Pershing Gold Expands Landholdings at the Relief Canyon Mine Project

 

LAKEWOOD, CO - Pershing Gold Corporation has located 105 new unpatented mining claims and acquired by lease roughly 635 acres of private lands at its Relief Canyon Project in Pershing County, Nevada. Both the new claims and the private lands are strategic additions that add nearly 2,630 acres to Pershing Gold's land position. The Company now controls approximately 25,220 acres in the Pershing Gold and Silver Trend along the southern flank of the Humboldt Range.

The new claims are mainly located to the northwest and northeast of the Relief Canyon Mine. Gold Acquisition Corp., Pershing Gold's wholly owned subsidiary, owns 87 of the new claims. Pershing Gold owns ten of the new claims which lie within the Area of Interest ("AOI") of the 2006 Minerals Lease and Sublease that Pershing Gold acquired in April 2012 when it purchased the interests of Victoria Resources, a subsidiary of Victoria Gold Corp. in this Lease and Sublease with Newmont USA Limited, doing business in Nevada as Newmont Mining Corporation. Additionally, Pershing Gold has located eight new claims south of the Relief Canyon Mine in the Pershing Pass project area.

Pershing Gold recently entered into a mining lease with BTF Properties under which Pershing Gold has exclusive rights to about 635 acres in the Pershing Pass project area. The BTF lease provides the lessors with annual advanced royalty payments, a production royalty equal to a percentage of net smelter returns subject to a buy-down option, and has a primary term of ten years which may be extended for a second ten-year term and for so long thereafter as mineral development work continues on the property.

Stephen D. Alfers, President, CEO, and Executive Chairman said, "We continue to add highly prospective lands to our land package in order to further secure mineral targets that Pershing Gold's geologists have identified on the basis of reconnaissance mapping, sampling, and geophysics."

Since acquiring the Relief Canyon Mine property in August 2011, the Company's landholdings at Relief Canyon have grown from a little over 1,500 acres of unpatented mining claims and mill sites to more than 25,000 acres of mining claims, mill sites, and private lands. This significant increase reflects the Company's belief that this under-explored part of Nevada has potential for future discoveries of new mineral deposits.

Alfers said, "Our lands include the Relief Canyon Mine and heap leach gold processing facility which could resume mining and gold production in 2014. In addition, we control advanced-stage targets adjacent to the mine that we expect to drill in the future to expand the recently announced in-pit mineral resource of 463,000 measured and indicated ounces of gold and 101,000 inferred ounces of gold. We also control the Pershing Pass project area south of the Relief Canyon Mine--a great deal of underexplored land along the Pershing Gold and Silver Trend with numerous grassroots exploration targets."

In the coming year, Pershing Gold is planning a systematic development drilling program with the objective of upgrading the identified mineralized areas adjacent to the mine to bring them into a resource category. The Company also plans to initiate an exploration drilling program to start testing many of the grassroots targets in frontier areas surrounding the Relief Canyon Mine and in the Pershing Pass Project area. These projects will require additional external funding.

Pershing Gold Corporation is a new gold exploration and development company focusing on acquiring, exploring, and developing gold deposits in Pershing County and elsewhere in Nevada. The Relief Canyon Mine property in Pershing County is owned by Gold Acquisition Corp., the Company's wholly owned subsidiary.