 It is September 1st, 2015. We are in Vancouver and the interviewer, as usual, will be William McCran. So we're just going to start with a few simple questions. So could you please state your full name? My full name is Clarence Mark Rebliatti. Rebliatti. Yes. Apologies. And your age? I'm 72. And where exactly were you born? In Lytton, British Columbia, and that's at the confluence of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers. It's a village, eh? Yes, pretty. Populations of approximately 500 people. And as a child, what did your parents do? Well, my mother was a homemaker in the traditional sense of the era. My father worked in the family general store and he ran the butcher shop side of it. But the business, they sold hardware, clothing, groceries, everything it takes to supply it to a small town. And then the family business was sold. He opened his own butcher shop. But then to add to that, he bought a cattle ranch. So he was able to supply a fair number of cattle that he needed to supply and he did that all through the war, the Second World War. And he got tired of that and he sold the ranch and sold the business and then bought some construction equipment for highway building, but not ran that for about 15 or 20 years. So there was a downturn in the economy, but he had an opportunity to join one of the large construction firms based in Vancouver who had contracts to produce specialty concrete aggregate for the Columbia River and Peace River dam systems. And then that kept him going for no more than 15 years until he retired. And you as a child, what were your past times or interests? Well, I was active, didn't read much, but I did as a younger child, rode my bike, delivered papers, went fishing down in the Thompson River and some of the other Stein kayak near Lytton, trout steelhead, spring salmon, and you could actually fish them in those days. Yeah, I did that. I had two horses, so even as a 14-year-old, we went 35 miles, so it's at 50 k's back in the coast range, stayed about 10 days or so, thought nothing of it. And as I got older and had a driver's license at 16, then we did a lot of hunting, but we did trophy hunt. We hunted to fill the freezer and it was fresh air and exercise. I climbed every mountain you can see from Lytton. Activities like that. So already an explorer. Well, a little bit of fresh air, a few adrenaline rushes. And at one point, did you develop an interest for science or in school, was that something you excelled at? Well, to be honest about school, I didn't excel in anything. It's something you did. It wasn't a priority in my life, it should have been, but it wasn't. No, I just liked the outdoors and I had a small town, so you know everybody, everybody knows you. There were a couple of kind of prospect or type followers that did it part-time that were always looking for someone just to come along, so they ran out alone and it seemed like a good idea to drive up the freezer and walk up in the mountains and prospect. I didn't really have any idea what I was doing other than maybe carrying us lunch and a jacket, but it was out. And then for fun, in February, March, when the freezer was really low, we'd go down and pan for gold just to see what we could find in here or not. Ever find anything? Well, yeah, it lit and the gold is very, very fine. They have your nuggets of the long dropped out and it's super fine. You'd lick your finger and then touch it and then you'd get a little sparkle. But it was nothing getting like fifty or a hundred flakes, but it still added up to no weight. Yeah. It was so fine. You had to do it. You'd freeze your fingers. And so after primary school, high school, what did you decide to do? Well, once I graduated from high school in Lytton, I think my mother had everything packed up and we left Lytton about the next day, moved to Vancouver, and then… Oh, it all worked out in time with your high school graduation? Yeah. My father wasn't working in Lytton anymore, he was working all over the province, so it didn't really matter where we lived. And my mother had been from Vancouver in her early days, had just more opportunities and more cultural activities, shall I say, than one movie a week at the Legion Theatre. So I came down here and then my brother, who took Geological Engineering at UBC, saw that I was at Lusens and suggested I might enjoy attending the British Columbia and Yukon Chamber Mines prospecting night school course. So that started in the fall of 63 and then went to the end of March or whatever, 64. So I figured that by then I knew everything I wanted to know about prospecting and knocked on the doors of every mining company in Vancouver for about two months, finally got hired and then in May of 64 off I went into the bush and the rest is history. How long was your class? Oh, it was two hours once a week for four months or something like that. It was probably 50% social and 50% extra learning things. But there was Dr. Harry Warren, who was very well known in the industry, was one of the lecturers and then Dr. Dirt, the Templar and the Cluette, who was a grad student at UBC at the time, but I knew him because he was a classmate of my brothers. They were both very enthusiastic speakers and very personable and that increased my level of interest in mineral exploration. You know, it was outdoors, you got paid to go hiking, you know, something you do for fun. Yeah. And you see all the wild animals and all that, this is neat for sure. And at that time was because, I mean, the mining industry can often be quite cyclical. When you were knocking on doors, was it a hard period? Were they hiring a lot? No, everybody was just waiting for the snow to melt. Okay. It was March, April, and nobody left town until May, so that's what that was. So when I was out in the bush in the summer of 64, one of the other, one of my co-workers had applied to the Hellebrae School of Mines, which was, they renamed it to the Provincial Institute of Mining, and he had applied and was rejected, couldn't have the prerequisite courses from high school, and he threw the calendar in the garbage box. I had read every novel and camp at that point, so I pulled the calendar out, read it and said, hey, that's not bad. It's a two-year course. You do one year and you only get one year left. So I sent my $20 away or whatever and applied and was accepted. So I did the two years at Hellebrae and graduated there in the spring of 66. And while I was there, a recruiter came around from Michigan Tech or Michigan Technological University. They had a mining department at Michigan Tech that was short of students and they were on the verge of, if their enrollment dropped any more, the university thing was shutting the mining department down, so I got in. But while I was in my first, they were on the quarter system there, so in the first quarter, one of the courses I had to take was a mineralogy course over in the geology department. Anyway, I found the geology department far more stimulating than the mining department designing pillars and underground coal mine versus looking for middle deposits for the daylight. So as each quarter progressed, I had signed up for one less mining course and one more geology course. Okay. So anyway, then I graduated in 69 with a bachelor's degree in geological engineering. And what would you consider your first job in that field? Well, the first summer I was in the bush, you know, line cutter, soil sampler, the