Marathon: base metals in gold country.

Marathon -- The rocky hills and cavernous valleys of Lake Superior's north shore are renowned for their gold production.

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Now some enterprising junior miners probing those mineral-rich igneous rocks are finding encouraging signs of base metal mineralization.

Around the town of Marathon, the intrusive rocks of the Coldwell Complex has become an active area for companies finding good numbers for copper, nickel and platinum group metals (PGMs).

One of the more advanced projects belongs to Marathon PGM Corp. where president and CEO Phillip Walford is eyeing the possibility of a future open pit PGM-copper mine.

The company has intersected some high grade mineralized zones on their Marathon property after a successful exploration program this year. Walford will spend this winter analyzing the drill hole data in preparing a resource calculation this January as part of a preliminary assessment for a mine.

"We're planning on developing this (property) ourselves," says Walford. "Who knows what the future will bring, but our main focus is to get this property into production."

Since acquiring the PGM-copper property two years ago, Walford, who estimates he's spent more than $2 million in exploration, has accumulated a voluminous drill core library.

In an aggressive 2005 drill season, the company has discovered three areas of new resources (known as the Malachite, RD and BR zones) south of an old drilled-off resource.

"The resource is quite large and it's in an ideal location where the mineralization is located is about five kilometres north of the Trans-Canada highway."

Marathon PGM's land package almost encircles the Marathon airport after they picked up 1,056 hectares last summer to increase their total holdings to 4,342 hectares.

The company recently wrapped up a 14,000-metre drill program of 102 holes with half the holes being drilled in the new zones.

"We're re-doing the entire resource" with a mixture of new drilling on the property's south end and more precise definition drilling on an already identified resource, says Walford.

Walford says the drill results so far have "exceeded expectations," with one recent drill hole intercept grading 3.11 g/t pgm and 0.66 percent copper over 32 metres.

The property has a history of exploration dating back to the 1960s when Anaconda Canada explored the property for copper, conducting more than 36,000 metres in drilling before Fleck Resources took over in the mid-1980s.

They re-assayed Anaconda's drill cores searching for PGMs and carried out a further 3,600 metres of drilling before Geomaque Exploration took over and spent more than $1 million on a preliminary assessment on the project in 2001. They held the ground until gold prices fell and they dropped their option.

Walford, who previously worked for Geomaque, had great faith in the property's potential and acquired the ground with a new vehicle, Marathon PGM Corp.

As a former chief geologist at the Williams Mine in the Hemlo gold camp, he was quite familiar with the Coldwell Complex when Anaconda was conducting their exploration.

"It's the roots of three volcanoes that are composite cones formed in the Mid-Continent rift system with deep fault structures that went deep into the mantle, tapped these balsaltic magmas and intrusions that have platinum, palladium and copper in them, which came up along the fractures."

Walford compares the geology to the Sudbury Basin's highly prospective footwall intrusions. "We're learning all the time."

John Mason, regional manager of the Northwestern Ontario Resident Geologist Program, says Coldwell is an multi-phase complex with much copper mineralization, gold and uranium.

"It's a difficult geological complex to figure out but Phil Walford has stuck with it."

He calls Marathon's drill results "very exciting," and says the area's rough topography is an asset for open pit possibilities.

"There's a high percentage of outcrop," with good possibilities for bulk tonnage, says Mason. "You're not dealing with blind targets as in other parts of the province."

Walford agrees the property is best suited for an open pit. "The zones are up to 100 metres thick and it dips 50 degrees to the west, so it's ideal for an open pit."

The area is best known for its three gold mines situated on the Hemlo deposit, east of Marathon.

The closest operating mine to Marathon is Hemlo Gold, about 20 km to the east.

Near Marathon's property, another junior, Thunder Bay's Benton Resources has ground where they have conducted drilling, trenching and some surface sampling for PGMs and gold on their Bermuda project.

While the Golden Giant gold mine is slated for closure in 2006, Mason says there remain good prospects along the whole north shore of Superior for other gold targets. Many junior miners are searching for copper-nickel and PGM targets along the shore and north toward Manitouwadge.

Base metal exploration is occurring around the Steel River where Phoenix-Matachewan Mining has identified copper-zinc in the area, but there's mainly sporadic gold exploration and some copper-nickel-PGM exploration in the Manitouwadge.

To the west, Rampart Ventures is continuing with exploration for uranium in the Sibley Basin, south of Lake Nipigon.

www.marathonpgm.com

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business