Category Archives: Prospecting

“If I fall into that lot I’ll get badly hurt”, I warned myself, as I came to and looked down from the top of the cliff into the tangle of evil Devil’s Club lurking pointedly below.  

A time there was, 40 years ago, when two-way radio was the only way to communicate in remote places.   Life in mineral and geotechnical exploration bush camps – fancy with wood floors/canned oysters for snacks/carpentered loos; or more commonly: … Continue reading →

All professional folk have their favorite tools. 40 years ago I was besotted with my Ox Head. Nowadays the tools of choice seems to be GPS units, IPhones and Blackberry PDAs, and blueberry-flashing ear pieces.

It was early summer, 1969 and I was flying with our chopper pilot to our next project site in Ontario. Below, we spotted the rest of the crew in our huge International Harvester crew cab truck (adorned with its characteristic … Continue reading →

1969: summer evenings at bush camps in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba were long and lazy. And if the helicopter or geophysical instrumentation was acting up, the Scintrex geophysics crew I was a part of played. There was little to do … Continue reading →

It was summer, 1970 and I was a member of a Scintrex crew comissioned to fly a geophysical exploration survey in the North West Territories of Arctic Canada. We were based at tiny Repulse Bay, an Inuit hamlet on the … Continue reading →

In late 1970 I joined a European mining company prospecting in northern Ontario, leading a ground geophysical exploration crew of Quebecois men. These men rarely spoke English so I had to get by on schoolboy French. There were four or … Continue reading →

In 1969 and 1970 I was a data man and occasional navigator of an airborne geophysics crew, working for Siegel Associates (Scintrex) in northern Canada. The aircraft were either Bell Jet Ranger 206B helicopters or a de Havilland Otter float/wheeled … Continue reading →

My first job with Siegel Associates (later, Scintrex) was as a data man on one of the firm’s helicopter geophysics crews. Everything I did as a dataman was new for me -I had not a clue as to geophysics was … Continue reading →