Esp aside though, it’s hard to explain how one person can sport such a remarkable mine-finding record. Others have wandered a lifetime in the wilderness. Rich-looking grab samples and a clutch of tall tales might be the sum total of their achievements. Was it luck? Hard work? Brains? Connections with the Almighty or Alf Powis?
Donald Carmichael, chairman of Bryndon Ventures, among other juniors, whose association with Brynelsen goes back some 35 years, accepts the esp theory. “Every time he (Brynelsen) came across something good he’d make projections. I can remember at Wenatchee, Wash. (before the Cannon gold mine began operating there), they had about one million tons of point one. Bern said, Don, you’ll find 10 million tons of point 4.’ I think he’s got something like a sixth sense.”
Brynelsen himself says his gut has to respond to a property before he will work it. But press him a bit further and what emerges is the picture of a canny, relentless individual, probably driven by a combination of love and money, who has slogged through the B.C. interior and personally trod on and prodded any exceptional piece of ground he ever heard of. (He main tains pecuniary considerations were not the incentives: “It’s not the money because I don’t give a damn about it other than for getting a roof over my head.”) By his own estimate, Brynelsen would clock 50,000 miles a year checking out prospects for Noranda. “It was damned hard work.” And he loved it. His daughter, Karen MacGregor, insists that her father has never taken a holiday, not even a 1-week respite to the white sands of Mexico or Florida. “I remember once we went to Hawaii with the idea of having a holiday. We returned within three days. He lives to work.” (Brynelsen’s marriage foundered early in his career.)
Every fall, when prospectors were chased from the woods by the first snows, he would sit down with as many as possible and listen to their stories. If anyone needed a grubstake to tide him over the winter, the wallet opened. Prospectors don’t forget kindness like that. “They still phone me today,” says Brynelsen.
Brynelsen was born in 1911, the son of a Vancouver streetlamp trimmer who let him tool about in a British Columbia Electric Co. car at the age of 10. “Mother,” he says, “was a stern woman who made us work hard.” His grandfather, a transplanted North Sea fisherman, held the distinction of launching the Vancouver waterfront’s first tugboat. The young Brynelsen, however, wanted to launch a career on dry land. After scrapping dreams of becoming a medical doctor, Brynelsen turned to mining engineering, because “it paid the most in those days and you could get a job,” he told The Northern Miner Magazine.
In 1929, the year the world was graphically reminded that neither stocks nor New York brokers can fly for long, Brynelsen wandered into the placer fields of the Yukon. He was smitten almost instantly. “I love watching the gold coming out of the sluice box. Once you experience that feeling, you can’t get rid of it.” He kicked around the placer fields for several years, managing the likes of Polaris Taku near Juno, Alaska, and Evelyn Creek in the Yukon. Because miners and booze were a volatile mix in those days, mine managers stowed the gold in cigar boxes and locked the whiskey in the safes. At Polaris Taku, he once courageously stared down a sodden miner. “The guy was toting an axe,” Brynelsen recalls.
The association with Noranda began in 1948, when the major scooped up Quebec Gold Mining Corp., a Montreal-based junior with a fistful of B.C. prospects that Brynelsen had had a hand in acquiring. In all the years with Noranda, Brynelsen was given remarkably free rein. He would buy property options worth hundreds of thousands on his say-so alone. He shunned regular reports to head office, basically running the show in a style that must have made Noranda’s accountants shudder. But he acknowledges that it was Noranda’s deep pockets and flexibility that helped him achieve what he has.
His biggest coup was the Brenda mine. On July 1, 1955, Brynelsen and prospector Robert Bechtel camped on the property that was to become the Brenda mine. It snowed that night, dumping six inches of white fluff on the mine-finders. That didn’t dampen their enthusiasm, and even after Noranda dumped cold water on the project, Brynelsen pushed ahead.
