By IAN ROSS
Promoting it as Canada’s “largest undeveloped PGM-copper resource,” Marathon PGM Corp. has launched an aggressive 35,000 metre drilling program this year to fully explore and more clearly define some mineralized zones on their northwestern Ontario property.
The company has high hopes for an eventual open pit mine and mill on their platinum group metals-copper property, located 300 kilometres east of Thunder Bay, by starting a feasibility study this year.
With less than 25 per cent of the property explored, company president Phillip Walford has two drill rigs at work. The aim is to expand their knowledge of some newly discovered zones and infill on other already-known mineralized areas.
“We’re still doing a lot of exploration on the property but we’re moving ahead with a feasibility study on the mineralization we have delineated already.”
Since Walford first acquired some property on the outskirts of the town of Marathon in early 2004, he has steadily expanded the 4,568-hectare land package, which now almost encircles the local airport.
The property’s history dates back to the 1960’s when Anaconda Canada explored for copper followed by Fleck Resources in the mid-1980’s and finally Geomaque Exploration which spent more than $1 million on the project until gold prices fell and it dropped its option.
Enter Walford, a former vice-president of exploration for Anacoda and Genomaque, who had great belief in the property’s potential and acquired the ground with his own company, Marathon PGM Corp.
“It’s going beyond (expectations). It was large, but now it’s a lot larger.”
Walford has all the drilling logs dating back to 1965 and acquired their core samples. Besides producing high grade showings, the property has great infrastructure with Canadian National Railway running nearby and with his highly promising Dunlop Zone sitting astride the Trans-Canada highway.
In 2007, the Toronto junior is investing $6 million to follow up last year’s exploration work by tracing thick mineralization found in new zones to the southwest of their Main Zone.
“We discovered two new zones last year (called SG and WD) and we’re going to drill them this year,” says Walford. “Both have resources that are not known.”
Walford says all their zones are economic especially with the Main Zone, which would create an open pit 300 metres deep and close to two kilometres long.
Marathon expects to shortly update their Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA), or scoping study, by adding the drill results from a 25,000 metre drilling program performed in 2006.
An earlier economic assessment of the project showed a total measured and indicated resource of 49.3 million tonnes grading 0.91 grams per tonne (g/t) palladium, 0.24 g/t platinum, 0.09 g/t gold and 0.31 per cent copper.
It contains metals consisting of two-million ounces of PGM’s and gold and 341-million pounds of copper that is potentially mineable.
One drill rig starts this month on their high-grade Malachite Zone.
The company found mineralization open to the north with one drill hole producing the highest-grade PGM intercept for that thickness ever drilled in the Coldwell Complex grading 15.61 grams per tonne palladium, 5.53 grams per tonne platinum and 22.72 grams per tonne combined PGM and gold over eight metres.
Walford says there’s the potential for deep mineralization in their zones.
The company has planned a deep IP (Induced polarization) survey to test for convergence of thick mineralization (50 to 100 metres) discovered on the south end of the Main Zone and high PGM mineralization on the north end of their Malachite Zone.
This survey work will identify possible sites of mineralization in an area that is considered highly prospective and has no previous drilling information.
Marathon recently hired former Lac des Iles mine general manager Raymond Mason to manage the feasibility study, which should take a year’s time before the company considers possible project partners and financing.
“We’re really geared up and ready to go make this thing a success. It’s been quite an exciting time.”
