Robert "Bob" Hutmacher, CFO. and Matt Collins, COO of Sutter Gold Mining

For some investors, a good investment starts with a good story. These investors don’t just want to know the hard numbers, but they want to know the story behind the numbers; they want to discover the “spirit” of the company, and thus get a sense of how its leaders foresee the future of the company.

Sutter Gold Mining Inc. (TSX-V: SGM) has an interesting story that these kinds of investors will love. In some ways, Sutter Gold Mining’s current success began in part with Matt Collins (the COO of Sutter Gold Mining), panning for gold.

Recently, we spoke to Matt Collins, the COO of Sutter Gold Mining, and Robert "Bob" Hutmacher, the CFO of Sutter Gold Mining.

Mr. Collins started by telling us how he entered the industry. Rather than taking a traditional route, he started literally knee-deep in his search for gold: “It all started for me with a gold pan in a creek in Colorado. I was hit with a gold bug and realized that I wanted to do that as a career. I took a non-traditional approach; I went to a mining engineering school in Golden Colorado and I spent my time there working my way through with non-traditional students. I spent a lot of time out in the industry and gained experience being exposed to a lot of things that a lot of people aren’t exposed to. I found that my favorite office place was underground in a narrow vein gold mine. A lot of people don’t like it but that just means that you have a lot of time to yourself to think about how to mine gold better.”

This journey gave him the insight he needed not only to pursue gold mining as a career, but also to think about gold mining with an emphasis on innovation, efficiency and environmental compatibility. On the job, he got even more experience, which led to his work with Sutter: “I had just gone through the horrible process of shutting down the Cash mine in Colorado. [My previous employer] was operating that property for four years and producing gold and silver. It was a great project and we had a lot of success but then September 2008 happened. We ran out of money and we couldn’t make the next hurdle. We had to shut down the mine and lay off all of the miners. It was a bad process for me at the time. When I was trying to locate jobs for some of my engineering staff, I spoke with the folks at Sutter Gold. I found out what they were doing with the project and over the course of the next few months we spent some time talking about the opportunity out there for building a gold mine in Sutter Creek California.”

Today, as COO of Sutter Gold Mining, Collins is busy with their current project, located in a historical gold mining district in California: “We control from the Eureka mine north to the Bunker Hill mine. We control from the south town limits of Sutter Creek California all the way up to Plymouth California. It’s 3.6 miles of strike length on the California mother lode.”

The connection this property has to historical gold mining success, as well as its proximity to other successful mines, could be a good thing for investors. Mr. Collins explained: “We’re smack between mines that have operated for over 100 years. We’re in a district that historically produced over seven million ounces of gold. The properties that we control alone produced over three and a half million ounces of gold.”

That makes this an exciting opportunity for Sutter and for investors, as Mr. Collins pointed out: “This is a brownfield project -- we’re not looking for new discoveries in places people have never been – we’re looking for places that people might have missed when they were mining at the turn of the last century. We know they’ve missed gold; there’s no question about it. Our resource is indicated and inferred at about 700,000 ounces.”

So, with historically producing mines and a substantial resource, we wanted to know how the project is coming along. “It’s coming along fantastic,” said Mr. Collins. “It’s been a long process; it hasn’t been an overnight success. Many great people over many years have advanced this deposit.  We spent the last two years refining the geology and looking at economics, different mining methods, and mining production rates. This is a narrow, underground gold mine. It’s a tough nut to crack in today’s mining world where the paradigm has been large open pit deposits with economies of scale. We’re taking a step back in time and looking at higher grade deposits and narrower width.”

Although this could be a challenge for some – especially those who prefer to stick with today’s mining methods – it’s not a big deal to Sutter Gold Mining. Mr. Collins is confident that Sutter will successfully develop the project: “We have some of the most creative and tenacious minds in the mining industry working with us,” he said. “Our staff has been onsite for quite a while and has a lot of experience with the property. We’ve got a great engineering staff as well. I’ve been assembling some talent who worked with me [previously], some folks I’ve worked with over the years and some folks I’ve gone to school with. We’ve got the best and the brightest working with us and supporting us.”

Mr. Collins listed the reasons he felt investors would want to consider Sutter Gold. “We have all five of our major permits in place. We’re still waiting for building permits and grading permits; those are minor permits. We don’t anticipate any hold-ups. And, we have enough cash to get us through the phase we’re in right now.” Then Mr. Hutmacher added his own reason why investors might want to invest in Sutter: “We’re going to be one of the few junior mining companies that are capable of being in production next year. There are very few of those, and with the price of gold right now, we are going to be an attractive investment.”

Along with those qualitative reasons for investing in Sutter, Mr. Collins offered one more reason, drawn from the experience of many junior mining companies: “If you look at the curve of a [junior’s] stock price, you’ll see a strong peak during speculation, a lull in the production decision, and then a steady curve back up when production begins. Well, we’re right at the bottom of the second incline because we are making a production decision about this project very soon. We expect  that production decision will be positive so investors should see a  strong increase in the stock price.”

REFERENCES

http://www.suttergoldmining.com

165 So. Union Blvd., Suite 565 Lakewood, CO 80228 USA

Telephone: 303-238-1438

E-mail address: bhutmacher@suttergoldmining.com