camp grunt, whatever had to be done. I did it. It was a learning curve, but then I was always working with people with more experience. And so I had a summer's four months' experience before I even went to Halebury, then I worked every summer all the way through until I finished the university. First job in graduating from Michigan Tech was with what was geophysical engineering and surveys limited, but that was a tech corp company, and I was based in Bathurst, New Brunswick. Oh. So then I was... I'm from Camelton. Camelton, yeah. Right next door. But a year and a half, and then they closed that office. They offered me an opportunity to go to... I think they had an office in Shabugamo, but I was from British Columbia, and Shabugamo seemed like the wrong direction. You wanted to get back here eventually? Well, I wasn't particularly interested in going to Shabugamo. I didn't speak French, and well, I just came back. All right. Got a job with Silver Standard. That's kind of the old Silver Standard where they just shut down the Silver Standard mine up at Hazelton, where the mine's over, and they were running a number of exploration programs in the Yukon and BC, and I joined Jim McCausel and there in their Stakeen Arch program. In the summer of 1971, that led to the... We put in a discovery trench of the Red Chris deposit, though at the time, gold was still $35 an ounce, so we actually did an assay for gold, we asked for copper and silver and molybdenum, but we had a couple hundred meters of about 0.28% copper. We realized we had a broad zone. We laid out a proposed drilling program. Asarco was the joint venture partner with Silver Standard, they put up most of the money in Silver Standard around the program, but Asarco decided it didn't meet their criteria for their minimum criteria, so the project at that point didn't go ahead. Subsequently, other people picked it up and now Pearl Metals is operating a $35,000 ton of demine, and they've taken about a $2 billion ton of resource there now. So, I played a small role very early on. So could you just go through the big steps in your career and then we'll go back? Silver Standard, I joined New Connick's Canadian Exploration Limited, which was the Canadian controlled subsidiary of Consolidated Goldfields, London, England, originally founded by Cecil Rhodes. I was with them for seven years, and in 1977, working with Dr. Peter Fox, they put in the first, I'd say, the discovery drill hole on the QR deposit, which went into production. It's mined out now, small deposit, I don't remember the resource, three or four hundred thousand ounces, but it was open pit, about three grams per ton. And they consolidated their Canadian and U.S. operations into one company that was, Goldfields did. I was offered the opportunity to join their U.S. group, which I declined, and I worked for the Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation in the Exploration Division, Northern Saskatchewan. I spent a couple of years looking for uranium. I had an opportunity working with Anaconda in Vancouver, so I came back to Vancouver. I enjoyed Saskatoon very much, a great place, great weather, but it was cold in the winter, but it was bright and sunny, so less rain, more sunshine hours. Seriously. So back here. Well, then I was with Anaconda for a year, Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation opened an office, we're currently playing opening an office in Vancouver, and they invited me to rejoin them. I didn't have much interest, but they kept upping the offer. So then when it was up to about 50% higher than I was then currently making, I relented. That was great for about a year and a half, and then the Saskatchewan NDP lost election, and then the new government shut down and everything outside of Saskatchewan. But when I was in Saskatoon, I am sure I was the only employee of the Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation that had a B.C. social credit party membership. I had my membership card pinned over my desk, so it was always the far right wing versus the somewhat left wing. So it was a curiosity within the organization. Let's see. So then we were in an economic downturn. The mining industry had not fared well when the NDP had been in power in British Columbia, and I was going consulting when the SMVC job ended, but I was uncertain because they got in the game. I could see the exploration end of the business cratering, and then I had spoken to Dr. Hugh Square, who was then Selco, trying to market some of SMV's projects that I had acquired for them. And then in the process, he got back to me and offered me a job with Selco, so then I had a decision to either stay on my own or do I take what looked like a secure job. So I went with Hugh, a great fellow, a great mentor, learned a lot from him. But within one year, so that way it would have been in 1983, BP, British Petroleum Mineral Division, bought out Selco, finally ended up working for BP. And that was a whole other group of people with an order of magnitude, greater bureaucracy. I think in the Vancouver office, they were more interested in internal politics and finding minds. That lasted until January of 1986, and I was given the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere. And all of the projects that I had been involved in were put on the shelf. So after a month of, you know, like, where should I go from here? I went back to them and offered to option three of my former projects, three out of the six that I'd been running, but they turned me down and said they didn't think I had the financial wherewithal to do anything with them. So no, and I mentioned two of them that, well, you put them on the shelf, you're not financing them, so they're just going to sit there and mold. Anyway, they said no, so I went away and thought about it, so a week or two later I went back and said I would be willing to market those projects to other companies on their behalf at no cost to them. They couldn't understand that, but I went for a finder's fee. Well, I was signed off, and they went for it, and they gave me one month. So anyway, signed the paper at the office on the eighth floor, pressed ground, went down the elevator out the door, an acquaintance of mine walked by, and I said, Lauren, I have a project for you. Talked to him for about ten minutes on the sidewalk. We went back in, pressed the button to the eighth floor, cut the deal. So that was easy money. Then I had another project. It was a bit of a long shot, but I was able to link it to a good marketing story, and I marketed that one to Lornex, and that was in the real Tintel fold, a real Algon fold. That one took me about a week to market, but the one I liked the most was the Mount Milligan project, and I went to 23 companies, and it took me to, I can't remember all, but about the 28th or the 29th day of my one month that I had available before I was able to cut a deal on that one, and then from there of its history, the group that I marketed to, they ran the project themselves the first year. They were not particularly successful, and the geologists that they had hired to run their project wrote a very negative report. I was invited back as a consultant for three days to review all the data and give an opinion, and I said, well, there had been good work done, and a fair area had been eliminated, but the area that I felt was the most prospective still hadn't been touched. So I read a three-page memo or