ODDS’N’SODS — Prospecting, 1990s style (2)

The author concludes his story of his prospecting trip to northern Ontario last spring.

Dusk was falling rapidly and it was starting to rain. I hastily carried my bags about 35 yards from the tracks into a dry little clearing among small poplar trees. Spreading a tarpaulin onto the ground, I placed the boxes in a hollow square, with one side open.

Shivering, I blew up an air mattress and threw a sleeping bag on top. Over it all went another tarp. I got under just as it started to rain. It was cold, but I was dry and reasonably comfortable. Three freight trains roared by during the night, creating an incredible din.

You could hear them from miles away. Like a great symphony, they sang quietly at first, a high and low tremolo. As they went through cuttings, the sound increased and decreased. On the approach, they gurgled, rumbled, belched, shrieked and roared. Finally, there was an apocalyptic crescendo, punctuated by sounds of tortured metal.

Three ground-shaking locomotives sped by, linked together for a total of 9,000 horsepower. They pulled about 75 freight cars (total length: three-quarters of a mile) weighing, on average, 40 tons each. These locomotives were pulling some 3,000 tons. Considering that some of the cars weighed more than 100 tons, it wasn’t surprising that the earth shook. Sometimes there were six locomotives coupled together, pulling even longer trains.

There were petrochemicals in tank cars, wheat grain, lumber, plywood, cars, vans, trucks, steel rail, rolled steel plate, steel pipeline, machinery and shipping containers. Some of the latter were piled one on top of the other. Naturally, as others like this went by with headlights glaring, I didn’t get much sleep. When dawn arrived at 5 a.m., I didn’t bother to get up, as it was still raining steadily.

The temperature rose a little and, after suffering the terror of the night, I dropped off to sleep. At 10 a.m., the rain stopped and I hastily emerged to check my surroundings. Not bad. A beautiful clearing in a wooded, sheltered little river valley, with lots of deadwood fuel and a big duckpond on the other side of the tracks.

The sky, however, remained ominous-looking, so I pitched camp as fast as I could. There was a clearing at the edge of a swamp nearby where my tents were partly concealed by trees, just beyond the 150-ft. rail right-of-way. With an axe, I felled about 20 birch and poplar saplings which I used as poles in setting up my tent and tarpaulins.

The ground was well-drained, on gravel. One tarpaulin went over the sleeping tent to render it waterproof. Another made a shelter for equipment and supplies, for example, dry tinder and wood for the fire. (All my cooking had to be done on an open wood fire.) There were plenty of rock boulders from the glaciated debris and I used them to anchor everything to the ground in case of a high wind. All the poles had to be tied securely with stout cord. No sooner was it done than the rain started again, but I got a wood fire going with the aid of birchbark, which is highly flammable. My supper was a gypsy-style gumbo, consisting of a lot of things stewed together in a large pot.

A horribly cold night followed. Although I slept with nearly all my clothes on, inside a sleeping bag, I woke up every hour or so shivering. I slept in and decided to take it easy the following day, getting up about 8 a.m. There had been a groundfrost. The weather cleared up a little, so I cut more poles to make sure my camp was absolutely storm-proof.

My campsite had been carefully chosen. The railway provided easy walking and numerous rock exposures in cuttings. There was a bridge across the river. Three miles upstream were placers to be panned. Within two miles downriver lay most of the Lower Mississagi with good outcrops, the old 1967 Hudson Bay drill cores and the showing at Molybdenum Pond.

— The writer lives in Scarborough, Ont.