Drilling At West McArthur/Cree East Strike Target Zones and Strong Alteration Systems

VANCOUVER - CanAlaska Uranium Ltd. reporte on a preliminary summary of drilling for its two winter drill programs in the Athabasca Basin. Drilling was undertaken at both the West McArthur and Cree East projects. The West McArthur Project is a 50/50 joint venture between the Company and MC Resources Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Japan's Mitsubishi Corporation. The Cree East Project is a 50/50 joint venture between the Company and a consortium of S. Korean companies.

Drill core samples are currently awaiting geochemical analyses. Crews are departing the field, and detailed data interpretation is due to commence. The two programs comprised over Cdn$6 million in exploration expenditures with 12,434 metres of drilling. At the West McArthur Project seven diamond drill holes (WMA 028 to 034) were completed in February-March 2012, to test a series of individual zones where the resistivity lows were coincident with the EM conductors within the Grid 5 area. Total meterage drilled in the season was 6,422 metres, including one abandoned drill hole WMA031. The winter 2012 drill programme has demonstrated on Grid 5 the presence of requisite geological environment for unconformity uranium deposits. Significant faulting and fracturing are present in a number of drill holes, with individual radioactive spikes or elevated radioactivity in zones of hydrothermal alteration. In all drill holes which could be probed by borehole geophysics, there were indications that the drill hole unconformity intersection point was within 20 to 200 metres of the targeted conductive (graphitic) horizon.  At the Cree East Project fifteen diamond drill holes were attempted on the Cree East Project with completed drilling of 6,012 metres. However, only ten drill holes reached their targeted depth in the basement. This was mostly due to ex-tremely difficult drilling conditions related to intensely hydrothermally altered aureoles in the overlying Athabasca sandstone units within newly-targeted Zone B. The Zone B target became the priority drill target with the discovery, in the first drill hole, of a major hydrothermal system. In this drill hole the entire 400-metre sandstone column is heavily fractured, clay altered and friable.  Drill core samples from both projects are in transit to the laboratory for multi-element analyses to confirm the uranium content of intersections showing occasional radioactive spikes.