whatever, and said, but I'd like to run the project, so I was hired on as a consultant. The first, the second, and the third of my holes all hit, and that was the Mount Milligan discovery, and then, so that was 87, put those holes in, and then 87, 88, in the fall of 88 November, then the Hunter Dickinson group came in, and we had about 60 holes at that point, and then in 89 we discovered the Southern Star. Mount Milligan, if you put the two pits on them, the two pits coalesce, so it basically becomes one pit, and it's all rolled in, but they're really two separate deposits, Mount Milligan, Maine, if you like, and then the Southern Star, and then I ran that, but that was 100 people, 24-7, and as project manager you're the chief geologist, you're the project manager, you're the marriage counselor, you're the judge, the jury, pretty challenging, so I got burned out, so in May or whatever of 1990, of course I'd drill out like 720 drill holes by them, and then through the, moving more into the engineering field, and I was tired of being there, you know, another old Atco trailer night, so I stepped aside from that. This was with Hunter Dickinson, or were you still? Well, it was Continental Gold, but Continental Gold was managed by the Hunter Dickinson group, but then I knew everybody in the group, and the Hunter Dickinson group, then there was David Copeland, Ron Teeson, and Bob Hunter, they ran their own show, separate from Hunter Dickinson, Bob Hunter had his foot in both camps, but then in 1990 the two groups kind of merged full time, so I had about a month off, and then a friend of mine that I'd worked with at SNVC, was the director of a company that was broke, had some mineral claims up in the Teutagon of North-Central British Columbia, and said, Mark, the company's got some mineral claims, they're going to expire in a week, they have no money, we'll have to pay cash in lieu of doing work, and that's going to be my own personal money, and I want to know if the project is worthwhile, and he said, I want to hire you for a half hour. So I said, Jim, for a half hour, you're only going to get a yes or a no, but no technical rationale, because it's just, you know, in the consulting business, you just don't do that. Anyway, we went to the Bombay Cycle Club for lunch, but they used to call them beer parlors, and they served hamburger and fries, so he went, that was the lunch he was buying me. So we went down there, he handed me the report, yeah, he was just going to have all the regional geology, all that stuff, he skipped all that, I went to the back, we had all the assays, they had about a dozen old drill holes, I just looked at the assays, copper, gold, copper, gold, and I've been through like 700 volts a million, and then anyway, then I just closed, I didn't read any of it, I just looked at the assays, so he kept waiting for me to say something, hamburgers came, I think we had a coffee after the beer, he said, what do you think? I said, pay cash in lieu, and that was it, he said thanks, he phoned me back a couple of days later and said he had, and I said, well, you know, if I ever hear of anybody that's looking for a property of merit, let me know, let me know if you're willing to farm the project out, and I knew it'd be desperate to do that, because you put up with some money, and so, and then it's important with this property of merit, because I was consulting to the superintendent of brokers who managed the Vancouver juniors for the stock exchange in the government, and for them to raise funds, they had to have a professional engineer sign off that the property was of merit rather than just a piece of loose pasture, so I knew this project would qualify in that sense. That was almost a secret committee, the industry at large knew the committee was there, but they didn't know who the committee members were, because you could take a lot of flak if you said the property wasn't of merit, if I'm not. So you have to remain anonymous. Yeah, that was part of it, so I let a month go by, and then I phoned my friend Jim back, Jim Camine back, and said, Jim, are you sure that you're looking for somebody to come in? He said, oh yeah, he's desperate. So I went down the hall about 20 feet to Dave Copeland and Ron Teeson, said I have another mailigan for you, and by this time I had read through the report, Jim left the report with me. So you knew your yes was a good yes? Yeah, yeah, so I went through it, and I said, hey, these guys don't know what they have, the geology has been misinterpreted. Now I had had the experience to have looked at the Copper Mountain deposits, the Afton deposits, and the original Afton was all supergene, and the company that had Camus initially had only drilled into the supergene, and they used an RC rig, so they were just cuttings. This brick-red clay-like material with little flakes of native copper, and it assayed for gold, and they had no idea what it really represented, and I realized what it looked like for upper part of Afton. So we went in there, and we drilled about 50 consecutive orc-grade holes. And then from there there was the historic. The historic Camus property was actually six kilometers to the north, and we renamed it Camus North, and the new discovery which was on Camus Creek, we called it Camus South, and they're six kilometers apart. So after we got Camus South going, and we expanded our mapping up there, and we had a look at it, and said, you know, there were a couple of old holes that Kennecott had put in in the late 60s or early 70s, but they were, it was AX, you know, it's about half inch core, and core recovery is about 12%. So hey, they've demonstrated that the copper there, in this environment, there should be gold. So we went in and put in a couple of holes, and we had copper low-grade, copper and gold, but every sample topped the bottom, said, okay, we're into a system that shows great continuity. We have to work on the grades a bit, but you know, we only started in one spot, so it's a large alteration zone. So we worked on that, but probably 90% of our efforts went into Camus South, an area immediately around it, and we grabbed enough dollars to drill a few more holes whenever we could, and we had expanded Camus North from nothing up to about 150 million tons, but at that point it was still open in all directions. But then Alicandor felt that they could add more value by progressing the engineering at Camus South, so the expiration of Camus North shot down, and then in due course, Royal Oak Peggy Whitty came in, took over Alicandor, put the early efforts into getting Camus South going, but as we exited the project we wrote a report laying out a drill pattern on Camus North, about their first 10 holes or so were right on the proposed drill collars, and then they never looked back, and then they bought the geological resource or inferred resource of up to over 600 million tons, and they ran into permitting challenges on getting Camus North going. But anyway, Peggy put Camus South into production, ran into a falling copper gold market, Northgate came in, refinanced it, ran it, and that was a very successful mine that ran for eight or nine years, produced almost three million ounces of gold and several hundred million pounds of copper. That was good. And then from there I worked on the prosperity project in the caribou, that's copper gold, the casino property in the Yukon, copper gold and molybdenum, and then Daryl Johnson and