Like many mineral exploration companies carrying out pre-pandemic winter drill programs across the North, Nighthawk Gold Corp. made the decision to wind down operations at its Indin Lake gold property in Canada's Northwest Territories in March due to COVID-19.

In the three months to follow, the company kept in contact with territorial government and health officials as it worked out a plan to safely resume the planned 25,000-meter drill program at its district-scale gold property.

By mid-July, the company had three drills turning at Indin Lake and the company ended the COVID-interrupted season with 22,993 meters of drilling. This involved 16,419 meters of drilling at Colomac, the flagship project, with the balance testing Leta Arm and Treasure Island, high-priority regional targets across the 899-square-kilometer (347 square miles) property.

According to a calculation completed shortly after the program resumed, Colomac hosts 25.9 metric tons of indicated resource averaging 2.01 grams per metric ton (1.67 million ounces) gold; plus 5.7 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 2.03 g/t (372,500 oz) gold.

In addition, Damoti, a satellite deposit about 25 kilometers (16 miles) south of Colomac, hosts 736,000 metric tons of inferred resource averaging 4.97 g/t (117,800 oz) gold.

The 2020 drilling at Colomac focused on an exploration target adjacent to the defined deposit where Nighthawk saw the opportunity to add 1.5 million oz of gold to the resource.

Highlights from the early batches of assay results from this drilling include 38.3 meters (21 meters true width) averaging 2.09 g/t gold in hole C20-03; 252.1 meters (150 meters true width) of 1.84 g/t gold in hole C20-06; and 85 meters (43 meters true width) of 1.19 g/t gold in hole C20-08.

Nighthawk said the wide gold intercept in hole C20-06 confirms the widening of the gold-rich sill at depth in this area of the roughly 3,500-meter-long Colomac zone.

The 2020 drilling also began the work needed to convert some of the exploration targets at Colomac into the project's resource.

In order to complete the drilling needed to upgrade the Colomac resource and test regional targets, Nighthawk upgraded the camp and expanded the number of drills at Indin Lake.

Nighthawk Gold Corp.

Ore cars from historical mining on the Indin Lake property.

"`With five drills in operation, we could complete up to 75,000 meters of drilling in 2021, which would allow us to greatly accelerate resource growth opportunities within the Colomac Main and Goldcrest sills and test some of the other targets within the Colomac gold project area, some of which have never been drilled by us," said Nighthawk Gold President and CEO Michael Byron. "Equally as exciting as the continued advancement of Colomac ... is the ability to upsize our efforts on two of our more prominent regional targets. Both Leta Arm and Treasure Island, and their associated deposits, lie within large deformation zones that possess geology favorable for hosting significant gold deposits. We have barely explored the true potential of these systems, as nothing has been drilled below 200 meters depth."

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