Mt. Haldane

This past Sunday was most definitely Sunday
Funday! Miguel, our current manager, sprung it on us late Saturday night that we were taking the next day to go hike the local peak. It was
absolutely gorgeous, with about 5km distance and 800m elevation. We got an early start to the day, leaving camp by 7am with lunches, water, warm clothing, and sturdy boots in tow. The drive to the base (Halfway Lakes) was about 1.5hr, but most of us snoozed in the back.

The way up was really cold and windy with sporadic rain bursts (and even a bit of hail/snow).

Once we got to the top, however, it was nothing but gorgeous sunshine! We enjoying our lunches

at the peak and did some trundling into the bowl below. Super fun! At the peak there's a tin box with a notebook to sign your name when you get to the top. I was happy to see within 2 pages 5

different people that I knew from University! UVic sure does represent here in the Yukon.

If you're ever in the Mayo/Halfway Lakes area and if you are adventurous with a solid pair of

hiking boots, I highly recommend this hike! I would put it at a moderate level of difficulty, though you can upgrade that to intense if you choose to continue past the peak to the firetower on the next peak over. That is an additional 3 hour hike. It took us about 3.5-4 hours to just get to the top of the mountain, and about 2.5h to get back down. It's a full day hike, and we didn't get back to camp until 8pm, but it was well worth it.

Many thanks to Miguel who took his 5 remaining ladies from the exploration team for a great day out in the fresh air and out of the core shack!

Miguel and his ladies at the peak.

(L->R: Miguel, Helena, Adrielle, Me, Krystle, Jenn)

View of the peak from the saddle. This was on the way down after the weather had turned from cold and cloudy to gorgeous and sunny!

One of the boulder slopes we had to scramble up to get to the peak. I was on my way down to the saddle being careful not to lose my footing!

Me at the peak with Keno City behind me.

Oops... a bit overdue!

Since I've been back on my break, work and recovery have been keeping me busy!

I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to post recently, but recovering from Dawson City Music Fest took a bit longer than I had anticipated. I had a fantastic time dancing the night away and meeting tons of new people.

After spending 3 days in Whitehorse getting some shopping and reconditioning my liver, Helena and I headed up to Dawson. We stayed there together for 4 days, after which she left to head back to camp and I stuck around to attempt a road trip to the Arctic Circle with some new friends I had made. Here is the movie that I made that documents our attempted roadtrip. We unfortunately broke down 300km into the Dempster highway (which is a brutal, unpaved, pot-holed highway not meant for a small car). It was a great adventure though... I definitely felt like I re-caught the travel bug. The ability to go anywhere and see anything with new friends in a new place reignited my love for travel. I am in the process of buying my ticket to Kathmandu for late November so here's to seeing more places!!

I'll update you on camp life again in a few days - I'm supposed to be doing data entry right now so I'm being sneaky sneaky (I should get back to that...)

-C

Uncharted territory...

A week or so ago, one of the geos accepted another job so that he could stay closer to home. I was sad to see him leave, but secretly pretty excited that a geo-void had been left. This means that a few of the many (and I mean many - we could probably do with 1/2 the number we have) geotechs floating around site would most likely be trained up to learn how to 'log core'.

Logging core is a very important skill necessary when working in the mining and exploration industry. It involves careful and detailed study of the core that comes from the drills, keeping a keen eye out for various sulphides (pyrite, arsenopyrite, sphalerite, molybdenite, or potentially even small amounts of visible gold). Various types of alteration (oxide, clay, chlorite, sericite, and silica) are ranked on a 0-5 scale based on intensity. Veins must be measured and recorded, any fracture angles, and other vital pieces of info must be recorded to accurately describe the rock.

Myself and one other geotech (the one who worked here last year) have been chosen to get trained up to log core on a semi-regular basis. I finished the tail end of a hole yesterday, and today I started my very own! It's 26 boxes (which represents about 100m) and it's MINE ALLL MINE!!!! muah ha ha haaaaa

I'm pretty excited to get the experience. Even though I'll be in the core shack until I leave for break (4 days...eeek!) I'll be asking lots of questions and making sure I do it right!

Also, one of the core cutters has decided to leave to go start playing football, so we're getting trained to cut core, too! The core that I have tech'd, logged, and sampled is now getting CUT by me. We cut it in half lengthwise with a giant diamond-blade rock saw. It's pretty mindless work but just one more thing to add to my resume and experience! I was taught how to do it yesterday and it turns out I was better than the other guys getting trained up!

Core Cutting: one of my hidden talents.. (?)

Lots of new things to learn, lots of new skills to work on, and lots more stuff to do!

Hooray!

I'm off on break as of Wednesday, so I probably won't be able to post again until I'm back on the 21st. When I do that though it might just be on my new iPad2!!! Yaaaaaaay!

Until then!

-Char

Definition: Geologist

Just a little tidbit I thought I would share with you all to give you a better idea of what a "Geologist" really is.

Here is a snippet from Uncyclopedia.org. Click here to see the full article (pay close attention to "Geologists and Alcohol")

"Geologists are 'scientists' with unnatural obsessions with beer and rocks. Often too intelligent to do monotonous sciences like biology, chemistry, or physics, geologists devote their time to mud-worrying, volcano poking, fault finding, bouldering, dust-collecting, and high-risk colouring. One of the main difficulties in communicating with geologists is their belief that a million years is a short amount of time and their heads are harder than rocks. Consequently, such abstract concepts as "Tuesday Morning" and Lunchtime are completely beyond their comprehension. (This difficulty generates problems particularly when dealing with the girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse and attempting to explain why you were "gone for so long" or why something is taking "so long to occur.")"