Dave Jennings and I went down to look at a massive sulphide project in Mexico, Campo Morado in Guerrero State, and we then looked at it, and it was very obvious, again, the people that had it didn't really recognize the potential, not necessarily of the historical deposit that was mined just before and into the Mexican Revolution and then idle since. They didn't really realize what was there, but I'd been through Myra Falls and then I'd been to several massive sulphide mines and massive sulphide districts. And I said, hey, we have a district potential here because there are other prospects there, and so Dave Jennings and others and Hunter Dickinson Group then put together a land package. And then we went down and basically we didn't look back. We expanded the historical deposit from about 3 million tons to 10 million tons of massive sulphide, not necessarily all or great because there also were metallurgical challenges there, it was a very, very fine grain, but we went on to discover six more deposits and collectively about 50 million tons of massive sulphide. The metallurgy was, well, the combination of the metallurgy and the grade, the tougher the metallurgy, the higher the costs, and so then you need the higher grades to cover the higher costs. But anyway, in due course it went into production about 1,500 tons a day and the G9 deposit was the high enough grade to get it all going, but then into the current slump in metal prices, it's the mine shut down now, it's uneconomic, and also the social scene and drarrow has deteriorated with the cartels, drug cartels moving in, and it was a wee bit sketchy when we went in initially, but we got on very well. We had a John Arthur, Johnny Arturo, as the locals called him, had spent 20 years in Bolivia, fluent in Spanish, was just a little guy, very gregarious, and he went and talked to everybody, you know, they lived in these little mud huts, adobe huts, all already talked to them all, and so before we built a road anywhere, we'd go and talk to them and he could tell they weren't too pleased about a road going in a certain place, and I said, well, we'd be okay if we built the road on the other side, because obviously they had a marijuana plantation over there, they didn't know what road was going by, so they say, well, can you wait, we're ready to harvest, wait till we finish harvesting, so we just had to get along with them, you know, it was an hour issue, and these people were only making a few thousand dollars a year, you know, they got paid next to nothing, and they grew pole beans on the corn, and then they had squash or pumpkins growing underneath, and that was their only income, and at one point we had about almost a hundred of them working, line cutting, soil sampling, helping with the surveyors, and we had a lot of ladies working on the camp, assisting the cooks and looking housekeeping, you know, those types of chores, so we brought a lot of employment there, so we're very pleased, and then of course Hunter Dickinson Group was always looking for the next project, and then they went from one company to three companies to five companies, so there were more companies to feed with new projects, but a lot of time, now looking at projects, Alaska, BC, the lower 48, and then through Central America and all over South America, and but one project that kept popping up on the radar screen was Cominco, well it was Cominco then, but then initially the Tech Cominco, now it was a project they called Pebble Beach, because it was kind of Tundra, Rolling Hills, it's like a golf course, okay, and it's Pebble Beach in California. We looked at it, I was first became aware of it in 1990, and it was kind of always one of interest, and whenever we had a meeting discussed, you know, where, what should we look at next, where should we go, it would come up, a couple approaches were made to Tech, they, well Tech Cominco at that time, they weren't interested then around 2001, 2002, they said well we will entertain and often, see we had, the Hunter Dickinson group had picked up the prosperity project from Cominco, and they had done quite well in that, and so anyway, Bob Dickinson, Ron Dees, and negotiated an agreement with Pebble, and then I think 72, we did a small program, geochemistry, geophysics, a few drill holes, and then in 73 we started drilling in earnest, and we basically didn't look back, with Pebble about 60%, see Cominco had done about a hundred drill holes at that point, but about 60% of those holes bottomed in about 0.3 copper equivalent, you take the value of the copper or the gold in the molybdenum, convert it to dollars and then convert it back into copper, okay, so that's copper equivalent, it's a little more complicated than that, but that's the overview, so that's 60% of the holes bottomed in 0.3 or better, but 30% of the holes bottomed in 0.6 copper equivalent or better, and what's the cutoff, like what's, well you know copper prices, but you'd want about 0.2 copper, copper or better, and so with Pebble, if you had 0.2 copper, you'd probably be in the 0.3 copper equivalent range, and so Cominco had roughed out a non-43-101 compliant inferred resource of approximately a billion tons, well by the end of 2004 we had increased that to four billion tons, okay, at that point in December of 2003, well in 2003 I went and looked at a couple of porphy prospects in China, and I heard about one in Tibet, so in December of 2003 I went to Tibet and looked at it, but I was doing Pebble, so it was just a quick trip over and back, and I recommended the Hunter-Dixon's and acquire the Tibetan porphy, well it was it was epitherm, it was an epithermal prospect with a copper occurrence on the other side of the mountain, anyway I said it's great big alterations, so it looks interesting, we should try and kind of deal on it, so it was back to back to Pebble, then we, that was for the December of 2003, so in 2004 we saw that Pebble was absolutely wide open, and that the intensity of the alteration was increasing going to the east, the court stock work was becoming more intense going to the east, the grades of all three metals were increasing to the east, so I recommended we drill, the mining engineers said we have four billion tons, that's enough for 40 years, we don't need anymore, and then I was over in China getting that project, over in Tibet, getting that project going, and at a board meeting they made a decision that they wouldn't drill outside of the proposed pit, I'm saying it's getting better and better going to the east, so anyway the directive came down, no drill holes beyond the outside edge of the pit, so I puzzled over that for a week or two, so anyway I had a drill come free and would just say this is the outside of the pit, I stepped back about 15 meters, drilled a hole 60 degrees outwards, but I had the drill inside the pit, when I had about 400 meters of good ore grade mineralization, I had a second drill come free, so I moved it over 400 meters and did the same thing, and so when the second hole was about halfway down, the first drill rig was finished its hole, then I had a third rig come up, did the same thing again, then I told Bob Dickinson what I've done, but by then I knew we had it in a bag, I read about that, yeah, whatever it was, you know, 800 plus 830 meters of 1.48% copper, over 800 meters, way better, so it was like, you know, over a half a mile. Wow, and what was the real reason they didn't want to expand? Oh, they