Within the space of recent weeks, the share price of Edmonton-based Shear Minerals Ltd. has surged uphill like a hot-wired salmon scaling a spawning ladder.

And all because of the allure of a Nunavut diamond play formerly known only as “Trust Me.”

Last January, you could have purchased a couple thousand shares of Shear Minerals, a fascinating diamond exploration junior (SRM-TSXV), for the price of a used TV.

But interest surged when BHP Billiton Diamonds Inc. (BHPB), a major global resource company, bought into Shear’s 1.5-million-acre Churchill Diamond Project.

Jack Dagley photo, for Business Edge
Shear Minerals CEO Pamela Strand says modern technologies may help unearth discoveries missed in past decades.

BHPB paid $3 million for a 14-per-cent stake in the play while pledging to foot the bill for collecting, sampling and processing the first 200 tonnes of kimberlite, carrot-shaped geological formations that can indicate the presence of rich diamond veins.

That significantly lightened the risk load for Shear Minerals, which retains 51-per-cent interest in the property.

Meanwhile, the share price streaked to $1.70 before levelling off at $1.45 last Friday, after Shear Minerals confirmed the existence of a fourth and fifth kimberlite. Although the BHP Billiton endorsement represented a major breakthrough, the CEO of Shear Minerals has also caught the investing public’s fancy.

Down to earth and arrow-straight, Pamela Strand seems refreshingly miscast in a rugged game that has historically attracted chisellers and motor-mouthed promoters.

But Strand’s no hustler. She’s a skilled, experienced and methodical geologist (M.Sc., University of Western Ontario), who gained her practical knowledge working for the feds in Yellowknife during the 1991 diamond frenzy, the biggest Canadian staking rush since the days of Klondike Kate.

At that time, she rubbed shoulders with the key players, including Chuck Fipke, the wealthy Kelowna geologist who founded Dia Met Minerals. Fipke sniffed out the Ekati Mine, Canada’s first big diamond producer.

Strand would dearly love to emulate his big strike. If it happens, she will look back fondly on a day in 2001 when prospectors from the Hunter Exploration Group approached her with a pitch for exploring the Churchill property.

“We called it the ‘Trust Me’ play,” Strand snickered, “because we wouldn’t tell anybody where it was.”

Parts of the region, not far from the community of Rankin Inlet on the western shores of Hudson Bay, had been previously combed by De Beers, another global giant, about a decade earlier.

The De Beers explorations did detect kimberlites. But the company decided against laying claim to the area.

“I guess the mineral chemistry their people found wasn’t what they were looking for,” Strand speculated.

“We believe we’re picking up a different signature. We have very good regional chemistry,” she said. Did De Beers, which employs the world’s most savvy diamond hunters, misread the play?

Or, as Strand believes, have up-to-date technologies outstripped those of a decade ago?

Exploration and mineral analysis techniques have evolved dramatically during the past dozen years. Advances in landsat imaging, hyper-spectral sensing and laptop dataset analysis mean that smart companies stand to benefit by revisiting regions that have been sampled, found wanting and abandoned in the past.

In any case, Strand and her partners subsequently tied up rights to 500,000 acres.

And then?

“Later that year, keeping it all hush-hush, we sampled more (unexplored) land to the north and to the west, and came up with similar encouraging results. And we’re thinking: ‘Gee, these are all on open ground,’ ” Strand recalled.

Ultimately, Shear Minerals and Hunter Exploration Group acquired the current huge package of what Strand calls “very good ground, based on its scientific merit.”

“That’s why we’re very happy the way things have gone,” Strand continued. “We took a flier. It’s something we do all the time but, most often, nothing materializes from it.”

Early this month, the Hunter Exploration team sold its stake to BHP Billiton, while retaining a two-per-cent royalty on diamonds eventually taken from the ground.

That stage of development, if reached, remains years away, cautioned Strand.

“These are the early stages of a long-term exploration project. Even though we have five kimberlite discoveries, our goal is to establish whether we have a genuine kimberlite cluster, or field,” she said.

There is much ground to cover. The Shear/BHPB property is larger than the Ekati and Diavik diamond properties put together.

If the partners do break ground, they’re well fixed from a logistics standpoint. Rankin Inlet makes an ideal operations base, with daily commercial flights and tidewater access for bringing in heavy equipment.

Still don’t believe diamonds are a girl’s best friend?

Trust me.