Sterling Metals, a junior miner that’s probing around a former copper mining camp, north of Sault Ste. Marie, made an impressive hit on its very first drill hole this spring.
The Toronto exploration outfit pulled a lengthy core sample showing 359.3 metres of copper mineralization, grading 0.36 per cent, taken at its Soo Copper Project in the Batchewana Bay area, 80 kilometres north of the city.
The discovery was made just 14 metres below surface. A shorter length of the core revealed 0.56 per cent over the first 75 metres.
In copper exploration drilling, the grades are measured as a percentage of the ore. A grade of more than 1 per cent over 100 metres is considered high grade. A drill hole with significant thickness is an indicator of a substantial volume of potentially mineable ore.
Sterling, a newcomer to the area, acquired the 24,000-hectare land package from Copper Road Resources in May 2024. This was the company’s maiden drill program at the site.
Though still early in the exploration stage, the continuity of copper in the sample, though low grade, is an encouraging sign to Sterling of bigger things to come.
The company believes it’s standing atop a large mineral system of copper, molybdenum, silver and gold, something the Batchewana area has been historically known for since exploration and mining began there in the 1960s.
“This is just one hole,” said Sterling CEO Mathew Wilson in a May 29 news release, “but in today’s macroeconomic environment, the need for large, bulk-tonnage copper projects in safe jurisdictions like Canada is more urgent than ever.”
Wilson said previous mine operators on the property were selectively chasing narrow, high-grade zones of copper.
Sterling’s property is bookended by the former Coppercorp and Tribag mines, two small-scale copper mines that operated from the mid-1960s to early 1970s.
For 60 years, the ground has been extensively explored by a number of companies, but it was done on a mostly piecemeal basis on fragmented pieces of property. A comprehensive program was never done to get a larger view of the area’s mineral potential, the company said.
Fortunately, the previous explorer, Copper Road Resources, has set Sterling up for success by consolidating these properties in 2021.
After acquiring the project, Sterling spent last summer prospecting and sampling the area, pouring through reams of historical exploration and mining records, and running its own technical surveys to identify drill targets before hauling in the rig at the end of March. Sterling’s four-hole drill program concluded in late April.
In noting their progress, Wilson said in less than a year since they stepped foot on the site, they’ve gone from a “single pencil porphyry prospect with limited apparent scale to identifying the key ingredients of a much larger and richer porphyry copper system.”
Sterling’s property sits in a unique, mineral-rich, geological feature that extends across and under Lake Superior. The nearly 3,000-kilometre-long Mid-Continental Rift nearly split part North America 1.1 billion years ago.
This structure that formed Lake Superior sparked the copper mining boom on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula in the mid-1800s.
Today, it’s provided fertile ground for a resurgence of exploration with new nickel and copper discoveries in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as well as Generation Mining’s emerging copper-palladium mine project on the north shore of Lake Superior at Marathon.
The area's infrastructure certainly works in the company’s favour.
The project is accessible by bush road, 20 minutes off the Trans-Canada Highway. The site is an hour’s drive outside the Sault, and is a four-hour drive from abundant smelting and refinery capacity in Sudbury.
In the release, Wilson mentioned they chose to dub the property, the Soo Copper Project, to highlight the connection to the Sault, “a city of great industry where we hope to have a long and prosperous relationship.”