... I highly recommend reading the full article. So... DO IT! :-)

11 days until I'm on break for the second time, heading up to Dawson City for the DCMF with one of the Geos from camp here. It's going to be a wicked time with lots of friends, some hitchhiking, couch surfing, and copious amounts of drinking!

Ahhh break - I'm looking forward to it already and I've only been back here for 12 days!

-C

Back In Action!

18 days of sheer joy and now I'm back to working hard in the bush!

My break was absolutely phenomenal. A weekend at the cabin with friends, a week of graduation celebration with family, and more good memories and things to be thankful for than a girl could imagine! Playoffs, swimming in the ocean, receiving my diploma (cap'n'gown!), and in-town and out of town relatives all made the celebrations that much more special. A HUGE thanks to my fam for the love and support you've given me through my edumacations (I spelled that correctly, right?) over the last 18 years. You rock! (snickers the geologist).

Anyways - now that I've been back in camp for almost a week it's been nice that we've been keeping busy. The day that I got back was the summer solstice party. The crew had a minigolf tournament with each crew creating their own hole. I arrived just as the last crew had finished playing, but just before the bonfire was lit and the party started. People were up and around until 4 or 5 am because the sun just DID NOT set! It was weird, I tell you.

3 days in, my second stint in the chopper started. First day was sweet - I got a wicked crew drawn out of a hat and we had some good property to cover. We hiked up a huge mountain and waited for the chopper at the top. It's the second day that the coolest thing happened.

My team and I got stuck in the middle of a huge thunder and lightening storm on the very peak of a mountain, and we had to wait about 1.5 hours for the chopper to come pick us up. Chris (our chopper pilot) explained that the chopper itself has a charge, and if it flew through a storm it would most definitely become a target for the lightening bolts. That's something I definitely didn't want to happen. I was totally cool with waiting the storm out and then getting picked up later on, even if I was a little cold and wet.

While we were flying back we started guessing what would happen if the chopper DID get struck by lightening (there's still dark black clouds looming at this point and thunder off in the distance so it was a fairly close reality). Chris guessed that the engine would be blitzed and the instruments on the panel would be totally fried.

A good thing about choppers though is that if the engine stops mid flight, the rotors up top 'auto-rotate'. The top rotor blades are still able to turn on their own and Even when going down with no power, the chopper isn't like a bird getting shot out of the air... It's still possible to bring the chopper down but you'd definitely have to find a place to land pronto.

It was Chris's idea to show us what it would feel like if the engines cut.

Now: don't panic. He didn't turn the engine off totally. He just stopped giving it juice. So instead of being propelled in the air, the chopper bounced down a bit and started descending fairly rapidly. I would compare it to a pretty sweet roller coaster except for on a coaster you know you're attached to something!

We fell for about 5 seconds, which is actually a long time when you're flying just over the tree tops of the hills. My stomach flip-flopped a few times but as soon as Chris got us back to normal flying, I felt better and my adrenaline was pumping!

Ohhhh boy.....So, panic aside: The engine wasn't actually cut - there was just no juice (like putting a car into Neutral while driving), and we didn't free fall for very long (but it was SO COOL!), and the pilot was in total control the whole time. BUT. I felt what it was like to drop in a chopper.

I love my job!!!

This post is a bit excessive, so I'll end it here! Until next time <3

-C

x

I'm going home!

Ahhh...

4 weeks in and I'm getting ready to head home for the end of my first rotation tomorrow.

By the end of the day, I'll be sitting pretty on my sisters deck sipping either an ice cold beer or a very strong ceasar. Either way I will be in HEAVEN!

It's nice to have actual scheduled breaks. Last summer I was able to pick one time to have a break and I was given 10 days off all summer. This year it's very regular with a rotation of 4 weeks on, 10 days off. It's great! (this time though I get a huge 18 days off!)

My convocation is June 15th and I have family visiting from the USA so I know it'll be a fantastic break. I just hope it goes by reeeeeally slowly!

Until next time <3

-C

The Chopper's here!

Four days ago I heard a faint chugga-chugga off in the distance... I dropped the power washer and looked up to the sky to see the chopper finally arrive! I grabbed my vest, ran to the landing pad (that I had made with 5 cans of fluorescent orange spray paint) and watched it land for the first time.

We'd been waiting for 3 days for it to arrive, but bad weather had delayed it for a little bit.

So far we've been working in remote places for about 4 days now... but they're not really that remote. Eventually, later on in the summer, our mapping sites are going to be 10s of kms away from where we are now. At the moment, the chopper ride to out farthest destination has been only 5 minutes long. Before the chopper got here, a crew of us hiked for 7 hours up to the trench that we were supposed to be mapping... it was a far cry from the simple 5 minute jump with the chopper (albeit the chopper was I'm sure far more expensive...)

It's a total thrill! We've been briefed on all the safety stuff and we know the basics of what to do and what not to do. It's still fun getting that feeling of lifting straight up into the air - very different from the landing and takeoff of an airplane.

It's my first summer working with a chopper, and tomorrow we all get to go on helicopter tours of the whole property during the day!

Just to give you a taste of the kind of chopper that we're using, here's a little clip of two of my coworkers hopping off at our meeting point, the peak of the ridge we have spent the last 2 days mapping.

My first rotation finishes on Friday, so I'll be nice and cozy with my sister and her fam on Friday night.... oh boy I can't wait! <3 <3