Condition Purple

If it weren’t for all of the snow and lack of trees I would think that we were in the heart of Borneo. It may sound odd but at times it feels as if we are surrounded on all sides by dense foliage and listening for the strange calls in the trees. The monkeys abound, even if you can’t see them you are constantly aware of their presence because of the tell tale evidence.

We are now a full week in with the whole crew, 17 people in total, and we have a grand total of 1 hole in the ground to show for all of our efforts. The drillers arrived last Thursday and then spent the next few days digging the drill out of its winter confines and then determining what they had in front of them.

Here is what they discovered:

No inventory
No functioning spare parts
No tools
No time sheets, which might not have been too much of a big deal because…
They had no clue what they were being paid.

Fortunately they are a good hard working lot, they persevered to get the rig started up and ready to drag out to the first set up and along the way the bastard fell of the skids because the gibbons that left it “assembled” at the end of last season decided no to secure it to its skids. Then when all seemed rosy the hydraulics went for a shitter just at the end of the hole, so rather than risking having issues like we did the previous field season, the drill head office told the boys to stop all further work until new parts and a mechanic could get into camp to put everything together properly… Which of course takes time; stand by time, and who is going to be paying for that.

It would seem that down there at the drill office in Flin Flon, orangutans staff the shipping department. They are fully aware that there are important parts to send to camp, in Rankin Inlet, so they figured the best way to get them to us was to send them to Thompson “Hold for pick-up” and hope that someone would know how to get them to us. Well being that we are 500+ miles from Thompson , it was not looking good. Fortunately we have a pretty good zookeeper (expeditor) down there that was wondering the same thing.

Then there are the baboons that put this camp together, I have mentioned that they worked ridiculously hard given the circumstances but they certainly weren’t thinking very long term when they got everything sorted. First off there was the back-up generator, just big enough to power the office and a couple of fridges should my girl act up again. Well as soon as the big girl was up and running they just forgot about the little power unit. It wasn’t until they were just about out the door that it was revealed that our back-up power source was encased in 6ft of snow and ice.
I don’t even want go too deep into detail about the tarps on all the tents that might as well have been held on with thumb-tacs considering how little time it took for them to be ripped from the roofs during the first decent blow since they were attached.

Pass the bananas!!

Which brings us now to poor old George our cook’s helper, I mentioned him earlier and last year I documented just a couple of days of his escapades last year . Things were going pretty good for George up until last night. When not helping out in the kitchen he works on his carvings, and lately he has been offering a trade of a “shot” for a carving. One of our drillers took him up on the deal and one mickey of rye later poor George was howling at the moon and firing up one of the snow machines at 1am ready to light off for Rankin.


Unfortunately for George he didn’t make it too far, as well as being a little polluted it seems that the light may have been a little flat during the night, because he didn’t see the snow-bank that stopped him dead in his tracks…

The snow bank was only eight feet high on the other side of a trough dug out by the cat two weeks before. George lit into that thing at full speed; the tracks didn’t even hit the ground before he hit that wall of snow. The only evidence of his attempted escape apart from the 550 Polaris augured into the snow was a bottle of Gatorade, a jar of peanut butter, a bag of crackers and his towel left scattered at the scene, that and a little pool of blood.

George didn’t emerge from his tent for a few hours after that; bags packed and ready for a more comfortable ride home.

Lucky bastard found his way out of the jungle