Site Visit: Saga Metals’ search for critical metals puts it on the radar

Cartwright, Labrador – On top of a forested mountain just inland from the Atlantic coast, a white dome and a set of buildings forming a military radar station almost act as a signpost for Labrador’s underground critical metals.

Further down on the slopes, Saga Metals (TSXV: SAGA; US-OTC: SAGMF) explorers are searching for titanium and vanadium at their Radar project, aptly named after the mountain station operated by the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Radar is about 10 km south of the fishing town of Cartwright and 390 km east of Labrador’s largest community, Happy Valley-Goose Bay.

“There’s not a single person that hasn’t interacted with titanium at some point today, tomorrow or the next,” Michael Garagan, Saga’s chief geological officer and director, told The Northern Miner during an October visit. “Its applications, from steel to aerospace, are quite important. And for vanadium on the aerospace side, on your nuclear reactor side, on your battery side. They are two resources that Canada has a lot of yet is mining very little.”

Watch a video of the visit

In Canada’s most sparsely populated province, where iron ore has dominated mining development amid a vast resource-rich territory, Saga stands out for its critical metals focus which includes its Double Mer uranium project further west. Into Quebec and west of Double Mer is Saga’s Legacy lithium project that it holds under an option agreement with Rio Tinto (ASX, NYSE, LSE: RIO). The Australian major operates Canada’s only titanium mine Lac Tio in eastern Quebec.

Canada has no vanadium mines, though three projects in Quebec have advanced to the economic study stage.

Hawkeye for titanium

Radar comprises the Hawkeye and Trapper sites. Both sit on heavily forested slopes near the Mealy Mountains range and are accessible only by gravel roads.

Historic drilling at Hawkeye in the 1990s identified noteworthy iron and titanium oxide grades. But a significant insight into the horseshoe-shaped target only came this year when Saga launched its first drilling program.

Its 2,200 metres of drilling across seven holes in the first quarter targeted a magnetic anomaly at Hawkeye. Many of the rocks at Hawkeye’s exposed trough, which was dug out months ago with an excavator, contain so much magnetic content that metallic pens can be dangled from them.

Highlight results included hole R25-HEZ-01 that cut 263.5 metres grading 17.5% iron, 3.6% titanium oxide (Ti0₂) and 0.17% vanadium oxide (V₂O₅) from 4.5 metres depth; including 31.5 metres at 26% iron, 5.3% Ti0₂ and 0.2% V₂O₅.

Another result, in hole R25-HEZ-04 returned 50 metres at 24.5% iron, 4.74% Ti0₂ and 0.3% V₂O₅ from 231 metres depth.

“You can see the magnetite layers which are hosting the titanium-vanadium, which we intercepted in our drill program,” Garagan said, gesturing at wide bands on the rock in a trench. “Knowing that it’s a layered intrusion has allowed teams to very easily track the magnetite and allow for our 200 to 300-metre intercepts of oxide layering.”

Drills follow strong readings

West of Hawkeye is the Trapper zone, where Saga plans to start a 15,000-metre drilling program in early November. The company closed a financing for $2.98 million on Oct. 10 to support the program.

Both titanium and vanadium tend to be hosted in rocks with magnetite, a form of iron oxide. Initial magnetometer readings at Hawkeye returned results of 72,000 nanoteslas. Readings were much higher at Trapper, Garagan said.

“We not only maxed out the machine at 120,000 nanoteslas in some zones, [but] we were getting pretty high consistent numbers of between 90,000 to 115,000 nanoteslas, which is crazy high for magnetometers,” he said.

Straight to indicated

The drill results will support an initial, indicated resource for Trapper that Saga plans to release next year. A resource for Hawkeye would be further down the road.

“We want to bring [Trapper] straight to a level of confidence that we can get behind,” Garagan said. “We could drill this at about 100-metre spacing, three kilometers long, and potentially come up with an indicated resource. It would be a lot more inexpensive to do an inferred resource. But we’re in the business of finding a mine and that’s what we want to do.”

Garagan also noted that Radar’s titanium and vanadium mineralization has geological similarities with southwestern China’s Panzhihua, which is regarded as the world’s largest iron-titanium-vanadium deposit. Both Radar and Panzhihua contain mafic intrusive bodies with oxide layering and vanadiferous titanomagnetite mineralization.

Skills pipeline

Cartwright, a largely Métis and Inuit town, is the only established community near Radar. Before a road was constructed in 2002 that linked it with Happy Valley-Goose Bay, the town was accessible only by small plane or boat.

But even at Radar’s early stage, Cartwright stands to benefit from the project. Saga has prioritized hiring locally for exploration roles, which Garagan says the community welcomes since its economic options are limited.

“[We’re training people to be] field techs, to be prospectors. The training for everything that we do on the ground on this project is 75% to 80% people from Cartwright,” he said. “If worst comes to worst on this project and we can’t de-risk it, and we can’t prove it, at least we’ve got a population of guys and girls from Cartwright who now have training in the exploration industry in a province that in due time, is going to see a lot more exploration.”

Saga shares gained 1.1% to 44¢ apiece on Friday morning in Toronto, valuing the company at $25.14 million. The stock has traded in a 12-month range of 19¢ to 54¢.