster and less expensive than most any mine can go in production. You’re seeing the pattern here. This is how we like to operate, leverage what we’ve built so we don’t have to continue to build processes at every single mine.

Now if I was up here today talking to you about Isabella Pearl, I’d be very excited. We’d have a really exciting future in front of us, but I have seven other properties I’ll talk about. But if we just look at Isabella Pearl, we’ve locked up this structural corridor, mineralized structural corridor ten kilometers long. We’re only focused on the very right end of this. With Isabella Pearl, we’ve been mining for over five years. We just put Scarlet South in production. We’re looking to put Scarlet North in production. I believe there are more Isabella Pearls on this trend. I wanna be the one to find them. So again, we’re very exciting story with just Isabella Pearl.

Scarlet North is what we’re focused on. Again, keep in mind, if you’re not familiar with grade, .5 grams, a lot of mining companies tout that. Look at these grades, phenomenal grades at Scarlet North. We’re evaluating this, where the water table is right now, how many ounces on our initial resource, how we can move this forward. That’s in the process right now. This slide shows Scarlet South that just went into production, Scarlet North, which I believe has even larger potential. But even beyond that, I’m gonna show you a couple of nearby targets that could be the next Isabella Pearl.

But first, let me switch gears on you. Golden Mile is in the permitting phase. Just to give you some sense of what we’re up against with the past administration, we turned in our Golden Mile permit application. It was crickets from the previous administration, and when they left, the regulators told us, “We didn’t look at it for years.” That’s how bad it was. So we’ve effectively had to start all over again, but fortunately, we now have a pro-business, pro-mining president and administration.

The Golden Mile, if you look at the schematic of the process plant, this is a little too far to direct ship ore. So we’re gonna build a process plant that takes gold to carbon, and then we truck the carbon to Isabella Pearl, so we leverage the ADR. That was one of the long lead time items of getting that permit. So this is our game plan. So that schematic, we not only engineered it, we’ve purchased it, it’s been built, and it sits in our laydown yard right now. We’re ready to go as soon as we get our permit.

So we’re fortunate that under this administration, that permit is moving forward. It actually got added to the Fast Forty One dashboard, which holds the regulators’ feet to the fire of, “Hey, we gotta respond to this. We have to have some turnaround time,” which is great. Also notice that it’s a gram average. Some high-grade pockets, this obviously won’t be the average grades. The average is about a gram, but those grades are phenomenal. And so that’s what really makes a deposit, is having those high-grade areas that differentiate it, as opposed to a homogeneous .5.

Exploration front, we wanna take our known deposits, expand them, discover new ones. We want to be here for the long term. We have eight properties in Nevada, most of which are within trucking distance to our Isabella Pearl on the Walker Lane. We also have Ripper, and I’ll mention briefly all of them, but we have, I think, and I’m biased, but the best property portfolio on the Walker Lane.

So I mentioned earlier that I think we might be on to the next Isabella Pearl. What we’ve done here in this slide, the blue circle in the bottom of the slide is the spatial area of the Isabella Pearl deposit. We’ve been here five years mining it. It’s wonderful, high grade. We’ve taken that and superimposed it on four targets that we believe could be the next one. Not guaranteed, but we hope. You’ll see the lines on this map are the structural trends. You’ll see all these dots that represent high-grade surface samples.

It goes farther than that when we look at Prospect Mountain. It’s on the top of this mountain. You can see spatially it’s as big as our Isabella Pearl open pit. We can take rock chip surface samples all the way down the mountain, 320 feet down with high grade. Why is that important? That’s the same depth as Isabella Pearl, 320 feet down. So another box checker how that could be the next one. And on top of that, Isabella Pearl, when we started mining, had a small, what we call, lithocap, this silicified material at the top. So does Prospect Mountain. So whether it’s Prospect Mountain or any of these other four targets or along our trend, we wanna be finding more of these Isabella Pearls.

Switching gears, East Camp Douglas. This year we did a $40 million joint venture. That joint venture is to expedite East Camp Douglas toward deposit discovery and toward production. We are the 60% majority owner and operator. It is a large district-sized land position. And anybody who’s heard me present this, this is the property that could be a game changer for us. This is the property that could be half a million, million, or more. It has a massive lithocap to the south. I’ll explain what that means. It also has these high-grade veins to the north, and I’ll show you some of those.

