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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a mediocre 72-99-139 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose four points to 533. Grenville Thomas and Ken Armstrong's adaptable-but-struggling mineral explorer, North Arrow Minerals Inc. (NAR), closed unchanged at 3.5 cents on 377,000 shares. Canada's busiest diamond explorer just a few years ago, North Arrow has morphed into one of the country's more active hunters for lithium -- again in Canada's North.

While the DeStaffany project just east of Yellowknife remains the company's most advanced project, North Arrow is cheering exploration success on two more northerly prospects -- MacKay and LDG -- that include ground heavily explored for diamonds in years past. Late last week, North Arrow revealed that it had discovered new spodumene-bearing pegmatites on both properties based on mapping, geophysics and sampling programs this summer.

Grab sampling at both MacKay and LDG -- the acronym stands for Lac de Gras -- produced several assays topping 2 per cent lithium oxide. Indeed, one test returned 3.74 per cent lithium oxide from the MK1 pegmatite at MacKay Lake in August. The samples came from outcrops, but surface exposures are limited in the area south of Lac de Gras because the area has a thick cover of overburden -- a problem that plagued North Arrow and its diamond exploring predecessors years ago, as the thick cover made indicator mineral collection from basal tills difficult.

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