Our current 60,000 ounces of production from our Manh Choh mine, adding our Lucky Shot mine in two years and our Johnson Tract project two years after that grow our gold production up to 200,000 ounces of gold annually. I'll walk you through the plans, but we've also just did the process of completing a merger with Dolly Varden Silver. We're going to add a significant amount of silver to the mix. That was voted on earlier this week and should close early next week as a transaction. That will create close to a billion-dollar market cap company, will be listed both in New York and the Toronto Stock Exchange. We're headquartered here in Fairbanks, Alaska.
We're generating over $100 million of free cash flow a year, and we have over $100 million of free cash on hand with the consolidation of the two companies. Rough numbers, we'll have a combined resource base of over 3 million ounces of gold and over 100 million ounces of silver. Let me walk you through the leadership team of the combined company. I'll be CEO. Shawn, President, CEO of Dolly Varden, will be the President of the combined company. We're gonna rename the company Contango Silver & Gold. Mike Clark will be the CFO. A mix of board of directors from both Contango and the Dolly Varden teams, but a very solid board with a lot of experience in mining.
The combined company, on a pro forma basis will have about 32 million shares outstanding. We're listed on the GDXJ and the Russell. Dolly Varden is on the silver indices. We have very little overlap in our shareholder base and very little overlap in the analyst coverage. It really is a one plus one equals three approach to getting into building a new North American precious metals-focused company. Just going through the assets, it is a mix of gold and silver. Our assets are, of course, in Alaska. I'll talk about those a little bit more. Kitsault, Dolly Varden's Kitsault asset is just across the border in Alaska, down near Hyder and Stewart, Alaska.
Again, combination will be pretty much equal in terms of the metal content of gold and silver, on a combined basis. Here's a walk through the portfolio. Starting with our producing mine in Alaska, the Manh Choh Mine. It's achieved production in July of 2024. Our 30% share of production is about 60,000 ounces of gold annually. Kinross is our joint venture partner and the managing partner. The reason we chose them as our partner, we found a deposit, and then we partnered with them because they have an underutilized mill at Fort Knox located near Fairbanks, Alaska.
This is simply a model where our high-grade ore from Manh Choh, which is seven-eight grams per ton, is loaded into trucks and then transported up to the Fort Knox mill for processing. We were able to get this project into production within about three years, which I think pretty much unheard of in the mining business. It's because we used this approach of just direct shipping the ore to the existing mill at Fort Knox. We didn't have to build our own mill and permit our own mill, and we got into production very quickly. Now, we just released our 2025 results. We produced about 60,000 ounces, a little over 60,000 ounces of gold equivalent.
Just a little bit, about 57,000 ounces of that were made up of silver. We were given a distribution of $102 million from the joint venture, so that's cash on hand for us. Our all-in sustaining cost came in just under guidance at $1,616 per ounce sold. Our guidance going forward for 2026 has always been a low year in the average. We're guiding between 40,000 and 45,000 ounces. We make that up in the following year, in 2027, where we're guiding 75,000-80,000 ounces. Again, average about 60. All-in sustaining costs will be higher this year, 2026, because we're doing a lot of pre-stripping.
We're up in the, you know, $1,900-$2,000 range, and we get the benefit of all that pre-stripping in 2027. We get high production in 2027 and low cost because we've gotten all that pre-stripping behind us. This at $4,000 gold, the remaining years will generate well over half a billion dollars of free cash flow for the company. We continue to whittle down our hedge position. The hedges were put in place to get the mine in production. We borrowed about $70 million from ING and Macquarie. We've been just getting rid of the debt and getting rid of the hedges as we go along. They'll be done by the end of the year, both hedges and the debt.
We'll be debt-free and hedge-free by the end of the year. We like this DSO model. It requires that you have high grades. It requires that you have a project that's near existing infrastructure, and whether that infrastructure be a road, rail, or water, just so that you don't have to build a lot of infrastructure as part of your project. The other thing that's critical, we believe is, it's a lot easier to permit a mine on private land. You'll notice that all of our projects are on private land. That's just a fact that the landowner gets to decide what the best use of their land is, not the public.
