Category: Uncategorized

My Favourite Carpet

Buying Rugs In Pakistan

The city of Quetta is a dump. It’s the provincial capital of Baluchistan, the western most province of Pakistan. It sticks out like a nasty looking spike, with Iran to the south and Afghanistan to the north. I was there in the late 1990s waiting for a government permit to head off road and up to the border region with Afghanistan to prospect for copper (see my earlier blog posts here and here) I waited about 3 weeks for the permit, which was finally granted after I hosted 15 or so officials from the ministry for lunch at a Chinese restaurant.

The Afghan border. I was waiting for a permit to go here.
Sometimes I question the wisdom of my choices.

Fast forward to 2019 and now it’s not just a dump, it’s a bloody dangerous dump, rife with Islamic sectarian extremism. The Shia Hazara tribes have been targeted by Sunni militants leading to bombings, kidnappings and other nefarious goings on. To compound its problems, the region is also prone to major earthquakes. The last big one in 1935 killed an estimated 40,000 residents.

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September Stock Picking Update

More from the world’s greatest stock picking club!

Greeting Stockpickers,

It’s time for another look at how Hys and Lows, the world’s greatest mining stock picking club, is faring as we drift soggily into Fall. The following is an edited version of my monthly note to the club members, individual’s names redacted.

The Rules

First, the usual reminder of how our much envied club works. We meet in late January to quaff flagons of fine wine, mourn the state of the industry, and pick stocks. It’s not a club, just a casual once-a-year gathering of 25 or so knuckle-dragging hairy-palmed mining people at an overpriced steak restaurant in downtown Vancouver.

So waddya think about the gold price? Mmm. Fruity.

Everyone chooses 1 mining stock. It can’t be a company you work for, and it can’t be halted or pre-IPO. At the dinner, whoever chose the stock that went up the most over the year is declared the winner and they eat and drink for free. Everyone else has to bring a $100 bottle of wine and the loser gets to wear the toilet-seat-of-shame.

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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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Exploring Communism Pt 2

Of Sticks and Stone

(I hadn’t planned on a Part 2 to my recent Yemeni post, but this story climbed out of my distant memories and seemed to fit.)

Western-style mineral exploration, as practiced by the typical Vancouver junior, is all about efficiency; how to maximize the data you can tease from the ground for each dollar spent. Or rather it should be about efficiency. Experienced hands know that when the markets get excited and frothy about metals, even Blind Freddy and His Dog can raise cash, as my colleague Graham would say. So I guess the concept of efficiency waxes and wanes in tandem with investor interest in resources.

St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia. I explored it.

The Communists, in contrast, were not known for efficient exploration. In last week’s post I took a look at the Communist-sponsored regional exploration of southern Yemen; a piecemeal and ill thought-out mess where the left hand had no clue what the right hand was up to.

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The Science of Sampling

& The Art Of Thinking On Your Feet

Eleven out of ten mining and exploration professionals, particularly geostatisticians, agree that the science of sampling is crucial to the discovery process. I’d suggest that everything we do as minerals’ industry geologists can be focused down into that single activity: sampling.

Every dollar we spend on logistics, geophysics, drilling, mapping and beer is spent to collect samples. It’s the ONLY way to check that there’s metal in the fascinating rocks you’ve described in your monthly reports. Geophysics won’t tell you, regardless of what those shifty geophysicists say. Satellites can’t tell you from 300km up, and mapping definitely won’t tell you.

Me (in the orange), 1984, Brittany, about to take a sample.
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Trouble With Toilets

I spent last weekend lolling around in the sunshine at the Vancouver folk music festival, down at Vancouver’s dusty Jericho Beach Park. It’s a wonderfully scenic spot for a fun weekend of eclectic music, watched by an equally eclectic Pacific Northwest crowd. People who wouldn’t normally be seen dead in a tie-dye T-shirt dose themselves in patchouli oil and let their inner hippies out of the artisan-crafted, organic bamboo box for a couple of days. Unfortunately, on hot weekends there’s nowhere in the festival grounds to hide from the blazing sun, so most sane people eventually gravitate to the beer garden for a cold brew and the safety of the sun umbrellas.

The north side of the beer garden is the business end, lined with grey and blue plastic jiffy johns; on warm days, they turn into scorching hot chemical-scented saunas. God help anyone who’s unfortunate enough to get stuck in one.

Not my finest sartorial moment but at least I had cider.
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