ODDS’N’SODS — An outstanding exploration team

They had been commissioned by the syndicate formed by Karl Springer and “Doc” Kidd to prospect and explore for gold and silver in the Coast Range Mountains, north of Stewart, B.C., in the summer of 1946.

Einar Kvale and Tom McQuillan were an exceptional team of talented and enterprising adventurers for such an undertaking. Einar had just returned from an extended period overseas in the Canadian Army, with an interval spent as an interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Tom was a veteran both of exploration and mining, with an extensive knowledge of this rugged frontier region.

The area presented a unique and awesome challenge. The rich Premier gold mine, just north of Stewart, had a history of wealth and handsome dividend payouts over a 25-year period. The geology of the district was such as to encourage optimism that similar orebodies could be found. No small consideration was the formidable task of penetrating the vast glacial fields of the Salmon, Berenden, Leduc and Frank Mackie ice sheets, which encompassed this entire region in the uncharted depths of the Coast Range. Both Tom and Einar were rugged and imaginative prospectors with the skills, judgment and discretion required of a team in such a circumstance. They loaded their toboggans with provisions and set off across the mountains and ice fields. Progress was strenuous. Their search led them across the Berenden glacier and on to the Leduc glacier. There they ventured upon outcroppings of sulphides which were to lead to the rich depths of the Granduc mine on the west face of Granduc Mountain. Their instructions were to look for gold. They turned away and, most unwillingly, left the site. However, in their camp that evening both men reviewed the samples from Granduc Mountain, revised their decision and staked the Granduc mine the next day.

They continued up the North Leduc glacier and then over the Frank Mackie system and later explored and staked the Sulphurets Creek copper showings. The summer of their first post-war venture proved to be a milestone. The Granduc mine was launched toward an outstanding development and, many decades later, the showings on Sulphurets Creek were to reveal rich and extensive gold-silver-copper deposits.

— S.J. Hunter is a retired mining engineer who resides in Vancouver, B.C.