That's not the case when you're working on state land or federal land. That's one of the reasons we think we've been able to very effectively use this model. It does require high grades and being close to infrastructure. This is what we call our direct shipping ore or DSO model. You mine at the face, you put the ore in a box, you load it on a truck, and you take it to a rail facility or a barge facility and get it off to an existing mill already permitted, already operating. That at your mine site you have no mill and no tailings facility.
Drastically reduces the amount of permitting that you need to do, and drastically reduces the amount of capital you need to put out in order to produce metal. This is the model, and all of our projects fit this model. Manh Choh is in production. We're taking that cash flow and developing the Lucky Shot mine. It's about 20 miles from the highway and 20 miles from the railroad. The Alaska Railroad goes from Anchorage up to Fairbanks. We've already outlined a small resource. We're drilling underground to expand that resource and be able to produce between 30,000 and 40,000 ounces of gold here. The project here was actually in production. It's a historic mine.
It produced about 250,000 ounces of gold at 40 grams per ton. That's 1.25 ounces per ton. Very, very high grades. They mined between these two faults here, the Caps Fault and the Lucky Shot Fault. That's the main tunnel, the Lucky Shot 500 level. The mining was done back in here. We've come underneath with the Ensearch tunnel, about 100 meters, 350 feet below the Lucky Shot level and put development work in so we can get this, the rest of the deposit down dip, drilled out. They did a little bit of mining across the fault here over at the Coleman. You'll see we've done a bunch of work up there that's, you know, close to the top of the mountain. I'll show you that in the next slide here.
There's the Lucky Shot at it. The gray area here is the historic mining. We have all the historic records, so we know this detail very well. We put the Ensearch tunnel in underneath that and have the development work down. We're drilling underground very close-spaced fan shot drills and developing a resource. We're currently drilling on the west drift. We'll get to the others as the summer proceeds. I mentioned the Coleman. There's the Coleman adit up top there, goes right underneath the top of the mountain, and we've done a lot of drilling up there to outline a resource up there as well.
Combined with, we're shooting for 400-500,000 ounces of resource that will then subset into a mine plan that can deliver, in the neighborhood of 50,000 ounces of gold a year. Now, one of the fun things about exploration is you always run into things that you didn't expect. We put the west drift in here that I mentioned earlier. We're doing the fan shots, and we're targeting the Lucky Shot vein structure. We're hitting it, so that's all kind of going according to plan. We extended the west drift out to the Lucky Shot fault because we knew that offset the whole vein system, Lucky Shot vein system, up the mountain.
We put the west drift all the way through the fault to make sure we, you know, knew exactly where that was. At the very end, we ran into this new vein at right angles to the Lucky Shot vein system. It's shown here in the photo at the bottom of the image here. It's a nice vein structure, and it's really rich. It ran over almost 300 grams over one point just over a meter. That's 10 ounces per ton. This is a very high-grade vein. It's not oriented at a very convenient angle for us to be drilling from the end of the tunnel. We're going to extend the tunnel underneath the vein structure.
There's the Lucky Shot fault, there's our tunnel, and there's the vein structure. We're gonna get underneath this thing and just, you know, drill the heck out of it. This is what it looks like. It's, you know, I don't know if you can see in detail there, but there's probably 100 flecks of free gold there in this little red circle, as part of the vein structure. You can see the kind of intersections that we're getting, you know, five, six meters of 60 grams. Skinny zone about a third of a meter, but almost 100 grams. This is the sort of thing you can mine and it's right there.
That's the exciting thing, that it's just right above us, so it'd be very easy to put the development work in to mine this. We're working on this. It's new. It's very exciting. Again, the plan, DSO, load the ore in boxes, load it, dig it down to the railroad, and then we can go north to Fort Knox, or we go down to Seward, and that can go to Asia, or it can go to a mill in BC. We're looking at all those options right now. Targeting 50,000 ounces of annual production with the Lucky Shot.
