Welcome, everyone. Let's welcome our next guest speaker, Travis Swallow with Idaho Strategic.
All right. Testing. Hi there. My name is Travis Swallow. I'm here representing Idaho Strategic. I'm on the investor relations side and business development side of the company. At a high level, Idaho Strategic Resources, we're the largest gold producer in the state of Idaho. We also control the largest rare earth elements land package in the U.S. Also, a majority of that is located in the state of Idaho as well. We're based in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Our producing gold mine is called the Golden Chest Mine. It's located in the Murray Gold Belt district. The Golden Chest Mine itself sits on about 220 acres of private land. Our company controls more than 20,000 acres in the Murray Gold Belt.
On the rare earth elements side, we have three projects, Mineral Hill in the north, Diamond Creek in the center, Lemhi Pass in the southern portion of Idaho's Rare Earth Element and Thorium Belt. We're the largest and most active claim holder in the Rare Earth Element and Thorium Belt. The goal of the presentation today is there's a lot of moving parts to our business as we're growing. We employ what we refer to as a production-backed exploration business model. It used to be the standard in the industry where you start small, get into production, get to free cash flow, reinvest that in organic growth, and build from there. As we refer to it internally, as some of the Canadian bankers got involved in the industry and pushed companies either into you're a production company or you're an exploration company, your goal is to drill out a deposit and sell.
The industry changed, we went back to the roots of the industry, employing production-backed exploration, we'll get into that and our aim small, miss small philosophy as a company. I'm going to make a lot of forward-looking statements in this. Just don't rely on those if you're making investing decisions. I wanted to start with what we refer to as our report card. This is our operational and financial performance in 2025. We had our annual meeting last week, I stole a few slides from that presentation for the one today. You could see solid financial growth in 2025 over 2024. A strong head grade of 10 grams per ton gold. For an underground mining operation in the U.S., this is one of the higher-grade mines. Also solid net income and earnings per share growth as well.
I won't spend a lot of time here. It's pretty self-explanatory on it. Again, just more of our report card. The stock performance, this is our chart against some of the benchmarks in the gold industry. You could see we're in blue, IDR, 282% return over 2025. That's compared to the GDXJ, the GDX, gold itself. You can see we provide some leverage to the gold price there, which is natural for a gold mining company. I like to think we also helped with the GDXJ returns because we were added to the GDXJ in 2025. I went through in the annual meeting and put some of the key macro events that, in my opinion, affected the gold industry as a whole, kicked off with Liberation Day in early April.
As you can see, we were added to the Russell 3000 Index, again, added to the GDXJ, and we went through three rate cuts in 2025. It's more obvious on this slide, but I also wanted to compare us to some of the rare earth element companies and benchmarks for the rare earth industry, because there are really two parts of Idaho Strategic, again, our gold production and also our rare earth elements exploration. You can see that Idaho Strategic, again, outperformed even the rare earth elements companies. What I like to look at on this is the correlation to, I'd say, we captured the upside of both the rare earth elements industry and the gold industry.
You could see the axis is a little off, but it was around the time that the MP DOD price floor was announced that the rare earth elements industry started to move. The reason for that is because in the rare earth industry, there was always this fear from private capital that you don't invest in a rare earth element stock because China's just going to dump on the market, suppress the price, and you couldn't reliably make an investment there and expect a good return. What the MP DOD price floor deal did is it told private capital, "If there's a real asset in the United States worth backing, we're going to do it." Private capital flowed into the space, and you could see the companies benefited from that, and IDR was one of those.
We captured a lot of the rare earth upside in that move, and you could see a lot of the rare earth stocks started to trail off towards the end of the year. We actually flipped and started capturing some of the upside in gold as we closed out 2025 and the gold price was increasing. This is a three-year transformation where it's backdated to 2025. We're about halfway through it now. What we had done as a company is you could really start to see the tide change for Idaho Strategic and really for the domestic mining industry as we exited 2024. We looked at what is Idaho Strategic going to look like in 2028 and beyond.
