from stockwatch 2023-02-02 17:57 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Thursday was a mediocre 93-91-126 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose fractionally to 630
Grenville Thomas and Ken Armstrong's North Arrow Minerals Inc. (NAR) rose one cent to 8.5 cents on 649,000 shares. North Arrow's stock, if not its focus, abruptly reversed direction earlier this week. The four-center got as high as 10.5 cents on Tuesday -- but gave three of them back Wednesday -- on word it has acquired the DeStaffany lithium property, near the Nechalacho rare earth project, near the north shore of Great Slave Lake, about 115 kilometres east of Yellowknife.
North Arrow's stock struggled to the 15-cent mark in the spring of 2021 and came close again last spring, as hardy diamond investors cheered on the company's Naujaat diamond project in central Nunavut. Although results of an 1,800-tonne bulk sample of the Q1-4 kimberlite met the company's expectations, by the end of 2022, North Arrow's shares traded at just three cents, which was not part of the expectations.
As it turns out nowadays, a lithium bird in the bush is worth plenty of fancy diamonds in the hand. Mr. Armstrong, North Arrow's president and chief executive officer, is not abandoning the company's diamond project just yet, but with a large bulk sample of Q1-4 not in the offing until at least 2024, North Arrow is eager to get busy elsewhere, and chasing a hot commodity like lithium fits the bill.
The price is right for DeStaffany, as North Arrow gets a 100-per-cent interest for just $18,000 in cash -- the cost to stake the ground -- and 500,000 North Arrow shares. It is a bargain perhaps -- the market is struggling to value those shares after all -- and the property does host two lithium-tantalum-niobium-bearing pegmatites, Moose 1 and Moose 2. Both were discovered in the 1940s but were evaluated as tantalum and niobium prospects only.
And so DeStaffany, Mr. Armstrong cheers, is "part of a larger opportunity to take advantage of North Arrow's deep exploration experience in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut" -- an experience that includes lithium, tantalum and rare earth elements, he adds. Some of that experience was on display nearly a quarter century ago, when Grenville Thomas and his daughter Eira Thomas's Navigator Exploration Corp. briefly worked DeStaffany. (Navigator merged with Mr. Thomas's Strongbow Resources Inc. in 2004 and in 2020, it became Cornish Metals Inc. (CUSN: $0.27) -- with both Mr. Thomas and Mr. Armstrong serving as directors.)
But Mr. Thomas -- long synonymous with diamond exploration in Canada, thanks to his early move on what became the Diavik mine at Lac de Gras -- has connections to the Great Slave area and to rare metals that go back much further. Forty years ago, Mr. Thomas was promoting the Lake Zone project, now called Nechalacho, through Highwood Resources Ltd.
In the mid-1980s, he cheered the Lake Zone deposit as "already the largest tantalum and columbium deposit in North America." Years passed and by 2001, Highwood was working the project with Navigator, but Highwood disappeared through a takeover by Beta Minerals Ltd. a few years later, and Beta quickly flipped the project to Don Bubar's Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. (AVL: $0.145), which has been spinning its tires at the project since 2005.
And so, while the pursuit of lithium is a new adventure at DeStaffany, the metal is a hot commodity with the market and so investors can expect North Arrow to plunk down some cash on a 2023 exploration program on the property. Drilling the Moose pegmatites and testing them for lithium is an obvious way to keep the company's stock percolating.