Odds ‘n’ Sods: Playing high stakes poker for Fruta del Norte
The following is the second of two parts of the abridged first chapter of an upcoming memoir entitled “The Last Great Adventure,” for which any profits will go to the…
Odds ‘n’ Sods
Odds ‘n’ Sods: An introduction to bush life
I spent my first summer in the bush in 1958, soon after graduating from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in geology and geophysics. McPhar Geophysics had hired me as chief…
Odds ‘n’ Sods: The rediscovery of Nambija and the road to FDN in Ecuador
The following is an edited version of the first chapter from an upcoming memoir entitled “The Last Great Adventure,” for which any profits will go to the Baca Ortiz Hospital…
Odds ‘n’ Sods: Sake and rescue
One of the great parts of our business is the places we go and the interesting people we get to meet. In the early ’90s when diamond mania swept through…
Odds ‘n’ Sods : Cobalt’s silver boom and the rise of mining media in Canada
The early history of hard rock mining in Ontario is essentially the story of the discovery of silver in Cobalt in 1903. It wasn’t long before the Cobalt mines became…
Odds ‘n’ Sods: Strange discovery under a freakish quartzite mound in Arizona
Let’s start this story close to its end with an April 27, 1967, front-page headline from Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star: “Papagos lease site for copper mine,” followed by a sub-headline:…
Odds ‘n’ Sods: The birth of the Smithers Exploration Group’s annual golf tournament
VANCOUVER – Exploration in northwestern B.C. was firing in 1972, and many explorers used services out of the small community of Smithers, B.C. This group included Nick Carter, who was…
Odds ‘n’ Sods: Mike’s strange discovery in Arizona
Mike Fitzgerald was in no way the smooth-operator type found in the universe of large corporations. His mannerisms appeared more like those of a boxer, and for good reason —…
Odds ‘n’ Sods: Visiting gold mines in the DPRK
It was 1993. After disappointment with the Louwanzhai gold mine in Yunnan, my employer Normandy Mining wanted a break from China, and we were getting encouragement in Laos with our…
Odds ‘n’ Sods: Gold in Union County, South Carolina
Early in 1979 I had been transferred by Newmont Mining from Western Australia where I had been working as the exploration manager, to take up a newly created role as exploration manager for the eastern United States.
Odds ‘n’ sods: The Toodoggone River Tube Race of 1981
VANCOUVER — On July 31, 1981, nearly 200 geologists and support crews stood speechless along the gravel banks of the remote Toodoggone River in north-central B.C., as a helicopter landed before them alongside the frigid, glacial-fed water.
Odds ‘n’ sods: No good deeds go unpunished at drill job in the Yukon
Our company was completing a drill program out of Mayo, Yukon Territory, in February 1996. We had to build an ice bridge over the McQuesten River, plus 21 km of winter road to the top of Red Mountain (5,000 feet elevation) and complete 5,000…