Tag: Gold

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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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.

Me in Egypt. Honest.

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?

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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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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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A Few Thoughts On Optimism In Exploration

This slightly sarcastic piece was massively improved by contributions from 4 colleagues: -Brent, Owen, Neil & Mike- all of whom I’ve been lucky enough to know for years. Thanks chaps. You’ll be able to spot where I’ve used your stuff.

Optimist. noun

  1. a person who tends to be hopeful and confident about the future or the success of something. “only an eternal optimist could expect success”

Bananas

A bit like a 99-year-old man with heart failure buying green bananas, exploration geologists are optimists. We have to be. A bad case of pessimism would be a huge impediment to building a geological career that survives past the initial 5-minute interview with the VP Exploration.

A bunch of optimism

“Can I have a job please? I don’t think we’ll ever find anything, but I’ll give it a go if you pay me.”

“WTF? No. No. No. Who let you in? Piss off. I don’t need a depressed hat stand on my team. Please don’t slam the door.”

A wellness website  I picked at random for its daft name, has this to say about optimism. “(it) is a mental attitude characterized by hope and confidence in success and a positive future. Optimists … expect good things to happen….. Optimistic attitudes are linked to a number of benefits, including better coping skills, lower stress levels, better physical health, and higher persistence when pursuing goals.”  To which I’d add “poverty” if your optimism is directed at the junior mining sector, although strictly speaking that’s not really a benefit.

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Please pass the salt.

They Thought They’d Get Away With It.

Names, dates, locations have been excised from this story to protect anyone who needs protecting -yes, even the guilty parties. People and companies have come and gone since it happened, but other than that, it’s a true tail of mineral malfeasance. This piece would have failed miserably without the crucial input from 2 good industry friends. They know who they are. A big thank you to both of you.

“When markets are hot, scoundrels come out of the woodwork.” Northern Miner, June 1996

For every major gold discovery, there are dozens of failed projects. The exploration business is actually very adept at not finding viable mineral deposits. Most projects fail for want of enough tons to make an economic mine. Some may be big, but they lack the metal grade needed to justify extraction. Others fail because of local politics or remoteness. But a few, a special few, fail because they were never real in the first place. They were simply fictions created by crooked management or a scoundrel out to make a quick buck.

Field geologists actively failing to find anything in Yemen, 1990s.

The history of mining is littered with scams. The ones that happened a hundred years ago have become mining lore, acquiring a patina of wild west romanticism with time. Back then, it was a world of snake oil salesmen – Mark Twain’s liar in a hole snaring unsuspecting patsies. Fast forward to the present day, and we rightly regard more recent deceptions as criminal and decidedly unromantic. It’s worse living in Vancouver, because we – or maybe someone we know- could well have a direct personal connection with the perpetrator(s); junior mining is a small world with few places to hide if you’re found out.

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