Picture of the Moment - Follow the Yellow Brick Road

When you come across a sign for the Yellow Brick Road, you follow it. We didn't see any munchkins, and these Oz friends are obviously disguised as homo sapiens from the "Red Green Show," but we did see a little bit of gold over the rainbow. And I discovered an affectation for show tune choreography.

Looking westward, in the far distance you can see the headframe of the David Bell gold mine. A staking rush after discovery of the Hemlo Gold Camp in the early 1980s was Canada's largest since the Klondike. Taxes from locally-derived gold bricks have paved plenty of roads in the thirty years since. I visited here in September, 1994 as a stowaway with the Queen's University Minex program's annual field trip to major ore deposits of the Canadian Shield.

While the rest of the group were busy looking at rocks, three friends and I organized an impromptu homage to a different kind of treasure. If memory and character placement serve, I'm the Scarecrow on the far left. The other two gentlemen were Best Man and a groomsman at my wedding two years later. I've only bumped into "Dorothy" once in the ensuing twenty years. The name of the poor photographer is lost to history.

The Yellow Brick Road is located near the Hemlo gold camp, about 55 km east of Marathon, off the Trans-Canada Highway (17), halfway between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

Pasties on the Range

In 2003 my family made its first foray into the upper Great Lakes region of Northeast Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP), beginning our long, continuing affair with the shorelines of the greatest lakes. Possibly the first sign welcoming us to the area hinted at "pasties ahead, 1 mile." Soon the byways were peppered with an assortment of sometimes shambolic roadhouses, neon "open" signs beckoning us to "Get your pasties here." My first thought was of tassels and cheap burlesque. But reality was in truth as tawdry as a senior's night checkers game at a nudist colony. We had stumbled upon a heritage dish, mining's contribution to the world's palate, the pasty (PASS-tee).

The pasty is perhaps the main raison d'être for an otherwise disrespected vegetable, the rutabaga. Other principal components of the standard pasty are beef, potato, onion and spices wrapped in a crimped pastry to form a semicircular pocket sandwich that is then baked to a golden brown. In the Upper Midwest, "spices" refers exclusively to salt and pepper. The pasty is right at home there. Its most scandalous aspect regionally is mild disagreement over the spelling of the singular item, some vendors preferring "pastie."

Variations on the standard pasty for the adventurous crowd might skip the beef altogether or include extra potato, and ketchup is an almost shameful side transaction not discussed between merchant and customer. Hoping no one will see, I've furtively grabbed a few courtesy packs of the condiment like a nervous youth in the prophylactic section of a drugstore. Gravy is a damnable abomination reserved for tourists.

Pictures of the Moment - Highlights of Big Nickel, Sudbury

The largest city in northern Ontario, Sudbury is a city of superlatives.

I'm in town for a few short days on a business trip to Laurentian University.

One of the local features I immediately sought out was a first hand view of shatter cones resulting from an extraterrestrial impact approximately 1.85 billion years ago. These horsetail-shaped, shock-related geological structures only form in bedrock proximal to meteorite craters or underground nuclear explosions, radiating outward from the source of the shock-wave in concentric patterns. The Sudbury Basin is the erosional remnant of such an impact crater, the second largest on Earth. A catastrophic global-change event even larger than that responsible for the Chicxulub crater in Yucatán, Mexico (which is widely believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs), the Sudbury impact was directly responsible for the metal-rich impact melt that now makes Sudbury one of the word's largest mining centers. Mines of nickel and lesser copper have operated continuously since the beginning of the 20th Century.

Pictures of the Moment - 2012 Mexico Field Work

Mexico is so much more than just beaches. My travels to the interior, particularly in remote or rural areas, exposed me to fantastical landscapes and a cultural experience as rich as anything I've had in more traditional tourist areas, anywhere.

Valle del los Cirios, Baja, one of Mexico's largest protected areas. The boojum tree or cirio (Spanish) is essentially endemic to the Baja California Peninsula. It is related to the ocotillo. The moniker "boojum" is from Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark. The English translation of cirios is "candles."

The northern Baja desert flora includes cirios, mesquite, cardon cactus, cholla, agave and bichnaga (and ocotillo, a relative of the cirios on the right). The cholla were near lethal if you kicked one; the thistles go right through leather.

Cardon cactus, the tallest cactus species in the world  (up to 19 m, with a  trunk up to 1 m in diameter). I was quickly corrected that they are not saguaro! It differs in the location of blossoms, fewer ribs on the stems, heavier branching from the base of the stem, and in the location of the blossoms.