Two years, it will spend about $25 million this year doing the drilling and about $25 million next year completing a feasibility level plan, which is basically a mine plan and a transportation plan, and putting the development work in to start mining. Very simple project to get underway. Now, Johnson Tract is on the west side of Cook Inlet, just west of us from here, down in Anchorage. Very high grades as well. We have over 1 million ounces of measured and indicated resource, averaging about 9.4 grams per ton. We're targeting a production level of about 100,000 ounces of gold equivalent. This is what we call a polymetallic deposit. It's gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc. We've done an initial assessment.
I'll talk more about that, a little bit later. This is what the mine site looks like. This summer's plan is to build this road that's already permitted. From our camp to the proposed portal site. This is very much like Lucky Shot, except we need to build the underground infrastructure. We already have that done at Lucky Shot, and we just, we're a couple of years behind, Lucky Shot here, on our Johnson Tract project. Get the road built, get the laydown area for the proposed tunnel this year and upgrade camp so we can work on a year-round basis. Right now it's just a summer camp, and we need to make that a year-round winter camp. That proposed tunnel is shown here on the slide.
It's about a mile long, which is about a third longer than the Lucky Shot tunnel. It's the same size, same dimensions. It's an exploration tunnel, but it can also then be later used for a production tunnel. You can see where the deposit's located here. Basically, this is a block model of the resource. We want to get underground in the proposed tunnel, build that tunnel. It'll take about a year to do that and then get all the drilling done, similar to what we're doing at Lucky Shot, fan shot drilling, off of the stations from the underground, relatively short holes.
Well, we'll infill drill the known part of the body, but also we'll be able to drill down dip and understand how much larger this ore body is going to get. You saw that there was a very steep mountain there, so it's very difficult to drill from the surface. You can only just drill holes going so deep and in the right direction. Getting underground is going to solve that issue. The other thing about the ore body is it averages about 40 meters thick, and that is very unusual for an ore body of this grade, which will make for relatively inexpensive underground mining. All the development work will be in that post mineral bay site.
That will reduce our permitting requirements and the regulatory agencies won't have to be worried about acid rock drainage. We won't put the tailings development work in the footwall and because that would potentially create acid rock drainage issues. By puttig it in the hanging wall where there's no potential acid rock generation, that really simplifies the permitting process. A very robust project shown here, the NPV at different gold prices, and you know, at $4,000 gold price, this is well over $600 million NPV at 5%. And very low all-in sustaining costs, and you're obviously taking advantage of producing those other metals, lead, zinc, and copper, silver as well.
It's a very, very robust mine site. Again, DSO trucks down to the barge landing site and then transfer it over to Asia or down to British Columbia for tolling and processing. Now, we're on the FAST-41 dashboard. Lead federal, the permitting process, the federal permitting process has already started. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is our lead federal agencies. There are a number of other cooperating agencies, National Park Service, NOAA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, EPA, and the Coast Guard. A number of tribal entities or consulting parties. The state is involved to make sure that coordinates with the state permitting process. The landowner, CIRI, and the village corporations in the neighborhood are also involved.
It's really an all hands on deck approach to permitting. It's very transparent. The dashboard exists so that anybody can go on and see what's going on from a permitting standpoint, what stage everything's at. The nice thing for us is it's a coordinating effort on behalf of the federal government to make sure the agencies and ourselves stay on track to meet the agreed upon timelines to get our final permits, which for us is March 2028. All efforts are working towards that. We certainly see this administration really focused on critical metals. We think that timeline's realistic.
Now, I mentioned, you know, we're diversifying our portfolio by adding Dolly Varden Silver's Kitsault asset, which is located in northern British Columbia, just across the border in Alaska. Again, bringing a significant amount of high-grade silver to the portfolio. Their assets, they have a commanding position in the southern part of what's known as the Golden Triangle of Northern BC. You can see there's lots of activity in this part of the world. Very well mineralized piece of real estate here. Lots of investment going on. Then, Dolly Varden has this commanding land position down in the south there. There are five deposits in their portfolio. They represent sort of a string of pearls along the Kitsault Valley that is connected to Alice Arm here.
