The Urban Crows Blog

How Not to Drill A Project Pt 2

Pt 2 was originally written for my friends at the Northern Miner hence it’s not as sweary as my usual pieces. Which is a pity.

Strolling around PDAC in March, I ended up in the core shack, perusing all of the world class, upper quartile tier 1 discoveries guaranteed to become a mine one day. Tucked away at one end was Barrick’s giant Reko Diq porphyry project in western Pakistan. The photos of the parched Baluchistan desert took me back to 1997 when I spent a couple of months there, prospecting for similar systems along the Afghan border. A year later in 1998, I was involved in planning the second phase of drilling at Anglo American’s Zarshuran gold project in northern Iran and we sourced our drill rigs from Reko Diq, then owned by BHP. The first Zarshuran drill program in 1996 was a slow grinding headache, (See Part 1 here) with only 7 holes completed in 3 months. We couldn’t come to any firm conclusions about the project, so we started planning a follow up program for the summer of 1998.

Drill rigs mating — *Drill rigs making little drill rigs.*

We’d learned some tough lessons in Phase 1, and this time around we were going to be smarter. No more Iranian contractors. We’d use a modern, western-owned, truck mounted top-drive rig with 1,500ft capacity to drill the project. Hopefully we’d get to a technical go-no-go decision ahead of the complex legal work needed for a major mining investment in Iran. But multipurpose rigs didn’t exist in Iran, so we needed to find a western drill company ballsy enough to send one -along with experienced drillers- to Iran. Luckily, an Australian drill company -I’ll call them OzCo- had a suitable rig across the border in Pakistan at Reko Diq. The rig had finished its contract and OzCo wanted it earning revenue rather than sitting idle. OzCo’s drillers in Pakistan serviced the rig, stuck the rods and assorted widgets into shipping containers, loaded them onto flat beds and got ready to mobilise into Iran. All we had to do was drive it across the border at Taftan, fill in a few Iranian customs forms, and then drive it 1,900km cross country to northern Iran. Simple.

Sheep Are Idiots

Apologies for the picture quality in this piece. I can’t get the old school photos out of the old photo album -they’re stuck down firm after 40 years under a sticky plastic film, so I had to take pictures of 40 year old photos.

Reputation: Sheep are stupid, defenceless and harmless creatures that mope about on hillsides doing not very much. They are good for two things: being eaten and producing wool.

Sheep. I like them but I also think they are complete idiots. I like them because a) they’re tasty when they’re young and lamby, and b) they’ve kept me amused through many long field days, providing a welcome low-IQ distraction from having to take notes about boring grey-green rocks in a sodden note book. But they are irredeemably stupid.

Animal lovers and cuddly vegans would have us believe they’re sentient, caring, intelligent beasts capable of protracted abstract thought. For example, here’s a glowing report card I found on an animal rights website:

“One example of their amazing intelligence is that sheep are capable of recognizing all kinds of faces. They recognize sheep in their flock and are aware when these sheep are missing. They can recognize “bully” sheep and get distressed when they come around. These sheep can even recognize the person who cares for them and the sheepdog that herds them! If the appearance of another individual is altered, the sheep have no problem still identifying who it is, and they can keep track of over 50 different sheep faces! If you make a sheep mad, chances are they are going to remember you and that event for over two years! Talk about a grudge.”

Oooh. Convincing eh? But I have to ask, have these mutton-loving snowflakes ever met a sheep? Leaving aside my vague disquiet at the the thought of a crew of grudge-bearing inked-up sheep casing my house at night and mugging the dog in the back yard, I don’t buy a word of it. They also claim that sheep have decent enough memories to form friendships and they feel sad when one of the flock is hauled off to Sam The Butchers for its final date with sausage machine. But everywhere I’ve worked, except down a mine -no sheep there, funny enough- I’ve only ever seen sheep, and their close cousins goats, studiously eating grass which is not what I’d call a challenging intellectual pastime. Hence, building on decades of keen science-based observation (trust me, I’m a geologist) I’m now 100% certain that they’re not the brightest knives in the animal cutlery drawer. They’re dumb as planks and the field researchers who call them smart have never actually interacted with a real sheep in a real field trying to do something that isn’t stupid or involving grass.

