ODDS’N’SODS — The Jogran staking rush (2)

The morning dawned dark and foggy. Lake Superior was living up to its reputation without question. It was clear that neither a helicopter nor an airplane would be of much use. With so many witnesses present, no one would be foolish enough to start before the appointed hour of seven o’clock standard time (eight o’clock DST).

All stakers were positioned except for the third interested party, whom Roy Rupert and Peter Reid had encountered earlier; he had decided not to bother. With pencils clenched between their teeth and razor-sharp axes in hand, they stood their mark and counted down the final seconds. Eight o’clock and they’re off.

Rupert describes what happened next:

“I had an advantage in knowing the ground better than Amax’s personnel, and also in having a canoe better-positioned. After finishing up my claim on the lakeshore, I was able to get to the canoe quickly by wading and swimming through shallow water. The Amax crew was still there, busily working their radio to see if the helicopter would come. As we pulled out from the beach, they decided not to depend on the chopper but, rather, to race us by road, and so they pulled out behind us in their canoe. We knew that the first one to the landing would be first on the logging road and that there would be no passing on that road.

“We were both using a motor (Amax had a bigger one) to drive the canoes, and paddling madly to make them go faster. However, there were two routes: a safe mile around an island and a three-quarter-mile shortcut through some shallow, boulder-strewn narrows. They went around. We went by the shortcut and reached the landing a couple of hundred feet ahead of them.

“We ran up to our truck and started driving on the logging road. At one point, we slowed to cross a flooded beaver section and we could see the other truck less than a half-mile behind. Eventually we came to the ford across Sand Creek. In our excitement, we cut a corner too close and the truck got stuck halfway across. John and his crew from Amax drove up behind us and parked on the bank to offer us advice on how to get out. They could not cross until we were out of the way.

“Peter and I were working with a big bumper jack — in the rain, in knee-deep fast water, with hordes of mosquitoes and black flies — to fill in the hole under a rear wheel. It was not fun. Then our hopes dropped. A helicopter flew over, and the Amax crew drove back up the road to meet it at a landing spot. “We soon filled the hole and drove our truck out of the creek. Not knowing the flying conditions, we kept driving and soon reached the highway. The water in the creek had fouled one or two cylinders in the engine and 50 m.p.h. was top speed. We could never beat another truck, let alone a helicopter.”

As it turned out, Rupert and Reid were the winners in this race. After getting into a minor traffic tie-up in the Sault, Rupert ran the last few hundred yards to the recording office.

What happened to the Amax crew? Well, they hopped aboard the chopper after it landed on the road; however, the cloud cover was low and visibility was not good. They made their way to Lake Superior, where there were a few hundred feet of visibility between the water and cloud, and followed the shoreline south. After turning into Whitefish Bay at the head of the St. Mary’s River, they got into some bad conditions and the pilot anxiously asked his passengers to watch for a landing spot.

Suddenly Gillan spotted land and, even better, an empty parking lot marked out in a square pattern. He directed the pilot to turn and then gasped when he realized his parking lot was the deck of a lake freighter in the middle of the St. Mary’s River. Landing was aborted. They did eventually land at a local landing strip and had to taxi from there.

— The writer is the mining recorder in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. The above is the conclusion of a 2-part article which appeared in a recent issue of “Mines and Minerals Monthly Update” of Ontario’s Ministry of Northern Development and Mines.