Tower Resources Ltd. provided the results of the recent, five-hole diamond drilling program on the Lightning Zone on the Company's Rabbit North property near Kamloops, British Columbia, between New Gold's New Afton underground Cu-Au mine and Teck's Highland Valley open pit Cu-Mo mine. the drilling was based on the assumption that the strike of the Lightning Zone was north-northwest rather than east-northeast as initially assumed. Of the five new holes, Nos.

RN22-034 to 038, No. 034 was drilled 50 m south-southeast of discovery Hole 026 (1.40 g/t Au over 95 m including 4.42 g/t over 19.3 m), Holes 035 to 037 were drilled 50-80 m north-northwest of the discovery hole and Hole 038 was collared southwest of the discovery hole to undercut it by ~50 metres. Prior to the present drilling campaign, essentially all strongly sheared and pervasively bleached, silicificified and pyritized tuff sections that were encountered in holes drilled on or near the Lightning Zone contained significant Au.

Therefore the presence of this visually distinctive deformation and alteration was inferred to be a reliable indicator of significant, Lightning-type Au mineralization. Hole 034 encountered the diorite plug south of the Lightning Zone which is unprospective for Lightning-type orogenic Au mineralization but Holes 035 to 037 all intersected several tens of metres of strongly sheared and pervasively altered tuff visually identical to that hosting the Lightning Zone Au mineralization, confirming the expected north- northwest shear/alteration trend. the undercut hole, No.

038, intersected 83.2 m of similar alteration including sections of pyritic vein-breccia similar to but more strongly sheared than the breccia hosting the high grade, 4.42 g/t Au mineralization in the overlying discovery hole. With the Au mineralization in the Lightning Zone being so clearly shear controlled, the apparent increase in deformation with depth was considered positive. While the wide zone of silica-pyrite alteration associated with the north-northwest trending shear zone intersected in Holes 035 to 037 is visually indistinguishable from the alteration in the Lightning Zone it generally contains only anomalous to locally 1 g/t levels of Au, as do some of the most strongly sheared sections in undercut Hole 038.

That is, the new north-northwest trending shear zone is largely unmineralized and has sliced through and structurally disrupted the shear zone that hosts the Lightning Zone rather than enhancing the gold zone. As a result, alternating mineralized and unmineralized sections were encountered in Hole 038 instead of a long, continuously mineralized zone as in Holes 026, 28 and 29. The best section averaged 1.95 g/t Au over 32 metres.

The surface extent of the Lightning Zone beneath the untill appears to be about 50 x 100 m, roughly the area of a football field. The zone has been traced to a vertical depth of approximately 140 m and appears to be approximately the same size at this level. It is presumed to plunge to depth but the plunge direction has not been determined.

The long axis or strike of the gold zone appears to be northeast as originally assumed. Hole 038 intersected a quartz-feldspar porphyry (QFP) dyke similar to the ones intersected in Holes 030 and 033 and previously mapped along a northeast trending structure through the Durand Stock. The QFP appears to have been the engine for the hydrothermal system that introduced the gold mineralization.

Significantly, the QFP dyke in Hole 038 is strongly anomalous in Au and a 1.6 m zone bordering its lower contact averages 2.8 g/t. A year ago, when the Lightning Zone was discovered, the existing interpretation of the bedrock geology beneath the untill was untrustworthy because no outcrops are present. The 15 holes that Tower has since drilled show a very different picture. The Lightning Zone is on the north side of a previously unknown diorite plug ~300 m in diameter, a satellite of the Durand Stock to the northeast.

During the subsequent deformation event that produced the shear zones encountered in the drill holes, this plug would have acted as a buttress, diverting the shearing into the adjacent Nicola volcaniclastic rocks. The Lightning Zone appears to occur where the curvature of the plug opened dilational shear structures, focusing both hydrothermal fluid flow and the ascension of QFP dykes from an underlying magma chamber. The main gold zone is inferred to occur in a similar but longer dilational structure on the opposite (southern) side of the diorite plug.

The Dominic Lake Train was sampled only as far up-ice as the southern contact of the diorite plug which is well defined because Tower's intersected it in Hole 024. The Lightning Zone's contribution to the gold dispersal train is probably significant only in the sample ~300 m directly down- ice that yielded 524 gold grains (588 grains in the field duplicate) because (a) the gold zone thins rapidly northeast along strike from Holes 026, 028 and 029, limiting any gold grain contribution from this part of the zone; (b) untill samples collected from some of the wastewater sumps west and northwest (up-ice) of the gold zone during the recent drilling program contained only weakly anomalous levels of ~50 gold grains per sample; and (c) the diorite and volcaniclastic rocks immediately south of the gold zone are covered by a patch of Chilcotin basalt flows that is probably an outlier of the larger band of flows north of the gold zone. The above evidence clearly indicates that the main source of the gold grains in the Dominic Lake Train is along the southern contact of the diorite plug.

If the 524-grain response in the untill directly down-ice from the Lightning Zone is discounted as being mainly from this zone, the responses in the other samples along the same traverse are significantly lower than those on the traverses further down-ice. This apparent drop in the gold grain content of the untill further indicates that the main gold source is nearby, on or close to the southern contact of the diorite plug. The source of the Central Train is also tightly constrained by the band of Chilcotin basalt flows to the north.

Therefore Tower plans to drill this target first while further refining the location of the main source of the Dominic Lake Train as a priority in a planned drill program of 2,000m in early 2023. Simultaneously, Tower plans to collect additional untill samples on lines 50 to 150 m up-ice from the sampled limit of the Dominic Lake Train to pin down its source. With the ground now frozen, these samples will be collected with the excavator that prepares the drill sumps.

The gold grain results for these samples should be available within two weeks of collection, allowing a follow-up drill test to be performed immediately if warranted.