A Rocky Start in Turkey*

Turkey (*now known officially as Türkiye) -a country I know fairly well and have always loved visiting- has been on my mind recently for both good and sad reasons. I’d just finished this piece when word broke about the terrible earthquake in southeast Turkey and the awful loss of life it caused. If you can, please donate to the relief effort via the Red Cross here. And thanks to my “abi” Dave C. for the photos in this piece. For the life of me I have no idea where my photos of Turkey have gone and it’s pissing me off.

Slogging up a steep forested path in northern Türkiye, I was focused on the outcrops along the side of the path, checking for signs of mineralization. It was a dry, crisp mountain morning as my Turkish colleague and I headed on up through the woods toward the tree line, crossing creeks clogged with avalanche debris. I was feeling a bit worse for wear -still on the mend after a 2-day bout of food poisoning I picked up just after I arrived in Ankara- so the walk was a welcome distraction from the aches and pains.

*The high Pontide mountains of northeast Türkiye. Dreadful place not worth visiting. Really.*

As the new boy in the field office, I was paired with a chain-smoking experienced local geologist. He was a small chap who bore an unsettling resemblance to Hassan Al-Assad, the murderous former president of Syria and I never quite shook the feeling that I was doing field work with a moonlighting genocidal dictator. He smoked a lot -a 40 a day habit- so we were permanently shrouded in a blue cloud of Marlborough smoke which put a bit of a nicotine-scented damper on the fresh forest air. He also ate very little during the day as the nicotine suppressed his appetite. I’d have to insist we stop for lunch: me, a can of tuna and packet of Ulker-brand chocolate biscuits washed down with cherry juice from a box, and him 5 more ciggies. I’d sit there munching on oily fish, praying that he didn’t commit an atrocity while my back was turned.

*The Black Sea coast of Türkiye courtesy of the googleizer.*

How Not To Drill A Project Pt 1

I was never really one for keeping a diary; I’m fundamentally too lazy, and not nearly introspective enough to sit down every day after my sausage-and-mash supper to scribble down the day’s events. I tried once when I was working in Turkey and ended up with half a dozen pages of forced, trite, verbal garbage about an ex-girlfriend that made me cringe when I read it back a few weeks later. I binned it. With hindsight, I wish I had kept at it because this blog relies largely on my rapidly fading memories of nearly 40 years in geology and mining. It’s become a sort of “hindsight diary” reliant on my decades-old impressions rather than in-the-moment detail.

The only time I did keep a regular diary, I had no idea that I was doing it. In 1996 I was sent to Iran by Anglo American to supervise a drill program at a gold project called Zarshuran in the north of the country. It didn’t go well. A perfect storm of awful rock conditions and stunningly inept drill company management had our number before we’d even started. We were doomed but we just didn’t realise it yet. The drillers were the most comical I have ever had the misfortune to hire; their lack of talent and common sense was a wonder to behold, and the managers couldn’t be trusted to sit the right way on a toilet. We only drilled 7 holes in 3 long, ball-breaking months of drilling and those holes cost us/me a whole world of pain and frustration, yielding shitty core recoveries and not enough data to make a firm decision on the future of the project.

I faxed a routine daily drill report from our camp camp back to head office in London via a dodgy satellite phone at the camp: I had to lean out of the cabin window and press on a specific point on the antenna while it was operating otherwise it wouldn’t work, and it gave up functioning all together at sub-zero temperatures. As the late Iranian summer dragged into autumn, and we were only getting 1-2m core a day, the water pipes began to freeze overnight, and my daily reports got more and more fraught before the drilling finally ground to a halt in November as winter set it. I can only imagine how much the London team dreaded the daily chronicle of desperation spewing out of the fax machine. Happily, my boss at the time (thanks Dave) had the presence of mind to a) recognise that I was documenting my own slow decline into total lunacy, and b) to keep the daily reports and bind them together into a single document; an ad hoc diary of my misadventures which was presented to me at the office Christmas party later that year in Budapest. This piece is based on the daily faxes which I still have, 25 years later.