When we look at the high-grade veins at the north, right now we are basically drilling with one hand tied behind our back with two legacy NOIs, notice of intent to drill. We are actively working with the regulators to get a more broad EA exploration that would allow us to drill 125 acres. But right now, with just our legacy NOIs, we’re hitting areas at Triumph, Roosevelt, White Rock, and we’re hitting material 13 meters of 3.5 grams. We’re hitting material of 28 meters of 2 grams. We’re hitting material of 24 meters of 3-plus grams. What happens when we get our new permit to drill and we can fill in these areas? We could add a substantial number of ounces here at East Camp. I think East Camp could be the dark horse, the game changer for our company.

Now, one of the foremost geologists in the world on epithermal deposits, which East Camp is, his name is Dr. Hedquist. He’s been to site. He created this slide. What he’s done is he’s taken world-class, multi-million-ounce deposits with lithocaps, and he’s compared our lithocap size to theirs, and notice some of these very small ones can have two, three, four million. So again, another touch point that this could be something serious. Now, just because you have a lithocap in and of itself doesn’t mean anything. Our lithocap, as I showed you, this area is very high grade. What I just showed you was the veins, but the lithocap also has high grade in it.

Switching gears, minor gold. We have gold at surface we’ve drilled on some patented claims. This has taken a back burner to some of the other stuff we’ve done, but we need to drill off, chase this gold off of the patented onto the BLM. Dauntless, we picked up Dauntless ’cause it met all our criteria. This was one of the highest grade mines a hundred years ago in Nevada. There’s no way I believe they found everything there back in the day. But we were able to pick this up for a very reasonable amount, and again, it’s in our pipeline. We’re not focused on this, but it’s for the future.

Intrepid, right across the valley from our operations. It’s a greenfield situation. Our first drill program, we hit 27 meters of a gram. Ripper is the property to the north center of Nevada. It’s not on our Walker Lane. It fit all our criteria for acquisition and very high grade, has great geologic setting.

So you’re getting the picture that we take this synergistic approach where, where possible, we leverage what we’ve already built to bring in ore. So Isabella Pearl’s been in production almost five-plus years. We’re now bringing Scarlet South and County Line ore to it. We don’t have to build a new process. We can expedite production. We don’t have the big CapEx costs. East Camp’s a little different. That could be a home run potential. Golden Mile, as you heard me say, we’ll take gold to carbon and truck to carbon. But this way of operating is how we’re trying to counter how difficult it is to get permits, the lead time of mining. We’re trying to expedite to get projects into production for longevity.

So you’ve heard me mention a lot about grade. This slide really shows the open pit in the US, and you can see the red dotted line. It averages about 0.5 grams. Notice County Line and Golden Mile exceed those. Same thing on the exploration potential of potential open pits. All these exploration properties of other companies in Nevada, notice that they’re about 0.5 grams. We exceed that.

So I work with a team of professionals that I worked with with my previous company, and I’m fortunate that many of them came over with Fortitude Gold, and I believe that’s why we’ve had the success. It’s people. Doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, if you have the right people, you succeed. We took our previous company, Gold Resource, from $1 a share to $31. We’ve taken Fortitude Gold from $1 to $8. We’ve pulled back during that permit situation with the Biden administration, but now we’re getting back on the horse. But it’s the people that allow you to do this. Same with the board. Bill Conrad, our chairman, came over from Gold Resource, past company, New York-listed stock exchange, came over, and I think that’s a stamp of approval.

We’re very proud of paying a dividend. This company was engineered to pay a dividend. We obviously, during the difficult times, had to cut back that dividend, live and die by that sword, but it also works the other way. Once you can start increasing the dividend, there’s another catalyst.

Capital structure. If you’ve listened to some of these presentations in this building, it is not uncommon to have an exploration company nowhere near production with two, three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand shares outstanding. You just heard a presentation before mine that has 600 million shares outstanding prior to production. So producers can often have half a billion, a billion. We have just 28.5 million shares outstanding. That’s how we differentiate ourselves so that when we’re cash flowing strong, we can dividend and really outrun our peers, which we did for three, four years running. No debt. We did take on some equipment financing ’cause we brought the mining in-house. We just have too many mines going now. It made sense to bring it all in-house. Good liquidity.

