It’s Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. So best wishes to all and have a great weekend. Unless you’re a Brussel Sprout. In which case this will be your fate.
My Project Went Boom
Half a day south of the N40 highway in Pakistan, the main road heading west to Iran through the Baluchistan desert, lies the Ras Koh mountain range. Steep, rugged mountains with little or no forest cover cut by deeply incised “nallas” or dry stream beds which you don’t want to be stuck in when it rains. Not that it rains very often. I was there in 1997 prospecting for porphyry copper systems, hot on the heels of BHP’s massive Reko Diq discovery in the Chagai Hills.
Getting there was a 2 day drive from Quetta along the N40 dodging Iranian and Pakistani trucks. The driving was some of the worst I’ve ever experienced; if you ask me it’s a bloody miracle any trade ever makes it across the Iran-Pakistan border in one piece. Once you left the road to head south, you might come across convoys of armed pick up trucks smuggling opiates to the Makran coast. And then there were the delightfully named Camel Spiders; hairy orange buggers with huge jaws that may or may not eat camels.
With only a very basic map and a GPS, accompanied by a dignified elderly Pakistani geologist, Naseem (who spoke Baluchi) and 2 government soldiers, I was trying to find a way in to the centre of the Ras Koh range. Detailed satellite image processing in head office had flagged a large area that looked like it might be a porphyry system and which had to be checked. But after 2 days hiking we gave up. There was simply no easy way in that didn’t involve some pretty extreme camping and we weren’t equipped for it. So, Naseem recommended visiting the local governor to find out if there were any tracks or roads that we hadn’t tried and off we went to find him in Dalbandin.
Dalbandin is a particularly unpleasant little truck service town. Dirty and hot, with –back then- only the cockroach-infested government hostel to stay in. What followed was a typical Middle Eastern tea-and-cake session with the Gov’ to honour the foreigner (me). Any excuse for a nice slice of jam sponge. After a couple of hours reminiscing about the glorious legacy of the British Empire (I kid you not) he looked at our map and drew a large triangle around the area we’d been trying get into and said in perfect English “Stay out of here” with no explanations given. On the way out, Naseem told me we should forget about that particular target and move on.
We headed west to Fort Saindak to chase different targets out on the westernmost point of Pakistan where the Iranian, Afghan and Pakistani borders meet.
Six months later the Pakistanis detonated 5 atomic bombs at their top secret test facility in the middle of the Ras Koh range. Our satellite photos had picked out the spoil heaps from the underground tunnel excavations. I’d been trying to hike into a nuclear test facility: a westerner with a digital camera and a GPS. Hello… Is that the Darwin Awards?
Memories of Rural Iran
In the mid-1990s I spent the best of a year in the province of West Azerbaijan in northern Iran, based in the small farming town of Takab. The area, about a day’s drive from Tehran, is populated largely by Turkic and Kurdish people and Zoroastrianism is still practiced there. The day-to-day language is Turkish. Rural and fairly remote, life for the villagers goes on as it has for thousands of years.
I was running an exploration program at a project called Zarshuran (“the place of the gold washing”) working a 6 weeks in / 2 weeks out rotation with Budapest as my home base.
The routine in Iran was pretty simple. Get up. Eat breakfast: flatbread with honey, eggs and yoghurt. Spend the day at the project. Come back to the Hotel Ranji in Takab. Eat dinner: chicken or beef kebab, yoghurt and grilled tomato. Sleep. Repeat for 6 weeks.
One day in 1996 or ‘97 my daily routine was pleasantly interrupted when a Dutch traveller turned up at the hotel. In Iran for his friend’s wedding, he was on his way to visit an archeological site near Takab: Tahkt –e Soleyman (the name means Prison of Solomon and legend holds that King Solomon used to imprison monsters there.)
In need of English-speaking company, I persuaded him to travel to my project for the day. It was a 45 minute drive from Takab through small farming villages where he got a chance meet the locals and photograph the hard-scrabble life of Iranian subsistence farmers. As a bonus, I took him underground at a small but spectacular arsenic mine to collect world-class samples of bright yellow orpiment (arsenic sulphide) from the ore pile.
Twenty years later, out of the blue, I got an email from him. He’d tracked me down on-line using an old business card I’d given him during his visit. And attached were 20 scanned photos from his day on the project which he said was the highlight of his trip to Iran. I was totally blown away. All the photos I’d taken at the project were of rocks, drills, and general technical stuff with a few scenery snaps thrown in. But here were photos of me, at 33 years old, looking vaguely like a geologist on a day I’d long since forgotten about… being all earth sciencey and authoritative at the Zarshuran project, which is now Iran’s biggest gold mine.
I Belong to a Club
It’s not a formal membership-fee type of club, more a casual once-a-year gathering of 20-25 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.
The rules are simple. Everyone gets to chose 1 mining stock with the caveats that it can’t be a company you work for and it can’t be halted or private. At the dinner, whoever chose the stock that went up the most over the year is declared the winner.
Everyone who attends has to bring a $100 bottle of wine except for the winner, who eats and drinks for free. We run it like a fantasy hockey pool with the overall loser picking first for the coming year, but last place also gets to run the club for the next 12 months (which is why yours truly is running it this year. Thanks for nothing Volcanic Gold…)
This is where it gets a bit more interesting, because we also track the overall performance of the portfolio of stock picks, naively believing a) that we’re somehow smarter than the average resource investor and b) that we represent an experienced and deeply knowledgeable group of mining insiders who should know what they’re doing. Yeah right.
Two years ago we thought we were the bees knees. Our portfolio was up an astonishing 250%. In fact, our record was so good, if we were a proper hedge fund we’d have ranked almost the number 1 resource fund in North America. If you’d invested $500 in each stock we picked, you’d have made close to $32k profit. Not bad for 12 months.
