4 Marathon PGM launches $6 million drill program.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Marathon PGM Corp.

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...