Portofino increases Red Lake interests; acquires Bruce Lake

PORTOFINO RESOURCES INC. has entered into an Option Assignment Agreement with Falcon Gold Corp. ("Falcon") to acquire a 100% interest in the 1,428 hectare Bruce lake property (the "Property") in the Red lake, Ontario gold district. The Property is located only 1.5 kilometres ("km") northeast of Great Bear Resources ("Great Bear") Pakwash Property and about 11 km southeast of Great Bear's famous Dixie Project boundary.

David Tafel, CEO of Portofino Resources, states: "The success of Great Bear (Dixie project) and BTU Metals Corp. (Dixie Halo project) drilling northwest of Bruce lake, combined with our current South of Otter property to the northeast, gives Portofino a well placed land package in a very active and expanding exploration area of Red Lake. Additionally, we believe the Bruce Lake property compliments our regionally focused gold strategy and largely completes our property portfolio." 

Like the Dixie Project, the Bruce lake claims are entirely underlain by the Archean-age metamorphosed sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Uchi-Confederation Lake greenstone belt. The Red Lake gold district is hosted within this same belt and is recognized as one of the world's highest-grade mining camps having produced approximately 30 million ounces of gold from 29 gold mines. Within the mining district, the Red Lake gold mine, that was recently purchased by Evolution Mining Ltd., is an underground gold mining complex, which is reported to have been in production since 1949, producing 25 million ounces of gold at an average grade of 20 grams per tonne.

In addition to the well-known gold deposits, the greenstone belt hosts several ferrous and non-ferrous mineral occurrences and mines. The historic Griffith iron mine property is located immediately north-west of Portofino's Property. The Griffith Mine reportedly operated from 1968 to 1986 and produced 22.85 million tons of iron ore pellets with average grading of 66.7% Fe from 78.8 million tons of crude ore with average grading of 23.9% magnetic iron. 

The Bruce Lake Property contains gold-in-soil anomalies discovered as part of a reconnaissance soil sampling program completed by Laurentian Goldfields Ltd in 2010. Portofino has recognized the existence of regional magnetic high anomalies coincident with the gold-in-soils anomalies that it believes are significant. Gold associated with banded iron formations are excellent exploration targets especially when the property has gold in soils associated with a magnetic anomaly. Portofino intends to follow-up on these exploration targets. 

Next Steps

Portofino has initiated the compilation and reinterpretation of all available historic data on the project and is proceeding to define exploration targets for an initial field program.

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