Baja California Norte traffic jam.

"El Gato" mining claim post near San Fernando, Baja California Norte.

Near La Huacana, Michoacan, Mexico (Inguaran valley). This fellow was guiding us around some old mine workings. He went back and forth from his home to the Inguaran minesite on the donkey. Strangely, he's carrying the drive-shaft to a car on his lap. I loved how he was wearing all his mining personal protective equipment during the commute. All he needs are the safety glasses.

Near La Huacana, Michoacan, Mexico (Inguaran valley). I loved this home-made saddle hand carved from wood and using rice bags to hold the stirrups. The folks here do not waste anything useful.

This small python (maybe 4 feet) was under the shade of a large boulder at the prospect. The small squirrel or chipmunk in its coils has seen its last sunshine.

Picture of the Moment - Coolest Memory Stick Ever

Sure it's only a loosely travel-related post. But boats are a medium of travel, and this is the neatest memory stick I've ever come across. I picked it up at a recent mining convention in Toronto. The real Willem van Oranje is a dredger operated by Boskalis. She was named after the House of Oranje Nassau and launched by the Queen of the Netherlands in 2010.

Picture of the Moment -- There's Gold in Them Hills, but Not in This Pan

Just moments before a flash of temper, a gold prospector realizes he's been skunked. But everyone is guaranteed to find a little color at Big Thunder Gold Mine in Keystone, South Dakota, even if Dad has to give a little help.

Seconds later this little prospector tossed his gold pan in frustration. Stubbornness is a virtue among gold panners, and prospecting is not the profession of the impatient. But few people got rich during the great gold rushes of the 19th century and early 20th century. The real money was made by the people that supplied food, equipment and the staples--blue jeans, bullets, booze and burlesque. The demotivational poster was created using a tool on Despair.com.

The 1892-vintage Big Thunder mine is a great place to try your hand at panning on the front porch or in nearby Battle Creek, and if you don't strike it rich there's always the ice cream. And you won't strike it rich, even with gold at $1300/oz.

The site includes a mining museum, gift shops and option of a tour of the underground workings, where all mine visitors get a free sample of gold ore. We visited the beautiful Black Hills a couple times (2004, 2006) for a western-themed family camping, and gold panning at a variety of locations was a highlight for the kids. These tourist sites are "seeded," as it is very rare to find any color in the played-out surroundings (and still productive sites are probably over private claims), but the process is much the same as in the 1870s.

The nearby Homestake Gold Mine in Lead was the deepest gold mine in North America when it closed in 2002 after producing approximately 40 million ounces of gold over 126 years, one of the continent's biggest single lodes.

Pictures of the Moment - Soudan Underground Mine State Park

Soudan Underground Mine State Park is the only place I know where you can tour an historic iron ore mine and a state-of-the-art physics lab at the same time. I was here in June of 2006. It's a great day for a geologist like me, or anyone who likes mining history.

Shaft #8 headframe. It takes a few minutes to get all the way down the cramped "cage" elevator.

Silhouettes of fellow miners on the tour, illuminated by headlamps 2341 feet below the surface. A 3/4 mile underground rail takes you to the Montana orebody, the deepest workings in the Soudan. Surface mining commenced in 1882, making it Minnesota's oldest operating district, and operations were fully underground in the 20th century.

The underground workings are preserved as they were left in 1962. Later United States Steel (Oliver Mining) donated the property to the state for educational purposes. Soudan was Minnesota's deepest and highest-grade iron ore mine, with hematite ores grading >65% Fe by weight. Ores mined in Minnesota today have less than half the recoverable iron. It was all I could do not to collect a sample.

The picture is a little fuzzy, but I took it.

You pass through a nondescript door from the darkened mine and into a brilliantly-lit physics lab, a segue that has all the hallmarks of a James Bond novel. Here is the MINOS (or Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) neutrino detector. More than 2000 feet underground, the lab also conducts dark matter experiments, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS II).

More than 2600 million years old, banded iron formation of the Soudan Iron-Formation--on Minnesota's Vermilion Range--hosts ores exploited in one of Minnesota's original mining districts. More than 15 million tons of ore were mined here, a small amount compared to much younger near-surface deposits of the nearby Mesabi Range. This stuff makes great clock faces and counter tops when cut and polished. It also looks very nice just where it is, especially after a rain.