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