Did you ever wonder how geologists find minerals under the earth? Neither did I. If you want to know, read on and I will explain it to you. Many years ago I was taking Computer Science at college so it only seemed natural that I took a summer job in mining exploration. At the time I would have taken any summer job as it was better than starving on my student loan through the winter. A friend of a friend connected me with a couple of geologists who had an exploration company and were not too picky about who they hired.

The only bush experience I had was camping with the family and a couple of years as a Boy Scout. It seemed that was enough. I was matched up with a couple of other students, one in Agriculture and one in Law. In the three summers I had this job I never met anyone other than the geologists who was even remotely connected to geology. We were flown to a large isolated island on the west coast of Vancouver Island. In the months we spent there we saw no one other than the float plane pilot who delivered supplies every week or two. Talk about isolated!

Finally here comes the geology part. Copper was the hot mineral at the time so that was what we were concentrating on. If you find copper you usually find molybdenum, whatever that is, and a bit or silver and gold. Finding a large deposit this could make someone very wealthy. The bosses wanted to see if the island had any potential. So the first thing to do was take silt samples from virtually every creek and stream, not just one sample from each but one every couple of hundred feet or so. My job was to find really fine silt, preferably dry but usually very wet as it often came from the edge of the creek or at the bottom of a pool.

You put this in a sample bag, numbered it and left a piece of flagging tape with this number hanging from a nearby tree. This identified the stop in case you had to come back. As the day went on my pack got heavier and wetter. Finally I would get to the end of the creek but I would not turn around and go back. No, I had to hike through the bush to the next creek over and repeat the process on the way down. When finished I got to haul this heavy wet mass back to camp. These samples were flown out on the supply plane to be analyzed for mineral content. Then the geologists finally got to do their job on the results.