(Use the expand button on the lower right of the image to get a full screen view )

Northern Saskatchewan lies within the great boreal forest that encircles the globe between about 50 deg north latitude and the Arctic Circle.  This is a raw landscape scoured down to ancient bedrock by glaciers, flooded by lakes, and heavily forested with stunted conifers which burn every few decades leaving large areas of fallen trees.  I was there during the rainy season but was lucky enough to avoid any storms serious enough to disrupt the survey.  The temperature stayed just above freezing most nights but never got any warmer than about 15 deg C during the day.  Access to most of the area is by small boat, float plane, or helicopter.  Our camp was primitive but comfortable.

[[Show as slideshow]]

We used the lakes to get to our survey lines then trudged off into the bush high stepping over the deadfall.  Each of the three teams put in 20-50 soil points each day walking five to ten kilometers in the process.  With this much effort and the calories needed just to stay warm, our appetites were robust.  This survey consisted of  about 500 soil measurements.  We augered a 10 cm diameter borehole to about 80 cm depth in the soil then collected a gamma spectrum at the bottom of the hole.  After placing a radon monitor in the bottom of the hole and backfilling the hole, we marched off to the next point to do it all again.  About a week later we returned to each hole to recover the radon monitor.  Much of the survey area is covered by lakes.  Fortunately, radon is highly soluble in water and polyethylene is permeable to radon.  By sealing a radon monitor in a polyethylene bag and anchoring it to the lake bottom, we are able to measure lake bottom radon.  This new capacity opens up whole new areas for radon surveys particularly since many of the lakes occupy faulted depressions, a prime uranium target environment.

[[Show as slideshow]]

Our camp was a masterpiece created in part from local materials.  Never the less, we needed over five tons of gear and food helicoptered in for our two week survey. Every day, something new was built around camp from better shelter to a better mouse trap.  Unlike some remote exploration camps, this was a very happy camp where everyone found a way to have a little fun each day whether playing cribbage,  fishing, or using their calling skills to attract a moose to shoot.  The workday  got underway at dawn with a massive breakfast of meat, eggs, toast, cereal, and a bottomless pot of coffee.  After a tough day of hiking through the bush, our camp cook always had a satisfying meal ready for us.  We had one wood stove to dry everyones’ clothes after a damp day in the bush and bake the chill out in the morning.  You can imagine the rich aroma in the warming tent after two weeks without bathing.

[[Show as slideshow]]

]]> http://www.stratamodel.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=368 0 http://www.stratamodel.com/blog/?p=332 http://www.stratamodel.com/blog/?p=332#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:55:09 +0000 Tom Bell http://www.stratamodel.com/blog/?p=332

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

We covered another thousand square kilometers of the Sahara one sq km at a time taking eleven hundred radiometric and geochemical measurements in a mere fourteen days. Our mixed Touareg, Arab, Fulani, and American crews quickly became well honed technical teams despite the fact that two of our three teams did not share a common language. It keeps useless chatter to a minimum if no one in the truck understands what anyone else is saying. Most problems can be resolved with creative mime, drawings in the sand, and a smile.

Now for the wildlife report. I jumped two Golden Jackals in a rocky canyon and was within 15 meters of their napping spot when they broke cover. These two were about the size of coyotes and their coats where a superb match for the dull red brown of the terrain. Bird life included numerous African Mourning Doves, and Spotted Sand Grouse, a Houbara Bustard, two Pharaoh Eagle Owls, Egyptian Vultures, a stork(?), Pied Crows, Black Kites, Barbary Partridges, and numerous assorted tweety birds. I surprised two Fennec Foxes intent on excavating a new den. When they realized we were close they could only hunker down and hope we couldn’t see them. Their massive ears were sticking out of the hole furiously turning like little radar dishes before they bolted for the bush. One of our local Arab workers told us a male lion had been seen in a rugged range of low hills just a few weeks before we passed through these same hills. Apparently this critter had a taste for donkeys. Miles reported a massive white scat in the area which is probably about as close as we will ever get to seeing a lion in the Sahara. Our military escort tried to shoot a large snake but it is not clear they could hit it at such close range before it dissappeared into the bush.

