Prospecting in Wekusko, Part 2

In the fall of 1955, my prospecting partner, Einar Sanden, and I transported a diamond drill rig to the east shore of Crowduck Bay in northern Manitoba to explore a new lithium prospect. I had the temerity to enter into a 5,000-ft. diamond drill contract with Midwest Diamond Drilling of Flin Flon, Man., before I even had assays from our original samples and without having first fully discussed it with management in Edmonton.

Once the gear was ashore, we built two fourteen-by-sixteen-foot tents — one to accommodate the four drillers plus the female cook; the other, for core logging. Sanden and I stayed in a make-shift cookhouse.

Two drillers worked twelve-hour shifts, one in the day the other at night, so there was always someone sleeping or trying to sleep. These made for long days and nights for the cook.

The foreman worked the dayshift and tended to his paperwork. He tried to keep in contact with headquarters via a Russian-made two-way radio using an antenna pointed in the direction of Flin Flon. The radio had no instruction manual and we often had to relay our messages through other Midwest drillers in the area.

There was also a large heated tent for cooking. I don’t remember the cook’s name, but she was a industrious, middle-aged woman who was good at her job.

The drillers used an old D-2 tractor to drag the drill from site to site. We kept stores of fuel, drill rods and other things we might need to carry us through the long freeze-up period before more supplies could come by plane on the lake or by winter road.

There was also the necessary outhouse with three walls — but no door. And perched upon “throne,” one could see the temperature dipping on a large clock-like thermometer which hung on one of the walls.

Soon we started blasting and drilling trenches across the dyke in order to sample fresh rock surfaces. The trenches were at twenty-five-foot intervals and twenty to thirty feet long across the surface of the pegmatite dykes. They were drilled and blasted to a depth of about eighteen inches, providing a nicely fractured rock surface for sampling.

As the trenches progressed along the dyke, the drill completed the first shallow hole and was then moved back to drill a deeper hole below the first. Each time, Sanden loaded his drill holes for blasting and we moved farther back, waiting for the dynamite to go off.

We later reduced the amount of dynamite in each blast hole as the trenching moved in twenty-five-foot steps along the dyke and closer to the drill sites and the camp. This reduced the number of flying rock fragments but did not fracture the rock quite as well. We progressed until fragments starting falling only a few feet from the cook tent, at which point we stopped.

Sanden soon left by dog team to spend winter with his family in Ontario. Meanwhile, I sent a letter to my wife, Marguerite, and asked her to join me at the camp over freeze-up. She traveled by train from Winnipeg to Wekusko, and arrived at base camp on the back of a snowmobile. A few days after her arrival, the cook took gravely ill. We attempted to contact the Flin Flin office but no to avail. We managed to get hold of some pilots, but they were not willing to risk landing on the thin ice. Meanwhile, our cook was too weak for the long snowmobile trip through the dense bush.

I decided we needed to clear a path to the nearest road. We worked at doing so for four days and had almost pushed through when, one morning, we heard the sound of a Cessna 195 buzzing overhead. It landed on thick ice on the bay across from us. We pieced together a stretcher and made our way out on the ice. This was the first time we had tested its cold surface. Each movement had to be carefully executed until we reached the plane. We finally made the transfer and the tiny plane whisked the woman away for treatment.

My wife stayed on a helped around the camp until Christmas. She cooked and assisted with my surveys. She added a new feel to the place and may even have brought some luck, as the drill results were good. But perhaps her most significant contribution was insisting that a door be added to the outhouse.

— The author is a retired prospector living in British Columbia.