Marathon Gold Corporation announced that it has commenced a 10,000 m drilling program at the Valentine Lake Project, located in Newfoundland, Canada. The winter 2013 drill program will focus on expanding both the underground and open pit resources at the Leprechaun Gold Deposit as well as targeting new gold occurrences from prospecting along a 17 km strike length of the Valentine Lake thrust fault including the Valentine East Area (includes VE Hill Zone, VE Net Zone and VE SW Zone), the Sprite Zone (includes Sprite Zone and Sprite Net Zone), and the J. Frank Zone (includes J. Frank Zone and SW J. Frank Zone). One drill is currently turning at the Valentine East Hill area where historical drilling returned positive results including 2.62 g/t Au over 3.2m in VL-99-18 and 5.67 g/t Au over 3.46 meters with 13.53 g.t Au over 1m and 2.20 g/t Au over 4.94 meters with 13.07 g/t Au over 0.44m in VL-98-1. These historic holes had incomplete sampling resulting in a discontinuous assay record over larger intervals of the drill core.

A second drill is expected to start turning in the Sprite Zone in early February.