Arizona Tribune - Fortitude Gold Acquires Dreadnaught Property

Fortitude Gold owns 100% of the Dreadnaught Property, which was acquired through staking Bureau of Land Management land. The property package includes 65 contiguous claims (1,343 acres) and is not subject to any Net Smelter Return royalties. The Dreadnaught Property is in the Hornsilver (Gold Point) mining district in Esmeralda County, Nevada, approximately 22 miles (35 km) south of Goldfield, Nevada and approximately 165 miles (266 km) northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. The Company's exploration team compiled historic property information, monitored the property's availability, and was able to move quickly once the property became available.

Dreadnaught acquisition highlights include:

• 100% ownership with no underlying NSR burden
• 65 contiguous unpatented lode mining claims (1,343 acres)
• Company surface rock chip sample program returned gold grades as high as 17.18 grams per tonne
• Historic detailed structure, lithology, and alteration maps of the property
• Multi-element results from a historic 741-sample soil program collected on a 100m x 50m grid
• Historic Induced Polarization / Resistivity property-scale results
• Analytical data from 10 historic shallow reverse circulation drill holes

Historically, the land package was known as the Morningstar Project. The first known company to complete advanced exploration work in the project area was McMoran Gold Company in 1986. During this exploration campaign, McMoran Gold Company collected 93 surface rock chip and dump samples and completed 12 shallow rotary reverse-circulation drill holes. Fortitude Gold has the collar locations of these historic holes and analytical data from 10 of the 12 drill holes. These historic drill hole results will assist the Company with targeting future exploration programs. Between 2006 and 2008, Golden Odyssey Mining Inc. completed detailed property-scale mapping, a large-scale soil survey, and property-scale geophysics. The Company recently sampled 153 rock chips from surface within the claim block area returning gold grades as high as 17.18 grams per tonne.

The Dreadnaught property warranted acquisition for reasons including surface and near surface high-grade gold, the opportunity to obtain the property through staking, and the property's proximity to the Company's current operations in the Walker Lane Mineral Belt.

"The Dreadnaught Property area exhibits significant and widespread occurrences of hydrothermal alteration and gold mineralization," stated Mr. Allan Turner, Vice President of Exploration for Fortitude Gold. "With multi-gram gold sampled on surface over a large area, the focus of future exploration will be to combine the structural data collected in the field with geophysical data to identify the deeper structures that acted as conduits for the mineralizing fluids. Building on the results of the initial surface sampling, a property-scale sampling campaign is planned. The resulting gold, multi-element geochemistry, and short-wave infrared (SWIR) alteration mineralogy can be utilized to further refine exploration vectors toward potential feeder zones."

"The Dreadnaught property not only fit all our acquisition criteria, but we also acquired the property 100% by inexpensive staking and with no Net Smelter Return burden on future production," stated Fortitude Gold's CEO and President, Mr. Jason Reid. "We analyze and turn down the vast majority of internally generated or inbound property opportunities, as they don't fit our strict criteria for acquisition. Dreadnaught has serious potential, and while we remain focused on building and permitting our next mines and more advanced properties, this property fits seamlessly into our exceptional pipeline of Nevada properties. We would have paid substantial money to a group marketing us this property, but it's a credit to Allan and his team to have identified, monitored, and move quickly on this exciting and accretive opportunity."

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

S.Jackson--AT