The Smiley Lake Property is a lithium exploration opportunity located 50 km north of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

The Smiley Lake Property occupies the northern Quetico Subprovince boundary zone with Marmion Terrane. This general area was included in a province-wide reconnaissance project (Operation Treasure Hunt) that examined peraluminous granites and their associated rare-element pegmatites. With respect to this area, samples collected along the Armstrong Highway (Hwy 527) transect revealed increased fractioning of pegmatites toward the southern (Onion Lake-Walkinshaw) and northern (Smiley-Scandrett-DeCourcey) boundary zones.

Two diamond drill holes collared by HTX Minerals in 2011 encountered pegmatites that were described as having some interesting characteristics, including greenish coloured feldspar, white-silver mica, muscovite, transparent blue minerals and tourmaline or columbite-tantalite. Assays of drill core produced anomalous Cs (cesium) values up to 40.5 ppm and Ta (tantalum) values up to 16.8 ppm. K/Rb ratios as low as 78.9 were encountered, indicating some of the pegmatites appear to be at least moderately fractioned. Further, these K/Rb ratios are significantly lower than those obtained by Operation Treasure Hunt from pegmatites collected from the area around DeCourcey Lake, in Quetico Subprovince, suggesting the possibility that pegmatites north of the subprovince boundary are significantly more fractioned than those south of the subprovince boundary. This is the exploration hypothesis that led to the staking of the Smiley Lake property to cover the Marion Terrane metasediments at the Quetico Subprovince boundary.

Reconnaissance prospecting along the Smiley Lake forest access road in October 2022 revealed the presence of pegmatites within a variety of host lithologies, including metasedimentary, metavolcanics and peraluminous granites within the Marmion Terrane.

Next steps include additional grassroots prospecting to identify the location and orientation of pegmatites, observe the characteristics of the pegmatites and collect samples for geochemical analysis to further determine the degree and direction of fractioning and test for the presence of rare-element mineralization.