So we are a gold company with experienced management in one of the premier mining jurisdictions chasing high-grade, low-cost operation. Catalyst, two new mines built this year. We’re optimizing those. $40 million joint venture at East Camp. That could be the game changer for our company. This year is just a turnaround year, trying to get our feet back under us, have some increased production. We are permitting two more mines. Why are we racing to get these permitted? Because if the administration changes and goes back to an anti-business, anti-mining administration like it was, I wanna have permits in my pocket so we can weather that storm better than we did with just one mine in production. And then aggressive exploration. So with that, got a little bit of time if there is any questions.

Thanks, Jason. We’ll open it for questions. Any questions? I might start then. Just in terms of the two projects we’re obviously waiting for permits on, the Scarlet North and Golden Mile, what are your expectations there? Are they both at the same stage? Do you think one’s more advanced than the other?

Yeah. So they’re more or less the same stage. They started within several months of each other. I’m removing some overburden. Fortunately, they both have pockets of high grade that start at the surface, but it takes a while to build a mine. But they’re both more or less at the same stage. But they’re just to keep us in business until we can find the Isabella Pearl, or to find a big deposit at East Camp. They’re a stopgap, if you will, from what we lived with the past administration. But hey, it just shows that our trends have potential to have a lot more deposits.

Yeah. Exactly. All right. I think we’re pretty much there unless there’s another question. Okay. Thank you. No, we have a question.

Can you disclose your joint venture partner for East Camp?

No, I can’t. Thank you for the question. The partner has very much requested to stay anonymous at this point. They operate under a company called Hawthorn Land and Minerals. I can tell you they’re a very well-heeled organization, and it’s a perfect partner for us at East Camp in as much as if we find something, a big project that maybe needs a big operation, it’s the right partner to have. So no, I appreciate that. Not trying to be coy, but they wanna keep anonymity for the time being. There may be a point in the future where they have their full position in us, and then they wanna disclose that, but that’ll be up to them.

And how’s your cash position right now?

On this last was what? 30 million, 23 million, I think. I apologize. It’s on the slide. Yep. Thank you.

Yes, sir. Got one more of them.

Maybe just address your budget for ’27.

Okay, budget for ’27, we have a lot going on. We’re building two mines. Fortunately, they’re low CapEx because it’s just mining. Exploration-wise, I wish we had our $18 million budget of three years ago. We don’t. So we’re gonna spend three, four, five million, depending on how cash situates on exploration outside of East Camp. East Camp is 40 million to drill. So that’s in its own isolated situation as far as budget. That’s gonna be effectively a $40 million exploration program for the next two-plus years. And hopefully, in that timeframe, we find a major deposit, and then it changes everything.

But then when we step back outside of the JV and just look at our seven other properties, we’re very focused on drilling where we know there’s gold because we wanna add to Scarlet South, we wanna add to Scarlet North, put that into production. So yeah, drill budget, I would hope we’re at five million this year. I hope. As far as build, et cetera, it’s just ongoing mining, again, ’cause we don’t have to build a process. The game plan is working well. For mining, it’s not a very capital-intensive situation, even though it still is. I recognize you. I know you know mining very well. It’s about as cheap you can put mines into production.

So we’re watching our pennies and as a function of we just barely made it through the last administration. Had that stayed with that same group, I probably wouldn’t be standing in front of you today. But it was fortunate that it switched back to a pro-business, pro-mining administration, and here we go. We’re off to the races. But at this time, I’m trying to position ourselves where we have more permits in our pockets so that when they shut off the tap to permits, which they did to us, we are in better position. We couldn’t get an electric power grid permit for over four years under the Biden administration. Trump comes in, we had it within months. That is a major difference in administrations, and I can’t emphasize that enough when you operate in the US.

So yeah, I hope I answered some of that question, but yeah, it’s been a tough slog, but we’re hopefully through it. So I know I’m over time, so—

Okay, thank you. Yeah, brilliant. Thanks very much. Jason will be available, I’m sure, for any further questions. Thank you.