had 40 years of resource, but I said, well, how do you know where to put your plant? You may put the plant on top of the rest of the deposit, and it turned out, so we added six billion tons, and about four billion tons was about twice the grade of the earliest four billion tons, and so what is there's, what are 107 million ounces of contained gold, 80, 85 billion pounds of copper, and six or seven billion pounds of molly, and lots of silver. Oh, anyway, did that, okay, so I was doing that, but at the same time I had the project going in Tibet, and we did mapping and sampling in 2004 to figure out what's going on, started drilling in 2005, in 2005, 2006, and 2007, and each year we added two million ounces of gold and a billion pounds of copper, so in three years we had six million ounces of gold and three billion pounds of copper, and then the group exited, Tibet and China at that point, sold out to a Chinese company. Okay, so how many companies does Hunter Dickinson manage now? They have about 10, some are more active than others. Biggest than they've ever been, or? Yes. And are you still, do you still work full-time, or retired, or? This year I'm on call, I'm a living archive, Mark, what happened in 97, such a such a place. Last year I worked about two days a week, averaged over the year, I had weeks that I happily did nothing, and then I'd work a week or ten days straight. As came up the year before, I worked three days a week, but before that I worked full-time. Okay. This would be my 51st year in the industry, so it's, you know, time to slow down. Yeah, for sure, but it's a recurring theme in these interviews, is everybody seems to, yeah, slow down, but never exit the game. It's an addiction, and it's exciting, you're in the front end. You go places no one's ever been before, you find things that haven't been found, there's mentoring along the way, you know, I'm not going to be doing it forever. Where would you say is your favorite place you travel to for work, or most memorable place? Well, do you like the place, or did you have the most success? Both, or? Really, the tougher it is, the tougher it was, the more stories you have to tell. If it's just something on the side of the road up in the caribou, well, it's just a normal day, right? Yeah. Well, the toughest was the Solomon Islands, 100 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever it is, 38 degrees Celsius, 100% humidity, malaria, lead in mosquitoes, the other mosquitoes carry dangly fever. I did a traverse, and, you know, your body just reeks in that weather, and we're in a camp, and it was a lousy camp, and it was someone else's project, and I would do a bit of consulting on it. And anyway, it was going to be the last ace, I wanted to do a traverse up on the ridge, and it's all jungle and everything, so I go all the way up and over, and I come down, and we'd come in on our, it wasn't quite a dugout canoe, it was made out of boards, but the same shape. We'd come in off an inlet and then up a mangrove swamp to the most of a river, so I told the local guys that's where I was going to end up, you know, at noon, so I come down, and I'm right at the mouth, and it's really hot and yucky, so I've got my little pack and my clipboard and everything, and hold it over my head in the way to, right across, put it on the far bank, and the water felt pretty good, and you're so sweaty, you're so kind of wet, so I just stood there. So I'm right with a small river, big creek, whatever you want to call it, it's right where we went in the mangrove swamp, so I'm there, and I'm up to here in the water, and then 50 minutes later, when the local guys comes along, and he jumps up and down, he's yelling at me in whatever the local language is, but I could, I didn't know the words, but I knew he was telling me, like, get out of the water, get out of the water, we load the stuff in the canoe, we go 100 meters around the corner, and a saltwater crocodile slides off the bank, and first day I was just standing there, I wasn't splashing, if I had been swimming, I'm sure I would have just disappeared off the face of the earth. Wow. Anyway, there it goes. Well, that was a, it wasn't a fun job, but you know, there you go. Fun story. Good story to tell. Yeah. So that was pretty exciting, but it was a very challenging place to work. The locals had minimal education, maybe grade two, grade four, they'd never really been anywhere, and then at year, we hadn't been able to explain to them adequately well to sort out the difference between North America, South America, and the country called America. Yeah. Okay. So then you go there and you have a community meeting and you try to explain to them why you're there and what you're going to be doing, and they had no comprehension of what mining was. So that was a real challenge. And then you had to do anything you had to deal with the Chinese bureaucracy because they ran the government, but you're working in the Tibetan community. Yeah, which is already tricky. And so then the Tibetans would see that you're working with the Chinese and the Tibetans aren't so keen on the Chinese administering Tibet. Chinese were perceived to be looking down on the Tibetans and we were in the middle. So we're okay. Everything went fine, but you were never fully comfortable that they were going to continue to go fine. But anyway, we had lots of success and no incidents. And we worked out a kind of a community-wide compensation package for any disturbance of the land because they raised their cows and yaks and donkeys and goats and sheep up in the hillsides where we're building drill sites and whatnot. So anyway, we worked something out that based on the number of square meters disturbed and so they could buy alternate feed until we had a chance to replant and those sorts of things. So it went well. That was a very exciting project, but again we drilled dozens of holes one after the other in ore grade, in good grade. That was the problem. So we had about 200 million tons of about 0.6 grams of gold for 0.47 percent copper and around four grams of silver, strip ratio around one to one, starting right at surface. So that was pretty exciting. Nothing would beat pebble, but in 2005 and 2006 I had 12 to 14 drills pulling ore grade holes in Tibet and then I had six rakes pulling long, good grade intersections of pebble, all going on simultaneously. So it's hard to beat those two years. And then the next year was okay too, but every rough something out and it's just infill drilling and then that's work. Are there any dysfunctional jobs or projects that you worked on? Yeah, SMDC, the exploration division was exploration manager, nice guy. But he came out of McGill, he had been a professor, was totally academic and not practical at all and that was always a challenge. So that was probably the toughest one from that perspective. Do you have any examples of how the academic did work with the practical? They wanted these sample groundwater to identify water that had, say, higher than average uranium content and most water is virtually none. So even low concentrations would be anomalous. And then they thought, well, if you go to a groundwater emergent area, like a spring, that would work well. And they came up with the idea, well, rivers would be better because they'd be collecting the water from all the springs. But the Fond du Lac River had a fair current, well, just go out in the wintertime on the ice. Well, lake