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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Exploring Communism

The Tethyan Belt Is Calling

After the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe was a rich hunting ground for mineral exploration companies. In the mid-1990s I was part of a small, enthusiastic team assembled by Anglo American PLC under the banner of its subsidiary, Minorco. Anglo essentially gave us carte blanche to conduct reconnaissance exploration along the Tethyan belt from Hungary through to Pakistan, with the odd side trip to visit other regions of interest.

Iranian village kids, late 1990s, exploring their little part of the Tethyan belt.

The Soviet-style exploration carried out under communism was pretty bloody awful. The metallogenic theories they applied were iffy to say the least, and all exploration results were regarded as state secrets. The geologists we hired told us that project information was rationed by the higher-ups, so the underlings never really got to see the whole picture – it was need-to-know stuff, and the juniors didn’t need to know. Any half-decent field geologist will tell you that you can’t explore blind with your hands tied. You have to know the target concept and the results to be able to confidently assess a project.

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How To Finance Your Mining Company. Part 1

I Love Pain.

This week I’m diving head-first into the murk, to take an unpleasant look at the slimy underbelly of the junior mining world. Yes, I’m talking about an ugly hidden world of prostitution, ritual humiliation, sadomasochism and betrayal, also known as junior mining finance.

For the last few years, trying to finance a junior ExploreCo has been a thankless task. Bumming for change outside Starbucks would’ve been more fun; at least that’s spiced up by the odd half-finished Americano and discarded smokes. No such luck in the finance world.

That’ll fund 30cm of RC

Faced with a world of apathetic investors who couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about junior miners, how do you finance your resource company? How do you pay the lifestyle salaries, the bills, and keep the lights on through the down times without the pain of actually exploring for anything? Like an old C90 cassette on repeat, we blather on about hoping to raise $500k here, $250k there, while the world spins, uncaring and increasingly oblivious to our fiscal pain.

Not sure I’d have this on endless repeat.
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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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The Ghost Train

A Tale Of Equipment Lost

Production is everything in mining. Sorry, I meant to say that safe production is everything. You can’t make money from a big hole in the ground if nothing useful is coming out of it and people are getting hurt.

Anyone who’s worked down a pit will eventually feel the pressure from higher up the food chain to produce more of whatever it is you’re mining. Sometimes the pressure will come from the stroppy, loud-mouthed chief mining engineer shouting at everyone when the mine is below quota. Or perhaps the plant head-grade will be changed constantly, necessitating closer geological control; a panicked attempt to get more ounces through the plant. I’ve experienced both.

Yup. That’s me alright.
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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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The Deep-Level Mine Geologist

Things Geologists Do. Part 2.

Earth scientists are a well-educated bunch, although we don’t always come across as clever when we’re 5 beers in to our cups. Most geologists –other than self-taught prospectors- have some form of university degree. Many of my colleagues were so enamored with the University study-drink-drink-more-study-repeat routine that they did what I did, and went back to university to earn a master’s degrees or doctorate on top of their undergrad’ degrees. Clever bunch, geologists. But eventually, assuming you have no wish to be an academic geologist or a waiter, reality bites and some sort of salaried earth science career is needed to fund the pub breaks.

A pint of beer.
I hate work but I have to fund this somehow.

In June 1984, much to my surprise, I graduated with a decent degree. A few months later I was poking forlornly around the City of London, knocking on doors and handing out a naively-bad resume to any mining company that would take it. I got my break when Anglo American interviewed me minutes after I walked into their head office looking for anyone from HR to talk to. A month later I was on a plane to Jo’burg to start a 3-year contract as a mine geologist in the deep-level gold mines in what was then the Western Transvaal (now Gauteng Province). After 2 days in the city signing paperwork, I was shipped off to the small mining town of Orkney, where I was billeted in the single mineworkers hostel and unceremoniously thrown into the deep end as a shaft geologist on Vaal Reefs 5 Shaft.

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