The Beer Quarry

Of Limestone, Quarrymen and Apple Laxative

Today’s news is all thoroughly depressing. The BBC is spouting on about the war in the Ukraine. There’s ongoing chaos on Britain’s rail network. Global warming won’t bloody go away, and -more importantly- why the fuck is Gareth Southgate still picking the human bollard Harry Maguire for England’s centre back? Good God, the misery never ends. To cap it all I was locked in a hotel in Frankfurt recently for a series of dull business meetings, sustained by a diet of luke-warm frisbee-sized schnitzel and soggy potatoes. Yum.

Small wonder then if my mind drifts back to a time when the world was gentler and kinder, and life moved more slowly, unspoiled by the daily horrors of the internet. Back to a time of golden wheat fields framed by hawthorn hedgerows, of windy cliff tops with endless azure ocean views, country villages and welcoming pubs. Yes, I’m talking last July when I spent 2 weeks hiking through the glorious English countryside with not a care in the world other than where the next Cornish pastie was coming from, and could I really smell that bad after 7 hours of walking? (A. Yes.)

Gin & Geologists Don’t Mix Well.

Most earth scientists are deeply passionate about their science, treating it as a vocation -a true calling- and not just any old degree. And they tend to feel the same way about beer, applying just as much discipline and passion to the task of finding a well-pulled pint as they do to ferreting around for a nice trilobite specimen in the local quarry. I’m not sure how it is in other countries, but in Merrie Olde England all geology students possess a mental map of the country based on 2 priorities: rocks and pubs. We know which pubs to visit in any town that’s close to an important geological location, and no college field trip is complete without at least one solid session in a well-known local watering hole.

*Geologists drinking beer (good) not gin (bad)*

In my formative high-school years, pre-geology, when we wanted to get really trashed we tended to eschew beer in favour of cheap gin or vodka. And if you’ve ever had a proper gin drunk, you’ll know that’s a really stupid teenage thing to do, inevitably ending with a couple of hours crawling-on-the-bathroom-floor-begging-for-death and then a cataclysmic hangover the next day. I vaguely remember a teenage episode involving me, my friends, and a bottle of gin, followed by a long sojourn down the side of the house, where I lay on the cold path head down in a drain, talking to myself until my parents carried me in doors.

The last shift.

My last shift working as an underground geologist wasn’t planned. It just sort of happened. In October 1987, I had 1 month left on a 3-year contract in South Africa. I was looking forward to a change of scene: 3 years in Apartheid-era Transvaal was enough and I needed to get out. I was feeling disconnected from the UK and needed a London fix. I’d already applied to the University of Alberta to enrol for a master’s degree program and the signs were good that I was heading to Canada so mentally I was checked out.

I had the first 2 months of the rest-of-my-life all planned out. Young and stupid with an interest in history, I was off on a once-in-a-lifetime five-week trip backpacking around Egypt and Israel. And then it would be back to London to hang out with my girlfriend for a few months of beer, concerts, and fun! fun! fun! But first I had to negotiate the perils of the Last Shift.

There was a lot of superstition surrounding the last underground shift. People didn’t telegraph their last one; they tended to keep it quiet. No need to tempt fate and encourage the Rockburst Gods or the Demons-who-make-shit-fall-on-your-head by blabbing about how it would all soon be over, right?

WTF Is Pseudotachylite?

A Brief Science Diversion

Hands up if you’ve heard of pseudotachylite? No? Neither had I until 1984 when – as a fresh faced geology graduate- I landed my first job underground in the South African gold mines. To be honest, I’d never heard of tachylite let alone pseudotachylite. One’s real and the other a poor copy? I didn’t have a clue. Then at 21 I started a 3-year contract working down a deep hole in the Witwatersrand Basin where pseudotachylite – which I’ll call PT because I can’t be arsed to write it out every time- became part of my every day geological life.

