25 April 2007
Keno Hill

The house is now finished with hot and cold running toilets and showers - just as I am about to leave. Hope my room, furnished with scrounged bits and pieces, will still be available for me when I get back - I put the word in to the camp manager so here's hoping.

Well, it looked as if winter was finished with warm weather and meltwater running - so it was a little bit of a shock to wake up this morning to see about 10cm of fresh snow that had snuck in during the night.

I am tidying up and packing ready for the run home. First break and will be home from Sunday 29th until Wednesday 16 May.

Have a bunch of maps to run into Whitehorse for scanning and you can see where they come from - a collection of completely unsorted, undated, multibly copied geology and mine drawings that have resided in a concrete vault, where a heater runs all the time, some from the 1960's.

I have now got a good handle on what I have to do when I get back and it will be a lot of computing and some field work and then maybe we can sort this little pile of rocks out and find some more silver. There will be four drill rigs working by then and with each one getting about 60m drilling every 24 hours, this core shed will be overflowing. Glad not to be logging core anymore these years.

So........

See you in kiwi soon.

21 April 2007
still at Keno Hill

Sunrise on Mt Haldene
from the camp - looks like it will be a good day out there!

&

Dinner from the deck - it did turn out to be a good day

18 April 2007 ,

Keno Hill

Well the week of intermittent snow seems to have passed with a couple of relatively warm sunny days and a lot of water starting to run on the slopes. The ground will still be frozen so it just pretty much spreads out. It was still -6 degrees this morning but it is shirt ang light jacket outside in the sun during the day, even though there is still a lot of snow around. Drove up the hill to check the conditions for drilling - glad not to be a driller!

The pussy willows are starting to pop
Theres big white snoeshoe bunnies hopping about in the snow
The first birds have emerged or returned from wherever thay might have gone.
And i hear reports of mooses wandering about.

I've been spending my days poring through piles of old geology and mine maps trying to decide on what is the most upto date version (they are from 1960's to 1980's) in order to find useful stuff - to get it scanned - to digitise it into new maps - and to try and make some sense of it - in order to find the new mine - that may or may not be out there.

It is getting dark about 11pm and light at 5.30am so portent for the long days to come! Might have to buy a curtain for my room soon.

Catch you later

13 April 2007

The few days of thawing have reversed their trend and it is now back below zero most of the day and there have been snow flurries off and on. But keeping warm from the excess computer heat being generated by either mechanical or frustration levels.

Have finally got some routines established, set up an office space and moved fom the bunkhouse to one of the old mine buildings that has been renovated - very comfortable, well it will be once the water is connected - cold temperatures may have something to do with this aspect of the work getting completed.

Really not a lot of newsy sort of news to report today. It seems particularly so since I have the Skype working and can talk to Lynne every day and get all the family dramas blow by blow !

Outdoors it ranges between crunchy and sloppy to go walking on the road and as I found out trying to take a photo, the snow in the bushes is very soft and not good to venture into.

One squirrel, one wolf and one fox is the wildlife to date.
And pussy willows are budding up little velvet puffballs.

Thought I would at least add in a couple of new photos - so catch you later.

5 April, 2007
Whitehorse

of course

a view from the air and
a view from the hotel room

not your average sort of resort town

6 April
Easter Friday
and all the shops were open in Whitehorse
Government offices are closed today but not on Monday.

So I drove the about 500km to Keno Hill Camp, at what was once known as the mining town of Elsa just 15km south of Keno City (remember: population 13 - might be smaller by now).



High grey cloudy overcast kind of day but the snow flurries had stopped and the sealed roads were mostly clear and dry. Travelled by the Yukon River and stopped to view the Five Fingers Rapids - not that there was any rapiding going on - at least above the ice - and there were no paddle steamers going up them.

The last 50km north of Mayo is a gravel road and here there was still some snow cover. I am driving a truck that has a little thermometer embedded in the rear mirror so I noted that over the 5 - 6 hour trip that the temperature ranged from minus 4 degrees plus 4 degrees, and I am told that it has been the warmest day at Keno yet - and they are talking about the "break up" having started, and I must have brought it. Good - I don't need any twenty below sort of stuff.

A quick look around confirms that there won't be any field work done this trip, since there is still at least a metre of the white stuff out there in the bushes. But there are two drill rigs on the go.

The camp has some outside appearance changes with a new kitchen/dining room in construction and changes to the core logging place - these are running a month behind schedule because of the very cold winter they have had, but otherwise everything else looks, feels much like it was when I was here in October.

I am asking why am I even here, it wasn't just to swap rooms and get one with a view.
Will keep you posted.

4 April 2007
Vancouver to Whitehorse

The clear skies of the past 2 days evaporated and it was cloudy with some rain showers in Vancouver this morning. Digging deeper I have learned that the 2 good days I had there were the first in about 3 weeks - so I was lucky to have had that walk down Commercial Drive.

Today was facing the reality of a corporate expectation of what work has to be done, before the flight to Whitehorse. Southern Yukon looked a mountainous sea of ice and snow that stretched for as far as the eye could see. Frozen lakes flowed from the glaciers that ponded in the cirques and barely a trace of man from 10,000m above. And the Yukon River is frozen over as evidenced by the snowmobile tracks that criss-cross it

It was about minus 2 degrees when I landed but it did not seem that cold. At 10pm it was still light and it was strange to see piles of snow - islands in the main street of town - as I emerged from a warm cafe and a glass of BC wine with an Alaskan halibut dinner.

Hey I have a couple of days here,
so keep you posted.

3 April 2007
Vancouver

It was a silvery full moon over the western states on the flight to Vancouver and the morning revealed a fresh dusting of snow on the north Vancouver mountains and bought home the fact that summer hasn't yet arrived in Canada.

A call to Keno confirmed this, with reports of it being minus 20 degrees there. This reinforced my need to visit an outfitters and get some warm boots - and since they are rated to minus 50 I think the pinkies at least shall stay warm. Needless I also got some doubly insulated gloves and a polarfleece hat at the same time. Otherwise I hope that I have enough layers in my bag - that includes the old down jacket originally purchased in Alaska way back when, but today I might not be able to get quite so many layers under it as I did then.


I have enjoyed two days of beautiful sunny spring weather and the blossoms are out all over town. Have done lots of walking and reminded myself what a beautiful place is when it is not raining - as it seemed to do every time I was here last year. It has been a little different not to have Aaron, Kerry and the Monkey here, especially as I walked past their old haunts on Commercial Drive this afternoon.

The city keeps growing steel and glass towers, and I am reminded from walking downtown that the Canadians are in general a pretty ordinary looking lot, even though it seems that at least 50% of them are of asian ethnicity, 1% of them are bums and homeless pushing shopping trolleys of cardboard boxes and pickings from the garbage bins or are begging on the street corners, and I guess the others are all in the glass towers since they certainly were not on the bus I took down Broadway.



Tomorrow the Yukon !

Al