As he recalls, he couldn’t convince the Noranda people that a deposit grading about 0.33% copper could ever make a mine. “The (Noranda) board consisted of practically all engineers. They were used to underground. They didn’t have any respect for open pit. So I had to fight like hell for Brenda.” Brynelsen recalls that John Bradfield, the Noranda chairman back then, asked him to quit spending money on the property. “I’ll never live to see it in production,” Brynelsen remembers Bradfield saying. Other skeptics included Cominco, Asarco, Anaconda and another 12 major companies. Says Brynelsen: “I have the letters in my file. Fifteen major companies looked at Brenda.” To bring the property to production, Brynelsen corralled some old friends — Mervin Davis, who handled the financial end; Jacob (Jack) Austin, a B.C. lawyer with political connections who would later become senator; and Morris Menzies, a geological engineer and Brynelsen’s partner on Noranda’s western exploration projects.
That group nurtured Brenda toward production. In the end, Noranda saw the light. It grabbed a piece of the action (at a considerably steeper price) through an equity interest in Brenda — which mightily enriched Messrs Brynelsen, Davis, et al. It also allowed some of Brynelsen’s office staff and engineers to pay down their mortgages: Brynelsen had set aside seed stock at about 10 cents or 20 cents a share and, at Brynelsen’s urging, most of the staff at the Vancouver exploration office bought at least a few hundred dollars’ worth. “They all made a pile of money,” Powis recalls. At one point, Brynelsen had mortgaged his house to keep the project alive. “I believed in it and I was sure we had a mine.”
Brynelsen himself does not suffer financially today. He collects royalties from the Cannon mine, dividends from Brenda and additional income as a director of 15 mining and exploration companies. His assets are considerable, but conspicuous consumption is not his style. Daughter Karen says he has lived modestly in the same Vancouver house for decades. He says he seldom dabbled in the stock market, preferring instead to post seed money on projects he felt were promising.
Brynelsen cut his official ties with Noranda in 1975. He and long-time friend and associate Archie
Bell, Noranda’s former eastern exploration chief, joined forces to form B & B Resource Inc. Brynelsen clearly cherishes the years they roamed the western part of the continent in search of gold. “It was like a holiday. We’d take a jeep, load up some beer and go off into the desert.” According to Carmichael, the pair was a good match. “Archie was the pessimist and Bern the optimist.” (Bell, by Brynelsen’s estimation a su perb geologist, subsequently suffered a stroke and, at the time of writing, has been unable to resume his career.) B & B was more than an excuse for two old chums to chew the fat and bum around the continent. It was serious exploration.
In their meanderings in California, B & B latched on to a property that had been a gold producer at the turn of the century and again in the 1930s. Today, the Castle Mountain property, now in the hands of Viceroy Resource Corp. (Brynelsen is a director), has an established reserve of at least 25.9 million tons grading 0.055 oz gold per ton (23.5 million tonnes grading 1.88 g per tonne). And, of course, Noranda, Brynelsen’s former boss and B & B’s grubstaker, has a piece of the Viceroy action through subsidiary Hemlo Gold’s equity interest in the junior.
Much closer to Brynelsen’s heart, however, are old producers near Rossland in southern British Columbia. Brynelsen had first tested the ground in the late 1940s for Quebec Gold. These mines had produced 6.2 million tons grading 0.47 oz gold per ton, 0.6 oz silver and 1% copper between 1890 and 1928. Le Roi, the most famous, churned out roughly 1.5 million oz of gold, a like amount of silver and thousands of pounds of copper. This mine and others in the area also spawned Consolidated Mining & Smelting, now Cominco.
Brynelsen contends that the Le Roi area is far from exhausted. He’s put together a company called Bryndon Ventures, hooked it up with a joint- venture partner (Antelope Resources) and begun serious exploration. The project has become something of a personal quest for the 77-year-old minefinder. It took him decades to assemble the land that comprises the claims and, now that it’s all in a neat package, he vows that this will be his last fling at mining. “Rossland is going to be a major. I can just smell it.”
There you have it. It’s all in the nose after all.
]]>
Be the first to comment on "Profile A NOSE FOR MINES"