Like I mentioned earlier, we have this aim small, miss small philosophy, which means while we have aspirations to be a mid-tier gold producer in America, we're not going to start with a 100,000-ounce production plan. We're going to start Well, we started with five, we went to 10, and now we're going to 20,000. The plan is 20,000 ounces by 2028 in 2028. That's the North Star that's guided our decisions since 2024 onward. You could see, beginning of 2025, we kicked off the build-out of our Murray Milling facility. We have been and continue to truck our ore from the Golden Chest Mine about 45 minutes to our New Jersey Mill milling facility. As we grow and expand, we're going to outgrow that New Jersey Mill milling facility.
It made a lot of sense operationally to build what we refer to as a Murray mill on-site, not only from cost savings, but also just growth potential as we advance. As we explore the broader Murray Gold Belt, having that centralized facility on-site there to mill eventually gold from multiple operations is going to be good for us. We also asked ourselves, in 2028, when we're a 20,000-ounce producer, what do we want our land package to look like? Do we have all the land that we want to have? Because we see a lot of opportunity here in the Murray Gold Belt area of North Idaho, where we operate. We've more than doubled our land package in the Murray Gold Belt from 2025 to now. We asked ourselves, we've got a 20,000-ounce production plan.
We don't want to get to 20,000 ounces and then drop off. We want to make sure that that 20,000-ounce production goal is sustainable. Where are those gold ounces going to come from? That bottom photo here in 2025 is the Paymaster area. It's south of where we're currently producing at the Golden Chest Mine. This is an area that you could see in 2025 was under-drilled. If you jump over to 2026, you could see we added a number of drill holes in it and continued to trace that ore body down into the north. There's been continuous high-grade mineralization there. These two images, it's actually filtered to 10 gram-meter thickness. This does represent a mineable deposit. It's not like some companies that throw in this broad resource that's lower confidence.
These are high-confidence ounces here in the Paymaster that we're continuing to build on in 2026. You can see in 2027, it's still what we refer to as a sausage-making stage. There's still a lot that's going to be going on. We're going to be commissioning the new Murray mill in Q1 of 2027. We're also going to test some long hole stoping methods, which we think are going to be extremely beneficial when we're producing out of this Paymaster area. There are things like geotechnical tests we have to do to make sure that that ore body is amenable to long hole stoping. That's going to help with the 20,000-ounce production goal. We also are going to add a fourth crew in 2027 as we prep for 20,000 ounces in production. Currently, we run three crews.
Two of them are full-time day crews, seven days on, seven days off. We run a part-time night shift that's four days on, three days off. When we add that fourth crew, we'll be seven and seven day and night every day. We're also going to start to expand our exploration into the Murray Gold Belt, and I'll touch on some of that. Some of those prospects came with that acquisition that we did in 2025 from Hecla Mining when we expanded by more than double our Murray Gold Belt land holdings. One key thing to look at, 2028 and beyond. I'm not going to say it's going to happen in 2028, but just one of those, I guess it'd be the beyond portion.
When we have the Murray Mill up and running, hopefully in 2027, we will still own the New Jersey Mill in a joint venture and be the manager of it. There is some optionality there. We can get creative on tailings to actually establish the New Jersey Mill as a long-term processing facility for some auxiliary operations that we may have, either in the Murray Gold Belt, if we'd filled the Murray Mill, or potentially throughout the broader Coeur d'Alene Mining District. Because the Coeur d'Alene Mining District is historically the second largest silver-producing region in the world. We know it, our geologists know it pretty much better than anybody. There is some opportunities we see there that we might as well take advantage of since we'll have an idle milling facility.
I'll talk a bit about the investments in infrastructure we're making to set the foundation for this production growth. I've talked a lot about the Murray Mill. Estimated completion Q1 2027. It's a 400 tonne per day mill. It's 25% larger than the New Jersey Mill. The big thing about it, though, is it's going to have a brand new tailings facility with it, and that's really the limiter on production right now is the tailings capacity at the New Jersey Mill. This new mill will come with a brand new tailings facility that's under construction now, and that'll unlock the next 10 years' worth of tailing storage for the company. Cost to date, we spent about $10 million on it. There's another $4 million to $5 million to go until that's ready to go.
We also built a warehouse/dry facility, and dry is just an industry term for basically a locker room. This was something that, as we're planning for success, not only at the Golden Chest Mine but in the broader Murray Gold Belt, we need to make sure that we're taking care of our guys, we have proper facilities. This was part of that. We outgrew our current one, quite honestly, and now we've got the nicest locker room in the Silver Valley. That also helps with employee retention, happiness. We've had one guy quit in the four years I've worked here, so it's not like it was a problem to start with. We like to keep our guys happy. The Murray Gold Belt expansion. This image is looking to the north.
