Tag: exploration

Speaking of Disasters…

How to screw up a presentation.

Stuck to a stained, gray padded seat in the speaking hall at yet another retail investment conference, the guy in front of you is falling asleep as the presentation on the main stage goes totally off the rails. It goes so badly wrong, dragging on for minute after endless tooth-achey minute, that you’re praying for lightning to strike and end the speaker’s misery. The irony is, the speaker kicked off by telling you that they’re going to present a very brief overview of what their company is up to -you know, just the highlights…the steaky sizzle…

A stained chair.

Bad corporate presentations are a missed opportunity for companies. The weird thing is, having paid thousands of bucks for a brief 15 minutes to pump their Tier 1 project, the way some companies present you wouldn’t think they gave a damn. Apparently, Mr CEO is doing the audience a favour by mumbling incoherently for 25 minutes, 10 minutes over their allotted time, eyes cast down at the monitor screen as their complex technical slides bludgeon the audience to a slow death. There are usually dozens of companies presenting each day, so you’d think they’d maybe want to make an effort to stand out, right?

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More Memories of Türkiye*

*the new official spelling of the country’s name.

High up in the mountains of northeast Türkiye -up where the borders of Georgia, Türkiye and Armenia meet- the terrane is alpine and rugged. The spectacular scenery is underlain by highly prospective volcanic rocks; the tell-tale rusty signs of possible sulphide mineralization scattered all over.  

The first time I went up there I was with 2 other geologists; a pleasant, easy going Turkish chappy who I’ll call Ahmed, and an annoying German one who I’ll call Harald. Harald had strong opinions about bloody everything and wasn’t shy to share them; a stark contrast to Ahmet who was happy to be learning the exploration ropes from a couple of relatively experienced geologists. He tagged cheerfully along, breaking rocks with his hammer and chucking the better ones into sample bags for assay.

The mountains of northeast Türkiye. Glorious spot.

Bloody Germans

But Harald -good old Harald, every team has one- well, he was a know-it-all who always had a better way of doing things and wouldn’t let an argument die even when his aggravated British colleague was about to give him a good Schlag in the Mund. He also refused to drive the field truck (with hindsight, perhaps a good thing) which added to my workload because as the most experienced off-road driver in the group, the long drives along forestry roads fell to me. Harald aside, I was happy enough. The geology was excellent, the pay was good and the scenery even better, when you could see it through the heavy clouds that often blanket the region.

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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.

This is why I never kept a diary.

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.

Arsenic mining at Zarshuran

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.

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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.

Painting this gave me spots

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.

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The Conference Circuit

Normal service is resumed on the Urbancrows Blog. Lucky you.

October 2021 – the last day of the New Orleans Investment Conference. After 3 long days in the Hilton hotel on Poydrass Street I was into the home stretch. One more day and I’d be heading back to Raincouver and my relentlessly leaky kitchen roof. To maintain my laser focus on the job at hand -promoting my modest silver company- I decided fuzzily through drooping eye lids that a bucket of extremely strong coffee was called for. Off I went to the coffee shop.

The Hilton on Poydras Street in NO. A design classic.

Everything was going swimmingly. I’d been in the slow-moving java line for 30 minutes, sipping from a bottle of water, propped up at an alarming angle against a counter full of herbal tea boxes, chocolate covered beans and refillable mugs. I was drifting off into a terminal coma, convinced my time at the front of the line would never come when the man in front of me finally got to the counter. Leaning in close to the perspex-walled counter he uttered the words:

“I’d like a caramel frappacino with soy milk and no caramel. My wife doesn’t like the slimy feeling of the syrup.”

I snorted, narrowly avoiding spitting iced water all over his flabby, sweat-soaked back.

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War Graves Along The Wire Road.

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) might recall a few stories about my time in western Pakistan in the late 1990s. It was bloody amazing; rough country but an extraordinary experience, except for the nasty gut bug I caught which followed me back to Budapest and then set about exhausting the local toilet paper supply.

Would I go back there? No. It’s even more nuts today than the 1990s and back then it was bloody weird, with drug runners, Taliban incursions, nuclear tests and the odd hotel bombing thrown in for good measure.

I prospected for copper on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan; the long, straight east-west stretch in northern Balochistan. It’s an arbitrary frontier created in 1893 in the depths of the Great Game between Britain and Russia, pencilled in on a map of the subcontinent by one Sir Henry Mortimer Durand GCMG, KCSI, KCIE, PC.

Sir Henry & Abdur Rahman getting ready to draw lines on a map.

Sir Mortimer Pencil Line

Sir Mortimer served as the Foreign Secretary of India from 1884 to 1894. He was a stuffy looking British civil servant in the best up-tight Victorian tradition and about as pro-Empire as you could get. His pencil line legacy -originally known as the Durand line- ran for 1,660 miles, cutting through traditional tribal territories and largely ignoring the wishes of the local savages. Its intent was to demarcate the areas of political influence between the British in India and one Abdur Rahman Khan, the Afghan Iron Emir; the man who finally united Afghanistan’s warring tribes. The line still exists although it’s now the modern border between the 2 countries and it still ignores the traditional tribal territories.

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Never Judge A Book

God, I Feel Old.