ice and river ice are quite different and the lake ice can be solid and two meters thick. The river ice is like flaky pastry or can be, especially with the currents. So it's like all ice and air bubbles. And you could just drop through it. So you could put a crew out in that and it's minus 30. And if you go through the ice and the current wash, you're gone. And then working with water when it's 20, 30, 40 below. And it went to minus 50 Celsius for five days. So that wasn't practical. And that was the extreme of the concepts. It would have been okay if we were just sitting in the office discussing it, but to try and implement it. It wasn't going to work. Did you join any organizations throughout your career? Yes. Well, in, when was it? 1971, 1972. I was eligible to join and I did join the professional engineers association of British Columbia. I had been a CI member in, when I was in Halebury in the 60s. That membership may have, but I didn't continue it, but I was busy away, whatever. But I've been a member for now out of 20 more years or whatever, whatever the records say. I remember the Society of Economic Geologists had been a member of the SME. That's a US organization. The British Columbia and Yukon Chamber of Mines, which is AMBC now. That would be it for professional organizations. I'm a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for Geoscience British Columbia. It's on the Vancouver MEG group, Mineral Exploration Group. It's informal. You go once your lifetime member. There's no dues, but organize a speaker once a month for about seven months a year. If it's a highly technical presentation, that's fine. But if Joe Prospector finds a brand new occurrence that's exciting, well, then that person may give a presentation of how he found it. And then the audience is not meant to ask tough questions. You know, you respect this. Maybe the only time this person's ever given a presentation of their lives. So you get the full cross-section there. I was involved in that in the executive for about four years. I worked from my way up from the bottom to the top of that. I'm on the review committee for APIG, so Professional Engineers and Geosciences. So if there's an applicant applies and it's turned down, they can appeal. And I'm a member of the appeal committee. So that must be interesting. Yeah, it is. Yeah, because you have people, local people, for whatever reason, maybe they didn't present themselves well. Or perhaps their application was, say, partly incomplete or not concise enough to people from other parts of the world that could have 10 or 30 years experience for whatever reason in British Columbia now. So you get to meet them all, talk to them. Now, just moving a bit more into social questions, I guess. In terms of women, how absent or present were women in the workplace? In my workplace, from 64 to about 77, there were none. When I went to university in mining engineering, physical metallurgy, geology and geological engineering, there was one girl enrolled. Okay, so I'll give you the balance there or the imbalance there. But in the late, mid to late 70s, women started enrolling in the, enrolling in the geological and, say, mining engineering, metallurgical sciences. And then they started being in the camps. They were, instead of hiring second world war veterans who had been cooks in the war, they were all getting older and retiring. And then the company started hiring, say, students in dietetics and nutrition or ladies getting their first aid certificates and cooking, because they're in the camp so that they can be first aid attended and cook at the same time. So that changed the dynamics, but it also impacted when the work was done, because Twin Otter would come in with eight barrels of fuel. You'd grab two geologists, send them down to the lakeshore and unload the fuel. Well, you couldn't grab two lady geologists in Shenandoah and just physically didn't have the strength. So that changed the dynamics in the camp. Then we had to hire other people than to do the heavy work. And you couldn't really hire any more geologists, because if you need four, you only need four, but then we had to hire people to run the camp. So it changed that. And then, of course, there was a degree of socialization that then occurred. And so very often you would have, say the boss's daughter or a daughter that was acquaintance to the boss or one of the directors come in. So they might say high school kids, 17, 18, maybe first year university, maybe the first time away. Then you got a cap of guys. And then you had the others that were 25 and 30 and whatnot. So when they're 25 and 30, they can kind of look after themselves, but the younger ones, well, then you're not their parents. You have some responsibility. Where's the line? What's your, what do you need to know? What should you know? What should you act on? And there's no lines. I mean, there's really no guides either. And then what's your business and what isn't? You know, they're in a company camp. So if anything happens to them, if they're injured or whatever, well, that's company business. So what they do on a social scene, perhaps is none of your business. So that created a bit of stress for me or others that managed the camps at that point. But now, many of the projects are about 50-50, and that's ironed out. And let's say 50-50. Pretty close. I mean, it shifts, but 30-60 or 40-60. They're always there. But we're not getting the younger kids anymore. It's just not an interesting thing for them or for you guys. The industry's changed. It's more hardcore now. You have to be able to contribute. We're not at a family employment agency, which it was more like that. You hire my son, I'll hire yours. That really isn't happening anymore. I'm not going to say zero, but it's less inclined to be. But it's softened the camps. It's softened the camps? Yeah, they're less rough. There's less swearing. There's no Playboy pictures on the walls anymore. That's gone to zero. A little more civilized. Which would encourage more participation from women if there's less Playboys on the walls. In the olden days, whatever that was, when somebody, the boss, came in the camp. We always used to bring them all with scotch. Firstly, all the camps are dry now. End of story. They're dry. Was that ever an issue when you were managing? The further north you were and the more of the northern people there were, yes, it became issues. It's actually people who aren't sober while on the job? They smuggle in a 40-pounder, and they drink the whole thing in one night. They've got fist fights and tents were coming down. Then you got to clean up in the morning, and then they're too sick to work. They've made enemies. You have to get the job done, and then you've got to iron all that out. When I did Melligan, I had a driller's helper make a derogatory comment to my first aid attendant about his perceived sexual orientation. The first aid attendant took exception to what the driller's helper sat. They kind of lingered on in the evenings in the dining hall. The first aid attendant grabs a steak knife and goes at the driller's helper who was like twice as big and five times stronger. He takes the knife away and puts it up to this guy's throat. Then just threw the knife away and told the guy to get out. I'd been in Vancouver. The flight was delayed, getting back to Prince George. It's a four-hour drive to get the camp. There was a blizzard. It's two o'clock