Diamonds drive Wawa boom.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: MINING

Ever since prospector Mickey Clement found 60 diamonds panning in a river near Wawa in 1993, junior exploration companies have been combing the 2.7 billion-year-old rocks of that part of the Canadian Shield, searching for the elusive source of potentially large diamonds.

Well known among hitchhikers for its landmark giant Canadian Goose statue, some Wawa residents hope their town may become equally famous for its diamond and gold production.

The latest buzz of exploration activity is not entirely new ground for the community of 4,100, located near the rocky eastern shore of Lake Superior. Modern prospecting there dates back to the Hemlo discovery in 1981.

Prospecting and mining have been part of the town's economic fibre since the late 1800s when gold, and later iron ore, was found to feed the blast furnaces at Algoma Steel.

Junior exploration companies such as Strike Minerals, Spider Resources, KWG Resources, Pele Mountain, Dianor Resources, Band-Ore Resources, Corona Gold, River Gold, Patricia Mines and Richmont Mines are in varying stages of exploration in the Wawa-White River-Dubreuilville area searching for diamonds, gold and nickel.

"The quality of the diamonds are very good," says Wilson. "But no one (yet) has a firm grasp on what (rock) hosts them."

Val d'Or diamond hunters Dianor Resources will spend more than $3 million this year to drill on their promising Leadbetter property, 10 km east of town.

The company is working the former claims of Wawa prospector Joe Leadbetter, who recovered an eye-popping 1.39-carat gem quality diamond from a creek bed in 2003. They signed a deal with him in December to acquire the claims and some private property to the south.

Company president John Ryder calls the area's infrastructure "fantastic," with bush road access and the Algoma Central Railway line just a few hundred metres away from their Leadbetter property, situated near Wawa Lake, just off Highway 101.

Dianor is finding diamond-bearing rock out-cropping at the surface.

Over the next 12 months, they are planning about 50,000 metres of definition drilling, mapping and ground geophysics on their 2,000-hectare land package over the next 12 months.

"Once we achieve that, it will allow us to zoom in our areas we want to take some larger samples of," says Ryder. "We don't know how big this thing is."

Ryder says the host bedrock appears to be thickening to the east, more than 300 metres deep. "We don't know how far north or south it goes."

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