This is the second of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers. See also Arms and the Man.

I’ve finally admitted an awful truth to myself; it’s 40 years since I left high school. In my head, I’m still a spotty 17-year-old idiot, albeit one who’s wondering why he suddenly has moobs, grey hair and a large, malignant bum growth called a mortgage. Give or take the odd break for post graduate studies, I’m now 37 years into my earth science career; 37 wonderful, peripatetic years of travel, strange alcoholic drinks, and disturbing intestinal nasties.

At Grammar School, I excelled in one thing and one thing only. Mediocrity. Sports? Too skinny and uncoordinated. Academics? Nah. I was a shit study and didn’t exactly thrive in the Hogwarts-style red brick school environment I was in; my exam results made the attainment of slightly-below-average-grades look like lofty ambition. Healthy living? Nope. I smoked from 14 years old, and me and my mates were in the pub as soon as we looked old enough and had sufficient moola to buy a pint and a bag of crisps. To paraphrase the great soccer player George Best, most of my money I spent on beer, ciggies and girlfriends and the rest I wasted.

Travel. And lots of strange alcoholic drinks.
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Arms & The Man

Or, how to interview a heavily armed geologist.

This is the first of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers.

Recruiting geologists for a project is a tricky business. For all sorts of reasons, someone who comes across well in an interview can be an absolute antisocial nightmare in the field; hygiene issues, weird sexual proclivities (see Geologists Gone Bad), fucked up political or religious opinions, drugs… the list of transgressions is endless, but the end result is always the same; someone sitting alone in a corner of the cook house while everyone else plays cards and throws things at them.

A Yemeni market. Veggies not guns.

I’ve hired nose combers to work in Pakistan, Iran, and Bulgaria. The biggest success was a team of young Bulgarian geologists we hired in the mid-90s for Anglo American’s exploration office in Sofia. The 4 guys we picked have all forged decent careers in the international exploration industry. When we hired them, starting on maybe $250/month -good money in post-communist Bulgaria- they were thrilled to be working for a major mining company that wasn’t owned by a Russian oligarch. Each of the guys had a different skill set to add to our group -prospecting, logistics, drill program supervision and so on; a competent and adaptable project team that we used all over the world.

Yemen

A few years later I was back on the hiring trail again for the same company, this time working with a Turkish colleague, Yasar, to hire a small team of Yemeni geologists from the university in the capital city, Sana’a.

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Scary Creatures

ooer…

One of the joys of a career in geology is the opportunity it affords humble earth scientists to get closer to nature, David Attenborough style. Sometimes a bit too close. Here are a few stories on the nastier strains of wildlife that I’ve encountered myself, or stories that friends have told me. I’ve covered some already –tortoises, ostriches, polar bears etc.– so they won’t be rehashed here.

This list is NOT a top ten and it’s not arranged by level of threat or ability to cause painful death or injury. It’s simply a list of stuff that occurred to me after my mother-in-law (thanks Maureen) planted the idea for the post. If you have your own story, let me know via the comments.

Hairy Insect Things With Lots of Legs

Best avoided.

In the field, anything with lots of hair, a bulbous pink abdomen and more than 4 legs should be studiously avoided, which is why I’d never vote for Boris Johnson.

If you ask me, the single worst insect nightmare is the camel spider, not actually a spider and not really a scorpion either. I touched on them in an earlier blog post. Giant sandy coloured fuckers with huge jaws, they lurk all over Africa and the Middle East, lying in wait to scare the shit out of arachnophobic people like me.

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The Cherry Orchard

Every so often, I’ve been privileged to visit a project that is SO woeful that I’ve started to think mid-tour that there must be a hidden upside; something I’ve missed that everyone else can see. This one such story.

Thanks go to my colleague Polar Bear Dave for filling in the blanks and sending me his pictures from the trip.

“A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.”

Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

Every so often, I’ve been privileged to visit a project that is SO woeful that I’ve started to think mid-tour that there must be a hidden upside; something I’ve missed that everyone else can see. A trip to Morocco years back springs to mind. We were there to visit a VMS project which wasn’t. It was a small, shear zone hosted base-metal occurrence. About 600 stream sediment samples had been collected in a 10x10km concession(!) looking for more “VMS” occurrences; enough geochemistry to spot a discarded AA battery 3 miles upstream, despite the total lack of hydrothermal alteration in the country rock.

“In 20 years I’m going to a crap project in Wenatchee..ha ha ha ha etc.”

I mentioned another travesty in my last post A Few Thoughts About Optimism in Exploration. This one was blind optimism on such a grand scale that I was actually in awe of the guys showing us around. The total lack of common sense was exceeded only by the hopelessness of the project. When it was over, my colleague Dave and I drove back to Vancouver alternately stunned into total silence or engulfed in hysterical laughter at what we’d just witnessed, checking our notes to make sure it was real.

Zombies Ate My Brain!

We’d done an office review of hundreds of zombie juniors on the Venture Exchange; companies with no cash that may have had a stalled project in need of funding. The work flagged a gold project in an old mine near Wenatchee in Washington; the self-proclaimed Apple Capital of the World by the locals, who’ve obviously never been to Kent in southeast England where I grew up.

Wenatchee. It’s the apple capital of Wenatchee.
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