West Red Lake Gold Mines Ltd. reported drill results from its 100% owned Madsen Mine located in the Red Lake Gold District of Northwestern Ontario, Canada. This round of drill results from the Madsen Mine were all drilled from underground on the North Austin Zone, which represents a new area of high-grade mineralization extending the current Madsen resource to the northeast. This program was designed to expand the North Austin zone down-plunge to the northeast.

There are three main plunge lines (ore shoots) that the team is targeting at North Austin, and the results in this press release have demonstrated down-plunge continuity on the order of 30 meters (?m?) within at least one of these ore shoots. The North Austin Zone sits adjacent to existing underground development marking it as a high caliber, near-surface target that could potentially be developed early during future mine restart and production. The North Austin Zone remains open down-plunge and along strike to the northeast and will continue to be a priority expansion target as underground drilling continues.

Accessed through the Madsen Mine East Portal, the North Austin Zone sits northeast in the footwall of the main Austin Zone. Like the main Austin and South Austin Structures, the North Austin domain is hosted within broad, kilometer-scale planar alteration and deformation corridors that have been repeatedly reactivated during gold mineralization and subsequent deformation and metamorphism. At the deposit-scale the Austin, South Austin, North Austin, and McVeigh Zones are locally folded and structurally dismembered by transposition and rotation into the penetrative S2 Foliation.

In addition to this intense deformation overprint, the mineralized veins and alteration have been subjected to the relatively high temperatures of amphibolite facies metamorphism, which led to extensive recrystallization and growth of the skarn-like replacement mineral assemblage of diopside-amphibole-quartz-biotite. All significant gold mineralization on the mine property is demonstrably early relative to the most significant, penetrative deformation (D2) and metamorphic events. The North Austin Zone displays ?mine-style?

alteration and mineralization and consists of multiple mineralized domains defined over a strike length of 0.5km. Mineralization remains open at depth and along strike to the northeast. In drill core, or at underground face exposures, gold-bearing zones at the Madsen Mine are best identified visually by fine (sub-millimetre) grains of free gold within strong alteration and veining.

All high-grade intervals generally contain visible gold on drill core exteriors, although numerous examples exist of high-grade assays where visible gold was only identified within the interior (cut surface) of the core samples. Apart from the presence of free gold, pervasive silicification (locally accompanied by discrete quartz veining) and quartz-carbonate or diopside veining are the best indicators that a given interval is within a high-grade zone along/within the mineralized structure. The current underground drilling program at the Madsen Mine is focused on further definition of near-term mining inventory, as well as growth of the current mineral resource.

Drilling has been focused on the more continuous and higher-grade portions of the Austin, South Austin, and North Austin Zones. This will continue to be the strategy moving into 2024.