Canadian geologist pips De Beers at the post

The dream of most geologists is to make a major discovery that will be recorded in the history books, or, at the very least, on the front pages of this newspaper. Charles Fipke realized his dream a decade ago with the discovery of diamondiferous kimberlites in the Lac de Gras region of Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Looking back on those hectic times, Fipke says his big moment came shortly after testing what became known as the Point Lake kimberlite. “We were processing the samples in my lab, and after we got a concentrate, I was able to pick out sixteen macros, including some nice gem-quality stones, by hand. They were the first diamonds, really. Even today, what sticks in my mind was seeing those stones sparkle. They were quite exciting. We flew down to the San Francisco to give a presentation to BHP, and all their executives came.”

There were other highlights too, Fipke says, including an even earlier diamond discovery found in an esker sample collected near his exploration camp. The sample contained a macro (a maccle) and a micro cube, confirming that the Lac des Gras region was a prime hunting ground for diamond deposits.

Getting to the Lac de Gras region, though, was no easy task. It took almost a decade of systematic sampling, beginning in 1982, when Fipke and fellow geologist Stewart Blusson continued a diamond search originally initiated by Superior Oil and Falconbridge in the late 1970s.

Fipke and Blusson focused their initial efforts in the MacKenzie Valley, near ground then being explored by a unit of De Beers. By this point, the diamond giant had already spent several decades in northern Canada, looking for kimberlites similar to those being mined in northern Russia.

Fipke’s sampling in the MacKenzie Valley region did not produce encouraging results, so the prospecting partners continued sampling in an easterly direction, eventually ending up near Lac de Gras. The indicator minerals from samples taken in this general region were, in Fipke’s words, “smoking,” leaving little doubt that kimberlites were nearby. Subsequent geochemical analysis of those minerals, using technology then known only to a few, showed that the kimberlites were diamondiferous. The location of the kimberlites, though, was still a mystery.

Fipke says that by this stage, staking activities were under way, based solely on the positive results of the indicator mineral assemblage. One day late in the season, with only two days left to stake the desired ground, Fipke spotted, from the air, a distinctly circular feature mostly hidden by snow.

“It stood out for sure,” Fipke recalls, “and I could see biotite schists outcropping on both sides were the snow had blow off. I can’t say I was excited, but I was really, really curious. We didn’t have much money left, and I had to decide whether to continue staking or to stop and collect samples. I didn’t sleep well that night at all, and in the morning I said, ‘look, we’ve got to postpone the staking, and go back and see if we can get samples.’,”

That proved easier said than done. Along with pilot David McKenzie and son Mark, Fipke began digging through the snow at the edge of the lake. It was six feet deep in places, and it took five or six hours of chipping away at ice to get to the frozen ground below.

“All we got were boulders,” Fipke says. “There were no fines, nothing to sample, and I surmised that we had to move down-ice to get samples, which is what we did. I started chipping pieces of till, and that’s when my son spotted a large chrome diopside. That was an exciting moment too. We managed to collect forty pounds of till that was chock-a-block full of indicator minerals. Up-ice from the eskers didn’t have any indicator minerals, so we knew we had found the pipe.”

In the fall of 1991, Dia Met Minerals issued a brief press release stating that its first drilling program at Point Lake had pulled 16 macrodiamonds and 65 microdiamonds from 59 kg of core. The rest, as they say, is history.

Fipke, meanwhile, went on to collect a number of awards for his remarkable discovery, including the “Prospector of the Year” award presented by the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) in 1992, and our own “Mining Man of the Year” award for the same year.