*PT in all its glory. Photo from Kevin.*

The Wits mines exploit ancient gold-bearing gravelly rocks accumulated in a huge sedimentary basin; a 2.7 billion-year-old accumulation of what were once sandstones and conglomerates but are now metamorphic quartzites. The basin was big, possibly 300km or more along its long axis and the experts tell us it looked a little bit like the photo below. Huge fan deltas formed where 5 or 6 rivers flowed into a large depression or basin.

*South Africa looked kinda like this once…*

A Cornish BroMoon

Four sweaty men and a few pints of cider.

Two years ago, in a moment of remarkable prescience for yours truly, I had an idea. Good ideas don’t come often to me so I had to act fast. Figuring (correctly) that COVID was going to last a while, I decided I needed something to look forward to other than a) pandemic weight gain and b) the weekly Okanagan doorstep wine delivery which was becoming a little too regular and comfortable. A walking trip would be ideal I thought, but when, where and who with?

I contacted three good friends, all geologists like me, over WhatsApp.

Chaps, I said. We need to something to look forward to other than a) our pandemic weight gain b) and the weekly doorstep wine delivery.

Agreed, they said in a WhatsApp-in-unison sort of way.

So, says I, why don’t we book a walking trip in the UK for the summer of 2022? How about a week or two hiking along the Cornwall / Devon coast? If we book now we can pick the optimum window for a good old-fashioned sunburn, like mid-July to early August.

Oh yes. We’re in if you book it! they replied somewhat cryptically.

Righty ho. I replied. Will do.

*We’re leaving (hopefully) on an Air Canada jet plane*

Impressions of PDAC 2022

Line Ups, Cut Outs & Simulcasts

In this brave new COVID world, the threat of infectious diseases is everywhere. So, when Father’s Day weekend came around just post-PDAC I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I was sleeping in a partly finished bedroom, smelling slightly of ammonia, my face and hands covered with white spots. In a moment of rashness I’d told my wife -the mother of my 2 wonderful boys- I’d do anything for her so she sent me to Home Depot to buy a gallon of Pearl White Matt paint to freshen up the dreary basement bedrooms. A father’s work is never done.

PDAC is over for another year and the rigours of yet another 5 day trip to Toronto are finally behind me. It was good(ish) to get back in person to the concrete wasteland of Front Street: My colleagues and I skipped the on-line version in March 2021. Zoom fatigue was really beginning to bite so the thought of “standing” in a virtual booth for hours (which in reality meant sitting in my home office in boxers and a wrinkly shirt) waiting for e-Investors to google their way down Aisle 6 didn’t appeal.

Line Ups and More Damn Line Ups

In the week leading up to this year’s show, the Canadian press was replete with stories about the chaos at Lester Pearson airport in Toronto. Massive lines ups, lost luggage, absentee staff – CBC’s website would have us believe civilization was falling apart starting with Gate A36. Pierre Pollywotsit, the erstwhile conservative (the small c is deliberate) Prime Minister of Canada, even filmed himself striding purposefully -nay, manfully- through Lester Pearson pronouncing loudly and totally apolitically that it was the worst airport in the world. To which I can only say he’s never been to Karachi, Tehran, Newark, Leeds / Bradford, large chunks of Frankfurt airport, Manchester, Kabul and any one of a couple of hundred others. The man should get out more. Personally, I had no issues on arrival until that is we got to the baggage carousel and the de rigueur 50-minute wait for bags kicked in.

The Urban Crows Blog

How Not to Drill A Project Pt 2

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Sheep Are Idiots

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A Rocky Start in Turkey*

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How Not To Drill A Project Pt 1

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The Beer Quarry

Of Limestone, Quarrymen and Apple Laxative

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Gin & Geologists Don’t Mix Well.

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The last shift.

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