Shear search focused in South.

Pamela Strand likes the lay of the land about an hour and a half southwest of Regina. So much so that her company, Shear Minerals, is interested in spending more time and money exploring for diamonds in the area.

Shear Minerals acquired a significant land position in Southern Saskatchewan in early 2006 and has since built the Stella Polaris Diamond Project to include 235 mineral claims over more than 300,000 hectares. Strand, President and CEO of Shear Minerals, saw what she needed to see by looking at the historical government database supplemented with additional data from private sources.

"There is a high abundance of indicator minerals right across the project," Strand says. "We were able to focus our work by conducting glacial mapping, studying flow directions and by looking at the chemistry of the indicator minerals."

Working in what Strand calls 'challenging geology', Shear was able to send a four-person crew into the field at various times over the last year. It's small-scale compared to the company's flagship project--an $8.5 million bulk sampling at the Churchill Diamond project in Nunavut--yet Stella Polaris remains intriguing.

"We like the Saskatchewan project," Strand says, noting the company also has active projects in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. "We'll probably have test results (from Stella Polaris) back in the next month and hopefully there will be reason to continue moving ahead."