in the morning I arrive, and here's the first aid attendant. He was on day shift walking around with a chainsaw that was running. Now, it surprised me he even got the chainsaw started. Anyway, I pulled up in front of the cookhouse where the parking space was. I said, what on earth are you doing? I'm worried. He walked around and said, well, that driller, you know, I'm going to get him. There's my first aid attendant, intending to go after the driller's helper with a chainsaw. Like the first aid attendant. Anyway, I said, well, go back to your bunk and go to bed. Oh, I'm afraid. I said, well, sleep under the kitchen table that I was doing in the morning. He won't come in the kitchen looking for you. The next morning, of course, I got to fire the guy, but now I had no first aid attendant. So then you have to get on the phone and hire any first aid attendant from the closest town, get them in, drive the guy out, talk to the drill foreman, fire the driller's helper. Now you're going to lose the shift. So you fired both people. Oh, you had to. You had zero tolerance for that stuff. But you still got to run the project. So now you lose a shift or two on the drill and productivity drops. Your overhead still continues on. And then, you know, got to fire the wrong guy sometimes because nobody would really fess up and they knew something was going on. So you'd settle for two out of three. A coat of silence. And then, yeah, the coat of silence. And then one person perhaps was or wasn't involved, but then he's got a few buddies on the crew. So when you fire him, then their buddies quit. Drama. Stuff like that. Oh, yeah. Well, it's the big of the crew. But it kept life interesting. Now, as for you, you had talked a bit about it in, especially your projects away from Canada. But if we look at Canada specifically, do you think there is a disconnect between the mining industry and their, I guess, the general population? Population. Absolutely. And how can you explain that? How do you see that? Well, most people at Vancouver have no knowledge or rephrase that. Minimal knowledge of British Columbia beyond hope. And hope is that the head of the Fraser Valley is 90, what is it, 90 miles or whatever it is, 150 kilometers up the Fraser. Well, it's the beginning of the Fraser Canyon. Then they know the Okanagan wine district and they don't know anything about the rest of the, perhaps never been to Pritch George or maybe only went through once 25 years ago. They all have cell phones. They all fly to Hawaii or Mexico for vacations. No idea where metal comes from. You don't have metal. You're a caveman. No connect whatsoever. They only hear or say the bad things. They have no idea the amount of employment, the mining and mineral exploration industry creates in Vancouver, all the lawyers doing the agreements, all the consultants working here, all the environmental analyses or environmental analyses in addition to the regular exploration analyses. Most of that's based in Vancouver. No knowledge of that whatsoever. It's exported. Any product is exported. It generates foreign currency to offset the money they spend flying on their vacations to other parts of the world. So it's a challenge. That's vastly underappreciated. Yeah. Now in terms of, I guess you've had a lot of experience and worked in many, many different places. So in your opinion, are there specific events, disasters, advancements, people that need to be mentioned when talking about the recent history of the natural resources in Canada? Well, for myself, Hugh Square was probably Dr. Hugh Square. It's a Selco VP. It was probably the person who I gained the most from a mentoring sense. Then you connect Bob Dickinson and Ron Teeson. In the earlier days, Bob Hunter and their capacity to raise funds. I went to Campo Morado and Rod says, how much money are you going to need? I said, 10 million. He says, okay, start work. Pebble, it's the same question. I said, I'll need all you can raise. So we spent a hundred, Pebble, we spent in the order of $150 million in drilling alone. Well, Dr. Harry Warren has probably began the application of chemistry to the geochemical aspect of mineral exploration. When I first ran into him in the fall of 63, he was talking about the copper content in rainbow trout livers in the Babine Lake. That lake stood out amongst other lakes. For the copper content, and of course there is bell copper and whatever the other one, just down the lake was. The perfect copper deposits and just through natural processes, some of the copper was getting into the waterways and the fish that make the critters. The copper was concentrating the livers, not to a toxic extent, but up levels high enough to be able to detect with the instrumentation that was available the day. Dr. Harry Warren received the gold medal from the British Medical Association for his pioneering work and where he'd studied the lead content of lettuce relative to the distance from the Trans-Canada Highway. So the lead growing on the side of the road had a lot of lead because all the gasoline was leaded and further away there was less and less lead. That was one of the first environmental linkages between uptake of metal in plants. That was what was recognized and he got his gold medal for that. And then since then, I had to get paid to go fishing. That was good. So I've used geochemistry very extensively, water sampling, soil sampling, TIL, and then now with the new techniques, mass spec ICP, we used to analyze for three or four elements and now we think nothing of analyzing for 50 or 55 elements. And so some only occur in trace amounts, but you had higher trace amounts and now you can pick up anomalies distant from a deposit through the use of geochemistry. Of course geophysics has improved vastly. You have Beringer and Harry Siegel and those people that pioneered the geophysical and geochemical end of the industry. Drilling has vastly improved. We probably have probably four or five times the productivity now. Since when? Since you started. The industry has been since 64. And we'll finish on a few last questions. In life, I guess we can split it in half and make it a bit easier because it's often a tough question. What are you proud of and we could say in life in general and also professionally? It's hard to separate those. Yeah, it's hard to separate those. Well, industry-wise, I've been involved in the discovery of a number and whatever the number is, eight or nine, mineral deposits and about half of those either have been developed and gone into production or in the process of permitting and moving towards production and they've created hundreds of years of personal years of employment that makes you feel good. I'm one guy passing through but when 600 miners have a job for 25 years and they're supporting the families and whatnot, that's feel good. On a personal note, I didn't think I'd get to university level and come out and have what others perceive as a successful career and I feel it was one too. Sounds like family, two children, a son and a daughter. My brother was the first of the family to get a university degree and my grandparents came to Lytton in the mid-1880s. My dad had about grade six education. My mother had grade 11. My brother was the first of the family to have a degree. My daughter graduated from university. My son got into snowboarding. Freestyle initially, half pipes were about one meter high, now they're about 10 meters high now. But