For the last 24 months, reality has bitten. The market has put us firmly back in our place while lustily kicking our butts down the sidewalk, up the alley and into the back yard. Year-to-date our portfolio is down 26% and, tellingly, 22 out of 25 stocks we picked are in the red. To be fair on us, this is a reflection largely of the “nobody gives a fuck” state of the resource sector which is veering dangerously close to a 10-year low.
On the bright side, I’m leading the pack. My pick, Evrim Resources, is up a gratifying 196% which means I’m currently on track for a nice free wine tasting. Chin chin!
I’ve Eaten Some Weird Things
But this one, bobbing around in my soup, was probably the weirdest.
Actually, I didn’t eat it. I stared at it for a while and lamely prodded it, curious what the small black hairs were on the dark bit but not really wanting to ask.
I was in northern Peru for a few days: the port town of Bayovar, visiting a phosphate rock exploration project. We ate breakfast and dinner in the workers’ canteen at the port. The food wasn’t bad but let’s just say Chef’s Table won’t be profiling the place anytime soon.
This particular day, the first course was soup. A luke-warm yellow, greasy soup with chunks of.. of.. stuff.
I can say with 100% certainty that it was part of an animal. But exactly what part and what species the unfortunate animal was remains a mystery to me. My best guess is it might have been a snout, or maybe a well-boiled hoof, possibly piggy in origin.
In the end I wasn’t brave enough to eat it. Call it a missed opportunity.
Dies Irae, Dies Illa
Every second Tuesday, starting in September, I join a small group of elite singers… Look, can I be honest for a moment? We’re so good we could all have successful music careers if we hadn’t decided to take ordinary jobs, no really… sorry I digress.
Where was I? Oh yes… Every second Tuesday we meet at a local church for an hour to practice Gregorian chant led by our lovely choirmaster, Colleen. It’s a wonderful but short lived opportunity to slip away from the shitness of the Trumpian world into a bygone era of Latin plainsong, pillaging, gout and rampant Plague.
If you’ve never explored the world of monophonic music, I highly recommend dipping a toe or two in. The origins of so many modern hymns, film soundtracks and great classical pieces are hiding there in plain (sorry) sight. For the choral duffer, it’s an easy place to start your singing career because it uses simple-ish, unharmonised melodies sung in the same register by the whole choir. Although plain song structure is usually complicated by a lack of time signature so regular practice is needed to nail down the commonly used melodic / rhythmic patterns.
The Dies Irae (Day of Rage) is one of the most famous themes. Well over a thousand years old, it’s popped up all over the place down the centuries. In the 20th Century it was written into Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, and some of the music from the Star Wars movies. Genesis used it in Attack of the Giant Hogweed (yes that’s a real song). Here’s an interesting vignette from Canada’s CBC on how Dies Irae has influenced modern and ancient music.
Despite the apparent simplicity of most plain song, the more you work at it, the more you realise why only Monks have ever really nailed it. They’re the only ones with enough time on their hands to put in the hours needed to make it sound great. A typical day in the life of Brother Francis …Wake up at 4am. Practice the liturgy in plain song. Fast. Bit more practice from 8-10am. Confession. Practice liturgy. Fast again while confessing. Practice. And so on, interspersed with some chicken feeding and gardening till midnight when they wind up another hard day with more plain song before bed washed down with an invigorating cup of hot water. Musical perfection ensues.
And Here Is The News
In today’s news, Bill Cosby was laughed at by world leaders during his speech to the UN general assembly. And Donald Trump was sentenced to 3-10 years for sexual assault and was forced to register for life as a dangerous sex offender.. Then I woke up and it was all a sad dream.
My Blue Heaven
This glorious sample of Azurite on Malachite from the Millpillas mines in Mexico reinforces why Azurite, with its incredible deep blues, is one of my favourite minerals. Sadly it’s woefully under represented in my mineral collection. Photo courtesy of Geology Tweets. https://twitter.com/GeologyTime
Don’t Panic. We Can Help.
Q. How to Make a Small Fortune in Mining?
A. Start with a Large One.
It’s an old cliché but very apropos at the moment. To put it in simple terms, the resource sector is beyond crap and has been for a few years.
Investors flit from one trendy idea to another gleefully proclaiming each to be the future of equity investing until the bubble pops yet again. Lithium. Graphite. Rare earths. Cannabis. Cryptocurrencies. Yadda yadda.
Sadly, they’ve all but abandoned the mining and exploration sector. The TSX Global Gold Index is sliding greasily down, inching its way inexorably to a 10 year low. The amount of investment capital available to the sector has shrunk, and as a direct result the pace of new mine discoveries has slowed to an historic low. We’re not happy.
But, fear not kind reader. Here in the UrbanCrows nerve centre we endeavour every day to cheer people up. Part of our mission is to help you forget the day-to-day. So if you are actually thinking of investing in junior mining stocks; should you wake up tomorrow and find yourself overcome with the urgent desire to piss your money down a massive drain, here, courtesy of the IKN mining blog, is a flow chart to guide you through the process of shrinking your fortune. We wish you bon chance.
My Dog is Almost an Idiot
Wheaten terriers aren’t the smartest of dogs. They fall about the middle of the pack when it comes to canine intellect. No matter. They make up for it with their looks, their unquestioning affection and their lack of aggression.
Ours failed puppy training twice. Puppy training consists of learning a handful of basic commands. Sit. Lie down. Walk. Nahhh… screw you. Meathead Doberman Pinchers passed with flying colours while ours sat in the corner picking its nose.