That's one of these narrow fjords that goes way up into the center, British Columbia. The road system goes up to the Dolly Varden area. That's something we'll look at refurbishing here this summer. There are five deposits, the Homestake Ridge, Homestake Silver, Wolf, Dolly Varden Mine, and Torbrit Mine. These were all historically active mines. There's existing resource, about 70 million ounces of silver at about 300 grams per ton. The first job we're gonna do is update that resource with about 200,000 meters of drilling that Dolly Varden has done over the last three years. Maybe three or four years.
That'll be out Q2 of 2026, and that will also then determine where we direct our 50,000 meters of drilling plan for this year. Most of that footage will probably be directed at further infill and expansion of existing resources, but we'll certainly spend some effort on looking at new opportunities in the rest of the land package. We want to upgrade that Torbit Mine road, get baseline environmental studies underway, continue the community engagement, and particularly with the Nisga'a Nation, and work towards a formal impact benefits agreement with them. We're planning on having a PEA, preliminary economic assessment, done in 2027 that will start to outline which of these deposits we bring in first and sort of a sequencing.
It's a fantastic opportunity to really expand the resource base and develop new mines. Our objective in putting the companies together is to build a North American mid-tier gold, silver producer, very much like it'll look very much like Hecla. We're targeting 250,000 ounces of gold production, plus 5-10 million ounces of silver production. A very solid company. We're well-financed. With cash flows from Manh Choh, we beleive we can execute our overall business plan. I'll stop there and open it up for questions.
Well, thanks very much, Rick. Highly interesting. We got quite a few questions here in the queue. Let me read off a couple of them. Let's start with, can you discuss the rationale behind the consolidation with Dolly Varden?
Yeah, basically it is to bring a significant amount of silver to the portfolio. That's, I would say , number one. Number two, Dolly Varden and Johnson Tract are both sulfide, polymetallic sulfide deposits. We're currently negotiating with a group, actually a couple of groups, to process the ores from both these mines at a common facility. That's where we really see the synergies between the two companies and specifically the two deposits, Dolly Varden's Kitsault asset and our Johnson Tract asset.
Mmm-hmm. If we could look to the Lucky Shot asset for a second, your described some very high-grade intercepts that you recently found. Does that change your view of how large the opportunity is at Lucky Shot or make you want to accelerate your plans?
Yeah, certainly underground, you've got some limitations on how fast you can move. You got to get the underground development in place, and so that's a bit of a limiting factor. We're underground drilling now on the west drift. We're gonna bring the miners in in the middle of May and extend that west drift so we can get underneath the KM, we call the KM vein, and then be drilling the fan shots basically up above in the ceiling of the underground. That work will take place very quickly.
Now, I'll tell you, if we keep hitting these, you know, multi ounce gold grades in the KM vein, we're gonna adopt our model and 'cause I'd rather if I'm drilling 30 grams per ton, I'd rather direct the effort to do that rather than, you know, the 10-15 grams that we're seeing in the Lucky Shot vein. So short answer is yes, if we continue to hit high grades in the KM vein, we're gonna modify our plan, and that might allow us to get into production quicker.
A lot of work to do and you know, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves and we wanna most of all, we want to do it safely, so we're gonna just you know, take the right precautions and take the right time to get the underground development work in the right place, but we want to do it safely.
Can you talk about what some of the milestones are that we on the sidelines should watch for the KM vein and for Lucky Shot generally? I'm sorry-
I'm sorry, just the first part of the question, what kind of models?
Milestones.
Milestones. Sorry. Thank you. Yeah, it'll be drill results. Like I said, we'll get the miners back underground in the middle of May. It'll take a couple of weeks to get 100 meters of drifting done, and then another several weeks to get the drilling done and it gotta go to the assay lab. I'd say next milestone is probably three-four months out on an update on the drilling on the other side of the KM vein, on the other side of the fault. Now that we don't know where it disappears to from underneath the west grid, because the Lucky Shot fault offsets it, we know that.
We're gonna drill a few holes on that side too to see where it is. We know what the offset distance is to the Coleman segment of the vein, and we can make some assumptions on that. We're gonna target both sides of the KM vein on the Lucky Shot fault. That work will be done probably, as I said, next milestone. First is get the other side, we call the footwall of the Lucky Shot fault done on the west side. We'll get that done first, and then we'll move the drills up and target the hanging wall side to see if we can find it on the other side as well.
