Month: September 2019

Sunny Side Up.

Where’d The Sunshine Go?

It’s that time of the year in BC. The weather’s gone all autumnal and rainy – the fine, misty, miserable drizzle that gets in through any zip or seam. The annoying damp spot on our kitchen ceiling, the one we can’t seem to fix, is back to doing its soggy thing. Yes, it’s Hallo Fall! Hallo mildew!

But to coin an over-used British phrase… “Mustn’t grumble, aye, could be worse.”

We had a very pleasant summer this year. A lovely warm forest-fire-free summer. A few years back it was a different story. Fire season was in full force and the valley north of Pemberton, where our cabin is, was shrouded in a thick pall of foggy smoke. A vigorous blaze was raging up along the banks of Anderson Lake towards the town of Lillooet, about 30km away from our modest shack.

This year’s smoke-free view at our cabin.
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Accidents Will Happen

Some people are accident prone.  It’s a fact. They have a higher predisposition to kitchen injuries, car crashes and the like and it’s a bloody miracle that some of them make it through adolescence without limb loss.

I had a field assistant once who suffered more accidents in a short period of time than anyone I’ve ever met. His name is Nejav and he lives in a small village in north-central Iran. My western geo-colleagues nicknamed him Yes-Yes because that’s all the English he knew.

Nejav’s home village, Zarshuran

Yes-Yes was/is a funny man. Happy as a clam at high tide, he cheerfully carried my backpack and rock hammer as we tramped across thousands of square kilometres taking stream sediment samples and prospecting for mineral deposits. He was with me when I went through my tortoise-signing phase and later on, he trained as a drill offsider to work on the drill rigs as we poked the first holes into the Zarshuran gold project.

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Hadrian’s Wall

A Walk Along The Edge Of The Roman Empire

Two thousand years before Donald Trump’s underfunded (and, as yet, fruitless) efforts at walling in the US, the Romans were busy building walls on the outlying borders of their vast empire. In Scotland, they built the Antonine wall in AD142. It was a 63km long earth bank cutting east to west across the country at its narrowest point. And in today’s modern Germany, you can still see remnants of the Limes Germanicus, a partly-fortified frontier that used a combination of natural obstacles and wooden palisade to guard the northern border of the Empire from the dastardly unconquered Germanic tribes.

But Hadrian’s wall in northern England is probably the best known. It stretches for over 70 miles across hill and valley from the east coast of England, at Wallsend in the outskirts of modern day Newcastle, to Bowness on Solway on the west coast. Bowness is an isolated but attractive little village that’s periodically cut off from the rest of the country by high tides on the Solway Firth.

Hadrian’s Wall as it is today, Upper Denton nr. Carlisle.
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August Stock Picking Update

Greeting Stockpickers,

With summer slipping away and September upon us, it’s time for another look at how the world’s greatest mining stock picking club (Hys and Lows) is faring. The following is an edited version of my monthly note to the club members, members’ names redacted.

First, a quick reminder of how our exclusive and much-envied club works. It’s not a formal membership-fee type of club, just a casual once-a-year gathering of 25 or so mining people at a steak restaurant in downtown Vancouver. We meet in late January to contemplate the state of the industry, drink good red wine and pick stocks.

3 out of 4 drunken barristers agree that Hys and Lows is awesome.
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