Everything in the south that's not overlain with a color, we already owned. That is how we exited 2024 with that land package. In Q3 of 2025 from Hecla Mining Company, we purchased all of the land that's overlain in blue. That came with a number of prospects that were identified historically and underexplored by both Hecla and Newmont Mining. In Q1 2026, we added the small red square. It's a small land position, but it's a pretty critical one. That's the Niagara Project that we just announced recently. That's 150 million pounds of copper, 8.8 million ounces of silver in a stratabound copper silver deposit.
One of the things I like about the Niagara is that it really establishes this Murray Gold Belt, not only as a gold belt, but really as a proper mineral district, where you see we've got orogenic gold deposits down south, like the Golden Chest Mine. Now we've got stratabound copper silver deposit like Niagara in the north. There's also epithermal deposits up there for gold, which is different than what we see at the Golden Chest Mine. Some land that we don't control for environmental reasons. There's also historically one of the largest lead silver base metal producing mines in the area as well. The Murray Gold Belt, when I say it's truly an underexplored mineral district in the U.S., it really is, and it's more than just gold that's here.
The focus of exploration at the Golden Chest Mine is again in the Paymaster area that I talked about. In our year-end press release, we announced a 53% increase in mineral reserves. That was a function of drilling out this Paymaster resource. You could see the image on the top is how we exited 2024. The image on the bottom is the resource we exited 2025 with. In 2026, we've continued to step deeper and drill deeper, and we're continuing to intersect high-grade gold mineralization with mineable widths. Our latest intercept is approximately 226 meters deeper than where we're currently mining. The Paymaster is extremely exciting because it really shows the depth potential of this orogenic system. You compare the Golden Chest Mine to some of the deep silver mines in the Silver Valley, which geologically speaking, are only a stone's throw away, about nine, 10 miles.
Some of those mines, like the Lucky Friday, go down 9,500 feet. We're barely scratching the surface here at the Golden Chest, so we're excited to see this mineralization continue deeper. Another thing about the Paymaster is currently it's two veins separated by a monzonite dike. Monzonite is, don't tell our geos, but it's a fancy term for granite. In the upper country at the Paymaster, we're seeing this granite at 30 meters thick. You've got a vein, you've got 30 meters of granite, you've got another vein. As we've continued to drill deeper on the Paymaster, what we've noticed is that monzonite dike, that granite, is actually getting thinner as we go deeper. These latest holes, we're only seeing about 15 meters of granite in between those two veins.
There is the potential, we don't know this, but there's a potential that that eventually pinches out, and that Paymaster area becomes one larger vein. For us, as we eventually produce from this area in 2027 and continue to drill deeper, that's one thing that we'll be watching is if those two veins do eventually come together, that's going to be a pretty big deal for the company. The other area we're exploring at the Golden Chest, it's called the Cathedral area, and it's an area where it's underneath where the old-timers produced. We don't actually produce gold currently from where the old-timers in the 1890s produced gold from. They were further north than we were.
You can see in the image, our workings are on the far side of the image, on the right side of the screen, and the old-timers, the shapes in gray, are on the left side of that image. You could see our drill traces. We're going to trace that mineralization deeper because a lot of times, old-timers didn't have the pumping infrastructure that we had. They just mined down to when they hit water, and then they packed up and left. There's a lot of opportunity for those gold veins to continue deeper, and we're going to find out. As far as Murray Gold Belt exploration, what I just talked about is exploration specific to the Golden Chest Mine. This is stepping out to that red square I had on one of the earlier slides, the stratabound copper silver deposit.
We're going to drill that this year. The thing about the Niagara deposit is only the upper Revett Horizon has been explored. There's a deeper Revett Horizon that some of the other stratabound copper silver deposits over in Montana. That's where the larger, higher grade tonnage occurs, and that's never been tested to date at this Niagara project. The image you see here is actually the ore body that represents 150 million pounds of copper and 8.8 million ounces of silver. We think there's a lot of potential for that to be bigger in the deeper, lower Revett Horizon. We're going to drill deeper for that this year. We're also going to look at extending the upper resource as well with some of this drilling. I'm running short on time and want to make sure I get to rare earths.