Speaking of our security escort, I got a chance to plant a Bread not Bombs sticker on their machine gun. If you have been through Durango Colorado, you might know of Bread, the best bakery for miles. I carry some of their pacifist stickers just for the fun of putting them in unlikely places like this.

My ear protection is not to damp the sound of machine gun fire. I doubt if that WW-II relic would get two rounds through the chamber before jamming on the grit. My pal Boubacar (on my right) and I had a shooting match with his pistol, a 9mm semi-automatic held together with duct tape he borrowed from us. Seems neither one of us could hit a bottle at 25 paces with one shot. I guess we’re both out of practice. I think any bandit attack would have to be scared off by the noise. That is if these guys could ever chamber and fire more than one round. After the embarrassing snake shoot and our target practice, it seems unlikely they could actually hit anything. I guess it makes their new Bread not Bombs sticker even more relevant.

Stratamodel’s 2009 radiometric survey schedule is beginning to fill up. We expect to return to Niger in January and remain through April. Our North American schedule will include a return to the Colorado Plateau in June. Contact Stratamodel to discuss how we can help your exploration program in 2009.

We are in the process of upgrading our 3.2 cubic inch gamma probes to 21 cubic inch NaI(Tl) gamma probes from Rexon Components. These new probes are far more sensitive to low level gamma radiation and when paired with our URSA II multichannel analyzers will improve our already excellent ability to collect detailed gamma spectra from shallow soil boreholes.

After another round of programming, our digital data logging system is better than ever. This ESRI ArcPad based system implemented on TDS Recon and Nomad rugged field computers speeds data entry and eliminates errors during data transfer among computing platforms.

Custom ArcPad data entry form on a TDS Nomad

We are also developing a new series of soil augers for deeper, easier, soil penetration while retaining the light weight and rugged design that enables a Stratamodel crew to take as many as a hundred soil samples per day..

Lightweight soil auger

All of these improvements and innovations will keep us at the forefront of exploration and environmental soil sampling in 2009 by improving crew productivity, reducing errors, and lowering our detection limits.

Training a new crew.

Our field camp was well managed by Niger Uranium staff, daily feeding our group of about thirty, three hot meals of typical Nigeriene food. It doesn’t take long to get tired of a dinner consisting of chopped goat and rice or couscous especially when the chili powder runs low. Breakfast was rice cooked in powdered milk and sugar. We could vary that by adding cocoa powder every other morning. Our field lunches were plain pasta with a few chunks of chopped goat parts. Water for cooking and washing came from an artesian well about 40 km away. Bucket baths with this very soft water usually left us with a soap film that we just couldn’t seem to get off.

“Allah Akbar…”, the pre-dawn call to prayer beautifully sung by one of the crew is our alarm clock each morning. After a quick breakfast each team loads its trucks with radon detectors, steel wire, fluorescent survey flagging, plastic cups, field computers, gamma spectrometers, and our soil augers for the day of drilling and sampling ahead. Our escort of 30 soldiers in their three ‘technicals’ (Toyota pickups with heavy machine guns mounted in the beds) join us for the trip out to the soil grid. After a wild high speed cross country ride over mudcracked dry pans, gravel covered low hills, and across numerous dry wooded stream courses we get to work drilling a shallow hole and collecting our data every three to six minutes for the next eight or nine hours. The days start cool and clear but by noon it is 90-100 degrees and the November sun beats down on us until late afternoon. We consume three to six liters of water chased by several beers back in camp to stay hydrated. The rough terrain takes a steady toll on the insufficiently rugged tires on our trucks and takes it toll on our equipment as well. We lost a couple of motors to the heat and stress of drilling. The first week our new crews of local Touareg men have learned the routine and despite a few mishaps like getting a good rap on the head when a head wrap gets sucked into the fan, get the hang of drilling a good hole. This seems to be a welcome change for them in what looks to us like a very monotonous life of sitting in the shade while the kids herd the animals and the women cook and fetch water. We have injected a few highly prized consumer items into the local economy like stylish safety sunglasses and leather work gloves. Our mandatory ear plugs are far less popular so we must frequently remind our crew to wear them when the augers are running. The sunglasses are making the rounds among the locals, soldiers, and camp staff trading at ever higher prices. I get a visit every few days by those hopeful of getting a first or even second pair. We insist that our drillers wear their safety glasses at work so they can’t sell or trade them until the survey is over.

