Prospector is on fire for ice.

• Position: Diamond mining by Thatcher Townsend Jr. of Allyn Resources Inc.

Thatcher Townsend Jr. of Tobaccoville says he's always had a warm spot in his heart for Canada, where he spent childhood summers.

But now that he's 60, Townsend's not looking for warmth from the Great White North. He wants ice. Townsend's company, Allyn Resources Inc., is hunting for diamonds on 30,000 acres in the Northwest Territory.

"It's kind of like buying a big lottery ticket," says the Greensboro native, who lives in the country just south of Pilot Mountain. Townsend persuaded about 20 friends and business associates, including 14 North Carolinians from Cashiers to Raleigh, to deal in. Don't ask who they are: "They're just individuals who have a decent net worth and can afford to speculate," he says.

Townsend got diamond fever after a British Columbian company, Dia Met Minerals Ltd., announced a $5 billion discovery in 1991. Allyn Resources has since staked claims on land that's 35 to 40 miles southwest of Dia Met's fortune. "We're about 225 miles northwest of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories," he says. "It's called the Barren Lands because there are no trees, no nothing as far as you can see." In the winter the temperature drops to 40 below zero.

Townsend's got lots of company, including South Africa's De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. and Australia's Broken Hill Proprietary Co. The Wall Street Journal called the 13 million acres claimed so far "the largest prospecting rush in North American history."

The only child of a former Internal Revenue Service director for North Carolina, Thatcher graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in banking and finance in 1954. After a stint in the Army's finance corps, he got an M.B.A. from Northwestern...