K2 Gold Corporation (TSX-V: KTO | OTCQX: KTGDF): Federal Permit, 200 Historic Workings, and a Live Drill Program in California
This article is disseminated on behalf of K2 Gold Corporation
California is the gold rush state. It is where the American mining industry was born, in the winter of 1848 when a sawmill worker named James Marshall picked flakes of gold out of the tailrace at Sutter's Mill and set off a migration that would eventually pull an estimated 300,000 people west. Over the next century and a half, more than 100 million ounces of gold came out of California soil.
Then most of the industry left. Permitting complexity, environmental review, and the shift of exploration capital toward Nevada and Alaska pushed modern gold companies out of the state. California became a place people remembered gold rushes, not one where new discoveries were being made.
That is starting to change. The U.S. government has made domestic mineral production a stated priority, most visibly through Department of the Interior Secretarial Order 3418, "Unleashing American Energy," which directs federal agencies to accelerate permitting for domestic mineral projects. Companies with projects on federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ground and clean federal environmental permitting are positioned to benefit from this policy environment. Permitting one project does not automatically mean every project clears the same bar, and federal priorities can shift with future administrations. But the direction of policy is real.
The company on the permitted piece
K2 Gold Corporation (KTO / KTGDF ) is a Vancouver-based gold exploration company advancing a portfolio of projects across California, Nevada, and Yukon Territory. Its flagship, the Mojave Project, sits on 6,000-plus hectares in Inyo County, California, 100 percent owned.
Earlier in 2026, Mojave received a positive Record of Decision from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — the formal federal approval required after an Environmental Impact Statement. K2's Final Environmental Impact Statement was explicitly noted by the BLM to align with Order 3418. In practical terms, that means K2 can drill on federal ground with the permits already cleared, at a moment when very few U.S. gold projects have that combination in hand.
K2 is a member of the Discovery Group, an alliance of resource companies whose members have generated more than $2.6 billion in acquisition activity. Executive Chairman John Robins has been involved in gold discoveries totaling more than 10 million ounces. Past success at other companies does not guarantee a similar outcome at K2.
The address
Mojave sits in a historically prolific mining district. The property covers more than 200 historic mine workings, most of which were operated with 19th- and early-20th-century tools and were never re-tested with modern exploration methods. The neighboring Cerro Gordo Silver Mine, once one of the largest silver producers in the American West, sits directly adjacent to K2's Morningstar target. Further afield, operating gold mines including Castle Mountain and Bullfrog demonstrate that the greater California-Nevada border region remains a live gold-producing corridor today.
What makes Mojave interesting is not that no one ever found gold there — plenty did, more than a century ago. It is that no one has ever applied modern geophysics, drone magnetics, and systematic drilling across the property. That is what K2 is doing now.
What is in the ground
The current 14,000-metre drill program is the largest in the project's history. On August 18, 2026, K2 announced results from a previously undrilled zone at a target called Dragonfly: 39.62 metres of 5.35 grams per tonne gold, including a higher-grade interval of 25.91 metres of 7.14 grams per tonne. In plain terms, roughly forty metres of drill core contained an average of 5.35 grams of gold per tonne of rock — considered a strong result for gold near the surface. Earlier drilling at Dragonfly returned 86.9 metres of 4.0 grams per tonne gold from surface. (Reported widths are drilled widths and may not represent true thickness.)
Dragonfly is one target on a 6.5-kilometre gold corridor. Elsewhere on the property, surface samples at a target called Gold Valley — 1.5 kilometres north of Dragonfly, along the same corridor — have returned grades as high as 375 grams per tonne gold. (Those are grab samples — hand-picked rocks from the surface; they show what a target can contain at its best, not the average grade across a whole zone.) Gold Valley has never been drilled. K2 has not yet defined how many total ounces of gold sit in the ground at Mojave, and has not yet completed a formal study on whether a mine could be built economically. Those two milestones are what the current drill program is designed to build toward.
What comes next
Twelve additional lab results are pending from Dragonfly. The drill rig is now moving to the Newmont target, one of 22 permitted drill locations across the property. Follow-up work is planned at Gold Valley and other targets across the balance of the 2026 program.
The combination — federal permit in hand, more than 200 historic workings mapped on-property, a live drill program producing strong intercepts, and a policy backdrop actively pushing domestic mineral production — is the kind of alignment that does not often come together for a single junior at a single moment in a state that has been closed to serious modern gold exploration for decades. K2 remains at the exploration stage and the standard early-stage project risks apply, but the twelve months ahead are unusually concentrated with milestones the market will be watching.
The tickers are KTO on the TSX Venture Exchange, KTGDF on the OTCQX, and 23K on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. For additional information, visit k2gold.com or public filings on SEDAR+.