Entertainment is hard to come by out here and the wild navigation and driving habits of the security escort is a constant source of amusement. After a couple of weeks, they became pretty friendly and wandered into camp to see what they could mooch. Miles drove a hard bargain for a pair of his camo field pants. One of the soldiers wanted them bad enough to risk a court marshal and allowed the boys to have their pictures taken behind the gun on his technical. This was done in secret so the officers wouldn’t know. A climb to the highest point on the grid gave us a panoramic view of the area. Following an ancient tradition, the soldiers had carved ‘petrogliphs’ of their weapons into the rock at the top. Thanksgiving was pretty sparse but we made phone calls home with the sat phone. I was the only one who got a bird. The camp cook prepared a partridge that the soldiers caught and gave to me as a present. The boys had to settle for our usual dinner fare.

When the last of the radon detectors are in the ground we start to get a little barn sour, longing for home or at least a good meal, a cocktail, and a shower. Detector retrieval after they have been in the ground for 5-9 days means a visit to each point on the grid again. This goes pretty fast because we can follow our old tire tracks to each flagged point, haul the detector out of the ground by its wire harness, log it in to our field computers, and be off to the next in about 90 seconds.

Just another day in the
Sahara.

Wildlife is scarce in this part of the Sahara largely because the locals kill anything that moves. I was able to save one of the three snakes we encountered by catching it and letting it go a little ways from camp. The irony is the two killed by the Touareg were harmless and mine was venomous. We flushed a jackal one day and despite my protests, the soldiers chased it with their truck for ten minutes before it escaped into some rough terrain nearly exhausted. It looked like the jackal was trying to lure us away from a den. They performed the same disgraceful act with several fennec foxes over the course of the next few weeks. We discovered a nesting owl in a tree next to my tent and worried the adults would stop feeding the lone chick. We fed the chick a few bits of goat meat but it promptly puked them out. I felt the same way from time to time myself. We put a bounty of one piece of our supply of Halloween candy on mice in the hope that the village kids would be enterprising enough to feed the owl but the single reward claimed a day or two later was by the camp cook. By this time, the owl had climbed to the top of the tree, out of reach. At Stratamodel we take pride in our ability to fix any and all problems, so we fastened the mouse to a tent pole by the tail with some duct tape and enticed the chick to strike at it. Once we were convinced the chick was ready to eat, we dispatched the mouse with a coke bottle, loosened the tape and served him up. All of our worries about parental abandonment proved unjustified when we discovered one of the adults puking up a yummy pile of half digested rodents to the greedy chick a day later.

When the last detector came out of the ground we celebrated by eating lunch and drinking strong Touareg tea under a tree before heading back to camp to face packing. One of the men from the village brought a young female camel for us to ride but the saddle wasn’t tight enough and the camel was not completely saddle broken yet. This all made for a real spectacle with Touaregs hanging all over the camel trying to hold the saddle on and the camel frantically bellowing in protest. After we had our ‘rides’ we attempted to exhaust the remaining cans of beer in camp despite its fishy flavor from being refrigerated next to a bag of frozen fish.