This is some of our Murray Gold Belt permitting and planning beyond 2027 or 2026. This will be 2027 onward. A number of these prospects were identified by Newmont. That picture in picture map is a 2009 soil anomaly map that Newmont put together, and my favorite prospect on here is Mineral Ridge. It's obviously the highest or the largest soil anomaly from Newmont's exploration. Newmont never got the permits to drill it. There is historic drilling from 1992 by a company that had 20 grams per tonne over two meters. That would be something that we're going to look to follow up on, and that permitting for drilling is ongoing now. Jumping to rare earths. Again, we've got Mineral Hill project in the north, Diamond Creek in the center, Lemhi Pass in the south.
We're the largest and most active claim holder in the rare earth element thorium belt. That rare earth element thorium belt is represented in blue on the screen. Our Two drill programs that we're planning in 2026. The first one's on the Mineral Hill area. Mineral Hill itself has three prospects within the project. It's Roberts, Cardinal, and Lee Buck. We're going to drill the Cardinal project in 2026, and you can see the drill plan here. What this is the green streak is actually carbonatite outcrop that's been mapped by the Idaho Geological Survey. carbonatite is the ore body that a lot of the rare earth elements, the economic rare earth elements projects across the globe are. Mountain Pass is a carbonatite, Mount Weld in Australia is a carbonatite, Bayan Obo in China is a carbonatite, and we have carbonatite occurrences here in Idaho.
This was a third party mapping this carbonatite occurrence. It coincides with a magnetic high, which is also the colorful image you see here is a magnetic survey we completed in 2025. The beauty about Mineral Hill is that what we've seen is the magnetics are really a good pathfinder to these carbonatites, you see where we've identified a magnetic high based on that white blob. It coincides with carbonatites mapped at surface by the IGS, you can see our three drill pads and our drill traces planned to test these at depth. We know we have high grade rare earth elements at the surface. We've got greater than 20% total rare earths at Mineral Hill at the Cardinal prospect, now it's a matter of do they continue at depth? How deep? Is it a mineable width?
Really starting to build, hopefully build towards a deposit that can be mined in the future. We're also permitting our Roberts prospect, that's where our highest grades have come from on our rare earth projects for drilling in 2027. Switching gears to Lemhi Pass. Lemhi Pass, we spent a lot of time working on it in 2025. We did a geochemical soil sampling program in 2025, also ground-based radiometrics. The goal with these two programs is to identify areas where you have high rare earth element in soils anomalies mixed with high radioactivity, that gives you a good drill target. The area we've identified is called the Lucky Horseshoe. It's one of probably 20 prospects across our Lemhi Pass project. It'll be the first one of phase one drilling. We have three pads permitted here.
We're going to drill a number of holes, then eventually look to build on these results in 2027 and beyond. Lemhi Pass is unique in that the rare earth element distribution is very favorable. When you talk about rare earths, you're really talking about 17 elements. Only about seven of them have economic value, the ratio of the high-value rare earths are extremely high at Lemhi Pass. When you hear people talk about heavy rare earth elements, that's typically what they're talking about is some of those higher value, more critical rare earths. Lemhi Pass is a standout, especially domestically in that regard. I'll pause here for questions. I apologize, I had to get through it quick. Time slipped. Any questions? Yeah.
On average, how much would you have to spend in CapEx a year for these projects?
Annually on CapEx, I could talk to exploration probably would be best. We will do $2 million-$3 million in exploration on the rare earths side. Probably $5 million-$6 million exploration on the gold side. CapEx for the new mill specifically, we have got about $4 million-$5 million left there to spend in 2026.
On a normalized basis, about $10 million would be.
Yeah. As some of the CapEx rolls off for the new mill, our strategy is reinvest in exploration because we have got a number of prospects out there that deserve drilling. Yeah, we will probably keep, I would not call it CapEx, but we will increase our exploration spend as some of our CapEx starts rolling off.
What was the average price in Q4?
It's listed in our 10-K. Do you know off the top of your head? Yeah, I'd have to go back and look. All right. Appreciate you guys for coming