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

Slacking and Slacklining

So here we go - week three and I'm already slacking with the blog posts!

It's got nothing to do with the fact that I've been far too busy to post anything - it's that there's NOTHING going on!

Last Thursday 4 new geotechs arrived on site. There was barely enough work to do for the 4 of us geotechs last week, and now there's more geotechs and even less work!

This afternoon the geotechs were sent out to get a geological rundown of the area from one of the geos, and then afterwards spent a good 3 hours reading papers that have been published on the geochemistry, structural geology, economic deposit, and tectonic history of the area.

Not to say all that isn't interesting, but it makes the days go by at snail speed.

To keep things interesting, though, one of the drillers has brought up a slackline and set it up between two trees down in the old camp. After dinner I take my speakers down, hang out, practice my balancing, and have fun! The drillers finish their shift at 7pm so I usually have a good hour after dinner to keep it to myself.

It's really hard! It's like balancing on a dynamic tightrope that keeps moving. Your legs end up wobbling and you're constantly trying to compensate for whichever direction you end up swaying.

I've been doing my best to practice every night since I started (4 days ago), and I'm slowly getting better. Tonight, I was actually able to walk 3 steps without falling! (it's harder than it sounds, I promise). It's good for your core and your legs, as well as really good for balance. They're super easy to set up (all you need is two trees and the slackline) and great for socializing. I think I'll treat myself to one as a grad gift when I get home from this break!

My goal for the end of the field season is to be able to walk between the two trees without holding onto anything and without falling!

Let's see how she goes...

How do we know the toothbrush was invented by someone from Mayo?

...Because if it were invented anywhere else it would have been called a teethbrush....

It's almost hit the 2 week mark (that comes up on Tuesday) and really the routine just keeps trucking along.

Wake up. Breakfast. Coreshack. Lunch. Nap. Coreshack. Dinner. Cards/movies/entertainment.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Today, though, was pretty wicked. I went up with one of the geos to go check out sites for the drill pads. The location was way up a mountain near 'Potato Hills' in the 'Shamrock Zone' of

our deposit. Tons of snow and an epic truck drive to get through before we reached our destination. It was the first time since I've been here that I've really been 'in the bush'. Sure, there was a road or two around - but these were rarely traveled as was evident by the tons of snow on the ground. We were just barely within radio contact of camp, and the road was just barely wide enough to fit the giant ford F-350 we were 'driving like we stole it'. We spent the morning trudging around in the snow, sinking in up to our thighs, rolling down hills, and enjoying mother nature's moodiness. One minute it was gorgeous and sunny out, the next it was snowing with flakes the size of golfballs. Check out the pictures below! The snow pictures were all taken on the same day. Check out the difference between super sunny group shot, and snowy miserable picture of the core boxes.

Just for some random information, the 'city' we're closest to (really just a town, or a single road) is called Mayo. It was established in the early 1900s as a river settlement and port for the Ag-Pb shipments from the Keno Mining district. In 2006 it's population was 248, and also has a big range in average temperature from summer-winter. (25deg C in summer, -30degC in winter). No more of this temperate coastal business for me! A few of the crew are locals from the area, so they have a quick trip to get back home for their breaks. When the mine opens next year, I'm sure that the Mayo community will appreciate the extra jobs.

In any case, I'm tired and need to catch some shut eye... the trek today wore me out!

Keep checking for updated photos :)

The final stake! Thankfully, we're actually ON the snow this time. Not falling IN it...

If it's hard to tell, the clock says 10:44pm.....

It's bright.. and it's not even June 21st yet!

Yikes!

Snowflakes the size of golfballs?? GO AWAY! It's spring, not winter...

To keep ourselves occupied when there's not much to do, some people in camp choose to turn the coreshack into a dutch oven (I swear I'm missing most of my nosehairs after they got burnt off), while others decide to 'hide' vests up trees.... This is the vest being planted.

Turns out Scott couldn't reach it...

The Dublin Gulch Gangsters.

This is me just playing around with my new camera trying to figure out different settings... but I think it turned out OK!

I like big butts and I cannot lie.

You other brothers can't deny....

Killing time in the core shack - I'm seriously digging Antoines striped long johns.

- C

My world in photos...

It's still fairly early in the 'getting settled' stage, but I feel pretty good about whats going on up here so far!

It's been alot of hanging around though and waiting for the drills to get going again, as 2 of them were waiting for parts/were broken when we got here. It's been pretty slow still, but I've been keeping myself busy with things like data entry, checking out drill pads, and digitizing data.

It's a slow start to the season but it'll pick up once the snow melts a bit more and more geologists and geotechs show up ready to map the area.

Below are a few more pics from the week in a nutshell. Enjoy!

The view from one of the drill pads we were scoping out today. It's ridiculously muddy up here so when we got out of the Kubota the mud was like quick sand and went halfway up to my boots! But - while we were trudging through the mud, we got to enjoy sights like this... -->

A little farther off into the distance but from the same vantage point, we get to enjoy this lovely view... Today was a gorgeous day. The sun was shining, and while it was a bit cold, it's a hell of a lot better than fog and snow.

Here's the Kubota we were driving around in to check out the drill pads. It was too muddy to take the real trucks up. For some reason they've given one of the geos a brand new GMC truck to destroy.. oh well... here we live by the rule: 'drive it like you stole it', or the alternate version 'drive it like you rented it'. Both very applicable. It's inevitable. The trucks. will. get. destroyed. It was fun...

While a few of us were scouting out the streams and rivers in the area for environmental purposes, we met the drill halfway up the hill. This is what the outside of a drill rig looks like, for those of you not familiar. You send it down, and it brings up lots of core - the same stuff found in the core shack that gets studied and logged by the geos.