Riding lessons. (big file takes a while to load)

We’re on are way to Niamey having run the gauntlet of bandit territory between In Gall and Abalak without a security escort. We’re never in personal danger but there is always the chance of a bandit roadblock where we could loose all of our vehicles, equipment and worse yet the survey data on our computers. The road to Niamey alternates between badly potholed pavement and rutted gravel for nearly 800 km and takes 12 hours to traverse. There are lots of interesting things to see along the way as we pass through a varied countryside of low sparsely wooded hills, open grassland, and small plots of farmland with a few withered millet stalks. The small villages are pretty sleepy except for the swarm of kids who appear out of nowhere whenever we stop. Donkeys, goats, sheep and cattle with huge horns drift back and forth across the road in front of us. The goats scamper out of the way when the driver first blows his horn. The sheep run but cluster more closely, never straying from the flock. The cattle keep crossing at their slow steady pace faithfully following the lead cow. The bulls, with their massive horns, plod along in the rear. The donkeys however, are indifferent to an approaching truck, no matter how much the driver blows his horn. They stand stupidly in the road as likely to stroll in front of us as to get out of the way. Some of the pedestrians exhibit a similar suicidal behavior so our drivers must be ready for the unexpected. Our driver values his horn above all other controls on the truck honking at everything from sparrows to camels. We want to get under the hood and snip the wire because it is driving us crazy.

Finally we arrive in Niamey where the air is thick with dust and wood smoke. The pristine air of the Sahara is now far behind us. Sunday evening traffic chokes the streets as we wind our way to our hotel eager for a long shower, a couple of G&Ts, a good meal, and our first sleep without the stars. Looks like we will finally get on that flight home in the early hours on Thursday and head back into the face of North American winter.

It is always a challenge to service our equipment and get it organized. This survey will be the latest iteration of our evolving gamma spectroscopy of shallow soil boreholes. I have been working closely with Paul Steinmeyer, a health physicist who creates portable spectrum analyzers. Together, we have successfully integrated gamma spectroscopy into our ArcPad based field data acquisition system. Stratamodel uses GPS enabled Trimble hand held computers for our sample logging. The addition of a gamma spectrometer linked by bluetooth to the Trimble units now enables us to record a spectrum at each of the hundreds or even thousands of points in one of our surveys.

Through the use of spectrometry, we can identify individual radioactive elements in the soil. Not only is this valuable for identifying potential uranium mineralization near surface but it enables us to evaluate the potential source of any radon based on the apparent support for radon generation in the soil. Radon anomalies with no parent radionuclides in the soil suggest radon transport from depth and a more deeply buried uranium source.

Our stop in Casablanca was interesting. We took a beat up old Mercedes taxi into town for a quick tour. Casablanca suffers from too many cars and not enough roads. Never the less it is still less congested than New York or Rome. The Grand Mosque is on a point that sticks out into the Atlantic. The Mosque looks fairly new and a few parts still seem to be under construction. The city is totally reconstructing its beachfront but there were still a few surfers out. A tour of Casablanca wouldn’t be complete without some shopping in the many leather stores. Scott couldn’t help himself so he bought a locally made leather coat to wear when riding his motorcycle. If this were a stop on the way home, we probably would have bought more. We tested the state of our digestive tracts by eating the local version of fish and chips. I might comment about how it all came out in the next blog.

We arrived in Niamey about 5 in the morning, just in time to watch Obama deliver his victory speech. Today, people in Niamey are celebrating.

Tomorrow we head 700 km north to In Gall where we will prepare to get Niger Uranium’s survey underway.

Lots more to do before we can get underway.  We have an air freight shipment with some of our equipment and supplies to send to Africa, visas to obtain, air tickets to buy, and a long list of items to include.  We’re a traveling hardware store and carry a small pharmacy not to mention electronics that now require 1,000 watts per night to charge for the next days work.

If all goes well, we should arrive in Niamey about November 1. Look for more posts from Niger in the coming weeks.

For those who have been here before, I hope you like the new style and our enhanced image, and video capability.  This should make our blog a little more entertaining. 

 

 

If you are using an older browser or Microsoft Internet Explorer, some of the features of this blog may not work correctly. If the thumbnails do not load, try hitting your browser’s refresh button. You may not be able to view the map or video. All other browsers should work well.

If you haven’t tried the new Google Chrome browser, now might be a great time to check it out. I’m pretty impressed with the enhanced image quality, fast page loading, and clean look. The only bug I have found is a problem using java driven drop down lists.

