Cascadia's North American operations include Goat Mountain, Norton Lake, Midway and Awkward Lake. These employees are being picked up at Awkward Lake.

Premier Business Partners:

Black Hawk Drilling Geotech Ltd. Geosoft

Cascadia International Resources Inc. is an up-and-coming force in the junior exploration and mining markets, says President, Director and COO Richard Osmond, who joined the Calgary, Alberta, company last year after working for the industry majors. “With our technical expertise, we’re able to evaluate the potential of a large number of properties quickly,” he explains. “Our key to success is being able to develop a solid base of projects. The more projects you evaluate in key parts of the world, the higher your chances are of finding success.”

Cascadia’s North American operations include Goat Mountain, Norton Lake, Midway and Awkward Lake. The Goat Mountain Mo-W property, near Castlegar, British Columbia, consists of 12 mineral claims covering approximately 10,000 acres. Cascadia says the main zone of skarn alteration was exposed to the length of more than 700 meters with grades of up to 1.6 percent molybdenum (Mo) and 0.1percent tungsten (W) detected from surface grab samples. As a result, six diamond drill holes were designed to test the lateral and vertical extent, as well as overall thickness.

Anomalous Mo and W were discovered in five of the six holes completed with assay grades of 0.405 percent molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) over 4 meters and 0.083 percent MoS2 over 11 meters intersected in drill holes GM-07-06 and GM-07-02, respectively. The style of mineralization reported appears similar to the Roca Mines MAX Mo deposit – a 43-million-ton deposit grading 0.21 percent MoS2 located approximately 150 kilometers north of the Goat Mountain property.

The company plans to complete a full evaluation during the next phase of exploration, where several lead, zinc and silver occurrences have also been discovered over strike lengths of more than 1.5 kilometers along the southern portion of the property.

The Norton Lake Ni-Cu-Co-PGE property consists of 476 claims on approximately 19,000 acres 400 kilometers north of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Cascadia has a 51 percent working interest and is the operator of the project. East West Resources Corp. and Canadian Golden Dragon – recently renamed to Trillium North – own the remainder.

The deposit is a 2.5-million-ton single sulphide lens containing 36.4 million pounds of nickel at 0.67 percent, 32.9 million pounds of copper at 0.61 percent and 1.7 million pounds of cobalt and 36.7 ounces of palladium. Recent airborne geophysical surveys, ground geophysics and soil geochemical surveys have been completed to explore for other Ni-Cu-Co-PGE lenses to continue to build the resource base on the property.

The Awkward Lake Ni-Cu-PGE property consists of 256 claims located on approximately 50 kilometers southwest of Armstrong Station, Ontario. Work performed by Harrison Minerals in 1963 outlined several zones of mineralized gabbro with assays of up to 15 feet of 0.33 percent nickel and 0.21 percent copper at a depth of 280 feet, with an interval of 0.54 percent nickel and 0.23 percent copper over five feet at a depth of 285 feet. Evaluation work completed by Cascadia confirmed the presence of anomalous minerals in several of the surface grab samples and the company plans to complete a high-resolution airborne geophysics survey on the property as well as follow-up prospecting and mapping in the next phase of exploration.

The Midway Ni-Cu-PGE and U property, also near Armstrong Station, has 608 claims on approximately 24,000 acres. It covers approximately 11 kilometers of Sibley Basin geology – with sediments of similar age to the Athabasca Basin – and is underlain by the Sturgeon Lake Archean greenstone belt. Cascadia recently entered into a joint-venture agreement with East West Resources Corp., which will earn a 50 percent interest in the property.

Pushing Forward
“Today’s market is making it more difficult to raise money for exploration,” Osmond says. “But, it is allowing junior mining companies to partner with other juniors to move their projects forward without having to finance further exploration activities at present market levels. Juniors, including Cascadia, are beginning to realize that the prize can be significant and are willing to share the risk.”

This is one of Cascadia’s growth strategies, Osmond points out; hence the fact that its Midway property is a joint-venture project and the remaining three are open to interested joint-venture partners. “We’re looking to leverage with other groups to help share the risk and look for partnerships to help finance our exploration projects,” he says. “If you have exploration funding available, you can look for companies who have quality assets and would gladly like to have a partner to share the exploration risk.

“The real value is when you can move your project forward and develop your assets – then everybody wins. You have to have success to move forward, but you need financing to develop that success.”

The need to travel outside of national borders for quality low-cost and low-risk projects prompted CEO and Director Jim Evaskevich to restructure Cascadia in 2003. He brought on Osmond, who had international experience as a former employee of Falconbridge, Noranda – now Xstrata – Voisey’s Bay Nickel Company and Anglo American.

South America was the first place he looked. Cascadia recently opened two new field offices in Peru and Brazil. “We signed a strategic alliance with Quippu Exploration to explore for base metal opportunities in southern Peru in an area where other companies have had good success; Xstrata and other juniors have made fairly recent discoveries there, and it’s really just a continuation of the world-class copper belt of Chile,” Osmond notes.

“The guys at Quippu are industry-trained and technically solid exploration geologists who have worked with major mining companies such as Tech Cominco and Newmont over the years, but decided to go out on their own.”

In Brazil, Cascadia is focusing on nickel in relatively unexplored belts of the country.

The firm’s future objective is “to continue to work hard and turn over rocks,” he adds. “The more rocks we can turn over in the right places in the world, the more likely our chances of success.”