Diamonds: one man's best friend.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Spider Report

WAWA -- Al Shefsky hikes up a twisty, thigh-burning bush trail hacked out of the spruce and birch towards his diamond property.

It is a chilly spring day in mid-May accompanied by boot-sucking mud and rivulets of late winter run-off trickling down the hillsides.

"I feel invigorated whenever I come out here," says Shefsky, the president of Pele Mountain Resources Inc., one of four junior exploration companies in the hunt for diamonds in the Wawa area.

Here in this five-star moose pasture where hunters and prospectors have tramped the rocky ridges of the Canadian Shield for decades is one of the hottest new places for diamond exploration in Canada.

Shefsky is giddy when talking about the potential of the Festival property and its untold millions of ounces of commercial and gem-quality diamonds hidden beneath the 2.7-billion-year-old rocks, the oldest known diamond deposits in the world.

And he is looking forward to the upcoming 2003 field season.

The outcrops at their Cristal occurrence are stripped of vegetation by exploration crews, and coated with xenoliths, rock fragments encased in volcanic breccias pushed upward from deep inside the mantle.

Practically popping out on the surface, they are the key indicators for diamond-bearing rock.

"They're the dead giveaways," says Shefsky, a former stockbroker who worked in the early 1990s for CM Oliver, a Vancouver brokerage firm specializing in junior resource companies, before he left in 1996 to start Pele Mountain Resources.

"Once you know what you're looking for, they just jmnp out. They're so obviously different from other rock."

Pele wholly owns the mineral rights interest to the 101-square-kilometre Festival property with three known diamond occurrences-Cristal, Genesis and Dom Perignon - about 20 kilometres north of Wawa.

The corporation also holds two gold properties near Wawa and west of Thunder Bay, but Shefsky says almost all their exploration dollars are being funnelled into Festival.

The past winter drilling program proved to be a successful one, yielding a 0.72 carat white gem quality diamond, Pele dubbed. "The Big Goose.'

The recovery of the gem was one of more than 160 other commercial size diamonds in the first 125 tonnes of samples processed from Pele's Cristal and Genesis diamond occurrences on the property.

It represented a milestone for Pele, but Shefsky says it has been a tough sell to convince the skeptics in the Toronto brokerage houses that Wawa is more than just a...