Random panorama shot of our geology day, when Scott took us out and about to teach us about the local geology.

Kind of a cloudy day, but beautiful none the less. Gorgeous views of mountains in the distance, and Dublin Gulch down below.

Sooo pretty!

That's camp down below. It's capable of holding 100 people (though right now it's sitting at 39 until the permits for the rest of the camp are cleared). PS3, Wii, satellite tv, delicious food, and gold panning, all in one spot! NEWSFLASH: soon we'll be getting guitar hero/rock band or whichever one it is for PS3. Avoiding boredom is very important for us, or else we start going loopy! So really it's in their best interest to invest in a sweet PS3 game... either that or they can spend their money reimbursing us for psychiatrist fees...

Another panorama shot from Scott's mini field school.

My precious....

No, not really. Just a few guys panning for gold. I found some! Just a tiny speck though. The water was SO COLD (in case you missed the mass amounts of ice still frozen over the creek).

The wonderful core shack! This is where we spend most of our time. Checking out the core, logging it, teching it, taking bulk density measurements, and just general screwing around.

One of the 12 creeks we have to survey/photograph/take notes on for the environmental studies. We have to consider how much water is flowing through, changes (increasing/decreasing in melt), how much sediment is in the material, and if there is an ice dam blocking flow nearby. Because the drills use lots of water and we're in an area where we can potentially affect multiple streams/rivers, we have to be extra careful about what happens to the water once the drills are finished with it.

ME!

Standing in the back of the Kubota today, just on our way down for dinner (it's 6pm in this picture - SUPER BRIGHT!)

There you have it! Just a few more pictures from camp so far...

Later on I'll be posting a few more pictures with time stamps on it, so for all of you folks that aren't used to lots of daylight, you can see how bright it is up here at night time!

More new recruits get up here on the 17th, so we've got a few more days before they join us. Until then, it's just us 5 geotechs and 3 geos! Small crew, but fun....

I'll be doing my best to post at least twice a week, so keep checking back!

And here we go again!

Welcome back to my lovely field-season blog!

After 5 years of hard work, good friends, and many adventures, this is my first post where I am no longer a student! As of April 21st, I finished my last exam as an undergraduate and (thankfully) passed statistics! On June 15th I will be walking acr

oss that UVic convocation stage in my cap and

gown, getting my diploma, and relinquish the 'student' title I have held for 18 years of my life.

But enough about the past. Let's talk the present

and the future!

This summer I am working for a company called Victoria Gold Corp. My official title is 'Geotech', though the title here means something a bit different than other places. At VGC, 'geotech' is just a title given to the new recruits. I will be teching core, lining up drills, inspecting drills (guided by a geologist, of course), prospecting, mapping, and getting lots of field work in.

The reason why I chose this job was because of the dynamic nature of the work. The work itself is varied because the property is large and includes 3 stages of mineral explorati

on: prospecting/mapping (the grassroots stuff), drilling, and next year they have a section set to open as a functioning mine. It allows for quite a bit of learning in many facets of minex, and as a new graduate, that's just what I need! This property has been historically mined since the

original Yukon gold rush, and the property looks like a giant

pile of dirt. Placer mining has been

common here in recent history, and so gold panning is something many of us will be doing in our

spare time!
In other news: I live in a giant mudpit. The new camp has just been built, and we are stil

l moving in. Each of us has our own bedroom with

a bed, desk, vanity, and closet. 100-wing (the one I am in now) looks like something out of university residence. Super small, but

does the trick. 200-wing (the wing the exploration team - that's me - will be moving into soon) looks more like a room out of an ikea catalogue with dark-wood furniture and a sconce for a reading lamp! Before coming out here, it was recommended that we each bring sturdy gumboots,

as they said it was 'a bit' muddy.This afternoon we found out exactly how muddy it can get. In the morning it's not so bad

because everything is stil frozen from the night before. As the day progresses though, the permafrost starts melting and giant mudpits form all over camp.

It's going to get even muddier as the snow around here starts to melt even more.
This camp is like no camp I've been to. It's almost like a giant construction site with constant noise from the generators, people always running around doing something, and terrible food.

The trend is that people tend to GAIN wait in camp rather than lose it...go figure!

This is a panorama of 'Potato Hills' (the two big hills to the left), and the truck is what we were driving around all day today checking out drill pads for various new drill locations. We are supposed to have 3 drills running but 2 have broken

down for now and are waiting for parts.

Here we have the coreshack. This is where I'm going to be spending

lots of my time geoteching

and working with the core. The smaller building behind is the core cutting shed.

Just some pretty mountains viewable from Shamrock hills. It's afternoon so it's pretty cloudy around here.

An old-school shaker table for the old placer mining operations that littered the area. To the right are

Antoine and Adrielle, two other newbie geotechs.

In the Yukon, after a company vacates an area, the core must be left behind to maintain the record of the work that has already been done (I think I got that right? I might need to confirm that). But this core farm is all of the historical core from

earlier VGC ops as well as ops from other companies no longer working in the area.

Dirt+Water = Mudpit...

Pretty self explanatory. This is the entrance to our camp. Picture taken looking outside the entrance.

This is my hallway looking down from my room. Looking the other way isn't much different, but while these here are bedrooms, the ones going down the other end are GIS labs, medic stations, offices, and the coffee room.

Home sweet Home! It's not huge but it's about a thousand times nicer and more comfortable than the tents that everyone was sleeping in before these were built. This is the uni res-like dorms. We're going to be moving into the other wing soon (to leave the drillers in this wing so we don't disturb them - they work 7-7 shifts) and once I'm moved over there I'll post a pic of those digs.

So there's a pretty quick intro to my life at camp right now! Tomorrow starts a new day and new adventures. I'll be adding photos and videos here as time goes on so keep checking back!

-C