Great. Coming out of the merger with Dolly Varden, you had a slide where you ended up with like $100 million in cash. Do you foresee a need for future financing, before you've moved through some of these crucial milestones with Lucky Shot?
No, I think that's the beauty of the company. We're generating good cash flow from Manh Choh over the next couple of years. I don't see the need for us to go back to market. Now, there's one exception to that is we are looking at, you know, discussing the milling operations, and whether we toll or whether we actually purchase the mill. If we purchase the mill, that's the only time I could see us, you know, looking at issuing additional equity. That would be to purchase a mill that we would operate then ourselves.
Okay.
Those discussions are underway.
Very good. I just wanna come back to something you mentioned in your prepared remarks. I wanted to make sure I had it straight. Are you forecasting that you feel the hedge balance and the debt balance will both be extinguished by the end of 2026?
Correct. Yeah. We're targeting continuing to deliver into the hedge book. It represents roughly half of the ounces we have planned to produce this year. Then the debt is down, I think, just over $10 million. It's diminishment at this point.
Mm-hmm. Very good. I believe at Manh Choh you have a 30% stake, but Lucky Shot is 100% correct?
Yeah. Both Lucky Shot, Johnson Tract, and the Kitsault are now soon to be the Kitsault assets, will be 100% owned by Contango Silver & Gold, yes.
Okay. Just to underline it's 100% owned, and you'll shortly have no hedge overhang, no debt to pay. You're just 100% exposed to the gold price.
Yeah. That is the plan. You know, I think we'll get there before the end of the year. Yeah, it's I think that's the right position to put the company in. I think gold investors and silver investors, they wanna take the risk on whether the gold price is going up and down. It's not really , you know, the company can't control the gold price, so we wanna be unhedged. The only reason we have the hedges in place was to borrow the money from the banks to build our share of Manh Choh in the first place. It certainly wasn't a bet on gold.
We're strong believers that investors want exposure to gold, and it's not our job to hedge it and, you know, make predictions on it. Yeah, we wanna be unhedged and debt-free. That's the objective for this year.
Excellent. We had another question come in. Can you expand on potential synergies with Dolly Varden?
Yeah. I think I mentioned them before. I mean, it brings a lot of silver to the portfolio, which we didn't have a lot of silver originally. We're mostly a gold-focused company. The silver's an important component 'cause we're strong believers in silver. Silver is sort of known as poor man's gold, but it also has a very strong industrial component. You know, there's a new demand side coming for silver on these solid-state batteries. They're building fabrication plants to build solid-state batteries, which are much better than the lithium graphite batteries. We like silver. We're strong believers in silver, so we like that aspect of it.
As I mentioned, both the Kitsault Valley ores and our Johnson Tract ore are polymetallic, so they're gold and silver biased. They have a lot of gold and silver in them, but they also have copper, lead, and zinc. So they require a specific kind of processing to produce copper concentrates, zinc concentrates, lead concentrates and the gold and silver. We see that as there's a commonality of processing. As I mentioned, we're looking at purchasing a mill that can handle these types of sulfide, we call them sulfide ores. That's where the real synergies are between the two companies and the two deposits.
Yeah. Terrific. Very interesting presentation. We're unfortunately just at the end of our time. Is there anything you'd like to say, Rick, by way of summation or wrap-up?
Yeah. I'll just say, you know, if you're looking for an investment in a safe jurisdiction, North America, exposure to gold and silver, take a look at Contango Silver & Gold. New York Stock Exchange listed, also Toronto Stock Exchange, symbol CTGO. Obviously this last week and couple of weeks have been pretty brutal for the gold and silver space and the equities. I think it's a good time to be looking at redeploying capital into that space. I'd like you to consider an investment into Contango.
Very good. Well, Rick, thanks very much for joining us. Everyone else, thank you very much for participating. Really appreciate your questions, and we'll look forward to speaking with you next time. Thanks again, Rick.
Thank you very much, Michael. Yeah. Bye-bye.