Wolf Wiese, President & CEO of Golden Dawn Minerals Inc provides the following update on the Greenwood precious metal project, located 500 km east of Vancouver, B.C on Highway #3. The project comprises approximately 15,400 ha., hosting 31 historic mines and three mines being actively developed by the company.

Dewatering at the company’s Lexington mine is now complete. The underground mine workings are in excellent condition with no major rock falls nor compromised ground support. Additionally, the east portal and decline, as well as the main underground haulage route, are in excellent condition. In early 2018, the west portal canopy will be refurbished with new timber. A third access to the mine, the fresh air raise, has been equipped with a new ladderway. The mechanical services shop and other on-site service buildings have been refurbished.

The next steps towards restarting operations include installation of mine services, including compressed air and water supply, electrical and ventilation, all to be serviced from the west portal. Initial technical work, including geological mapping and sampling of the exposed mineralization are scheduled to commence this month. A mine engineering consultancy is now working to produce a detailed mine plan and schedule. Following completion of these initial activities and coinciding with refurbishing the Greenwood process plant, the mining program is scheduled to provide mill feed for the plant by the second quarter of this year.

The process plant will be wet commissioned when the mining activities start, to initiate production of gravity gold and gold-copper flotation concentrates. Remaining start-up costs are expected to be approximately C$2 million. The project is scheduled to ramp up to full-scale production in the second half of the year.

The company is considering the installation of an ore sorting facility to increase the grade of feed for the Greenwood process plant. An initial pre-concentration test was conducted in December in Kentucky, USA using material previously mined in 2008. Sorted materials have been sampled and delivered to Lakefield, Ontario for assaying, the results of which will quantify the effectiveness of this approach.

Exploration drilling at the Golden Crown property continued until December 11, 2017, with assay results for intercepts in the last 14 holes still pending. The company plans to resume drilling northwest of the Golden Crown property along a 3 km mineralized zone onto the J.D. property, where last year’s extensive prospecting program returned high gold values over metre widths in rock samples.

The 100% owned Lexington-Grenoble deposit was developed as an underground copper-gold mine by Merit Mining Corp and saw a short period of production in 2008 by Merit, after which it ceased operation due to lack of funding indirectly related to the 2008 market crash. It has been kept on care and maintenance.

A total of 54,237 t of ore were mined from the underground Lexington-Grenoble mine by Merit from April to December 2008 and processed through the Greenwood gravity-flotation plant, producing 5,486 oz gold, 3,247 oz silver and 860,259 lb of copper. Only a small portion of the Lexington-Grenoble deposit was mined then.

At 5 g/t AuEq cut-off)