he also had done ski racing as Grouse Mountain, Tai-I ski club up in Grouse. He's usually in the top 10 if there are 100 kids racing and very often on the podium. They race mostly as teams so the team would come first, not the individual races, but we always kept track of everybody's times. But anyway, they had a new coach and as he moved up to the higher levels of skiing, they had a new coach. They didn't get along. So he sold off all the high-end ski equipment that I just bought. I bought a snowboard. Then that was in high school. Then he went to school and went snowboarding. Then he signed up for one of the colleges in Vancouver and then they had a strike. Then the principal said that, well, the strike's not settled by Friday. We'll refund tuition fees. I think he was first in the line to get his refund. We had a place at Whistler. He went straight to Whistler. He worked there, ski shops, whatnot. Then he snowboarding over 100% of the rest of the time. Then he won on many of the local races or was competitive in the local races. Started a race against Craig Kelly, the godfather of snowboarding, and beat him at the Mount Baker Bank Slalom. He won the overall championship for the US amateur snowboard championships until they found out he was a Canadian. He took the cup and all the loot away from him. But anyway, he won it. Then the same spring, he won the Canadian Amateur Championships out of Calgary, someplace. Then he wanted to go on. In winning the US and the Canadian Amateur Championships, he obtained a buy and he was able to go on the World Cup circuit without having to do the North American pro-circuit. He went over to Europe. Of course, before he went, he was like, I don't have a sponsor. Dad sponsored him, but on the proviso that his goal was to be the best in the world. There's no point going for something in the middle. In his first race, there were just over 100 competitors. He came about 87th. That was in a GS, which from my perspective was good because he thought he was good at winning the Amateur Championships. He told him where he really was. Then he did whatever number of races, 10 or 15 races before Christmas. Then he wanted to come home. I said, no way I'm paying the airfare. You're going to get back. You're going to be jet lagged. Go find a place. Anyway, he bucked in with some new acquaintance of his in Switzerland. Then he continued on. But by the end of the first year, he'd worked in the second seat. The first seat is the top 15. It might be the top 16 by whatever it is. The second seat is the next. In the top seat, you go down first. If you're 15, the ruts are only created by 15 people. You're in the second seat, the most is 30 people. But if you start 80th, you need a periscope to see it through the ruts. He worked himself into the second seat. In the second season over there, fairly early on, he got a second place. He got on the podium in Burmio, Italy. Then with a couple more races, he worked in the first seat. Then he was in the World Cup series eight years before the Olympics. In those eight years, he had one year where he was second overall, not solemn GS and Super G. Then in the shoulder years of that year, he was third overall. Pretty good. His main event that he's best at was the Superdance Lawn, which would be the snowboarders equivalent to a downhill. One year, there were only three of those races. He had a first, second, and a third of those races. He podiumed in all three. When the Olympics came on, it was only going to be GS. He was not a freestyler, so those are two separate disciplines. He qualified for the GS, and the rest is history. Yeah, he won gold. Now he's back to skiing. Yeah. I was going to say, when you said he switched out of skiing, I was a bit sad, because I'm a skier. Well, he's still snowboards, but you don't want to skiing now. So, well, he snowboarded for 20 years, and then he was on snow about 200 days a year, and training all 365, more or less. So, you have enough of that. You're living on a duffel bag. Europeans can go home for the weekend. Anybody from North America, you're away. The Austrians, they were supplied with cars, physiotherapists, they had a massage, they had a tent at the edges. Sponsors are pretty good. Canadian guys are up at night filing the gouges out of their board and fixing them up, and waxing themselves, and treat guys to a room. Your sports psychologist was your roommate, sleeping overnight in early stations. Different world. You get tired of that after a while. Sure. Last question, real quick. If you were to speak to someone much younger, like a student, for example, what's the one piece of advice or life lesson you could give them? Okay, if you're going to do an geology and mineral exploration, you have to have a master's degree, and you need an entrepreneurial bent, and you have to work on that side. It's a cyclical industry, and when there's lots of jobs, students enroll by time they graduate, or at the bottom of a trough, and there's no jobs, you have to be fleet of foot, flexible, and you've got to take whatever work you can generate. The other one is, seize every opportunity to go on every mine tour you possibly can, and the best rock to look at is drill core that starts outside the deposit, enters the alteration, so it goes through the deposit, comes out the other side, because that's what you're more likely to encounter when you're doing your exploration, because you rarely ever find or grade mineralization sticking out of the ground at surface, and learn to be able to assess what has the best potential to evolve into a viable deposit. If you have an outcrop that's 30 meters square, or 30 meters square meters, and there's bare and rock all the way around it, you're not going to find the 200 or the 500 million tons you need to be viable. And that applies to all of the deposit types, and you have to learn that. Early on, I had the good fortune to realize that, and when I was a truly independent consultant, whereas Hunter Dickinson for most of the years I was an in-house consultant, so in-house versus out-of-house, I turned down a lot of jobs, where after reviewing whatever reports they had, I felt that I had virtually no chance of success, because in having coffee with people going to conventions, the geologists that everybody knew were the geologists who had been associated with discoveries, and people, good people, but had worked 10 or 30 years that had never been on a major project, only the neighbors knew who they were. And so it was a gamble to turn down work when you didn't have work, but then you wanted to be associated with success. No, I had a lot of projects that didn't work out, but the other thing is, you got to know when to throw in the towel, you got to go to your client and say, it isn't working, you need to find a new project. Any additional money you spend, you're just throwing good money after that. They don't like it, and you just hope you get paid for your last invoice. But you got to do it. You owe it to them to tell them straight up. And then the minute you realize you're working for somebody that's less than fully forthright, you have to resign. Because if you stick on and there's a fuss, it'll stick to you, even though you had no involvement at all. And again, that means you're on the street without a job, but you have to do it. Well, thank you. Okay. Anything you like that? That's enough, unless you've got the rest of the day. Yeah, and I'm good.