If only it were so easy as clicking the heels of our ruby slippers.  The trip home was certainly quicker by a day because our client chartered a plane to get us back down to Niamey.  After a day there, we got out in the middle of the night and had an uneventful trip back to New York.  We were too impatient to wait for the shuttle down to Dulles and the commuter back up to State College so we rented a car and drove home.

It’s still late Winter here which is something of a jolt to the senses when you are accustomed to 90 degree days, shorts and t-shirts, sitting around in the shade in the afternoon drinking beer….

Our survey is in sausage making mode.  The lab has the ingredients and we are ready to grind out maps and hopefully celebrate the identification of some hot anomalies to follow up on next month.

Meanwhile, I am headed to Toronto to the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada annual meeting to learn what is new in the industry and line up more work.

That’s it for the current trip to Niger.  We will pick up the blog where we left off in about a month on our return trip.

We all hope that you have found the blog interesting and informative.  I certainly enjoyed writing it.  I have no way of knowing how many readers we have but judging from the statistics for my website it seems to have become fairly popular.  We are hoping for surveys in new countries this coming year even though we all really like Niger.  Stay tuned.

Cheers

Stratamodel

On a high lonely rock in the Sahara

We’re short timers now.  Homeland has chartered an aircraft to take us back to Niamey on Sunday so we can avoid the arduous two day drive.  All 1800 radon detectors have been retrieved from the field and the films are safely packed in bags for their journey to the lab in Chicago for processing.  This recon survey has covered four thousand square kilometers, a sizable chunk of real estate by anyone’s standards.  The next step is to identify favorable areas and test them at a much greater sample density when we return in a month.

Our geologic traverses continue to reveal valuable information about the history of the basin that bears to one degree or another on our understanding of the origin of the uranium deposits.  Tony Kovschak, chief geologist of Homeland Uranium, has identified most of the specimens in our collection of fossil plants and animals.  The final phase of basin development (Cretaceous) was marked by a very large freshwater lake as evinced by a robust species of freshwater clam, algal mats, horsetails, and hungry hadrosaurs who grazed the edges.

Get off my back!

We still live in a happy camp.  Our grubby existence has developed into comfortable routine.  Up before dawn to a breakfast of Malrone (anti-malarial), bread, butter, and jam washed down with Nescafe for the unprepared or Italian roast for the more discerning palate.  The honey dippers are regular visitors until the sewer is completed.  Laundry is done by our security man with a bar of soap and bucket of tap water then hung out to dry on tent lines.

Everyone drinks from this contaminated well

We were treated to a Touareg roundup down at one of the regional wells yesterday.  After a morning geologic traverse, we pulled into their camp where a grand lunch lay waiting.  A ram was slaughtered and a platter of meat mixed with rice was placed before us on a rug under an acacia tree.  Strong green tea with as much sugar as tea was served in shot glasses.  The Hors d’houvre was aged sheep cheese. Armed with a soup spoon we all sat in a circle and dug into a mound of steaming food on a large platter.

Our lunch of ram and rice (probably made with well water).

After lunch we mounted our camels and under the watchful eye of the Touareg men were either led around or handed the rein.  Steering a camel is done with bare feet placed at the base of their neck.  Push the top foot and the critter goes right.  Push the bottom foot and he turns left or at least that is what I thought I understood from my teacher.  Pulling the rein, which is tethered to a ring through the camel’s right nostril, makes them complain in a loud Chewbacca growl.  I think the rein works like a brake and accelerator combination.  Mounting a camel takes some practice.  The camel kneels with all four legs tucked underneath but the saddle is still nearly four feet off the ground.  You mount by stepping on the camel’s left foreleg and throw your right leg over the saddle.  The pommel is a trident of carved wood or horn that is best grasped tightly when the camel rises.  They unfold their back legs pitching you forward at a 45 degree angle.  The front legs unfold next throwing you wildly backward.  Now, with your head eight or nine feet off the ground you have a grand view of your surroundings.  It’s a long way to the ground as Drew found out when he was pitched off as his camel rose.  Camels are just as ornery as some horses and like to rub you against the thorny branches of the nearest acacia.  They seem immune to the two inch needle sharp thorns, munching them like candy.  Their mouths are tough with a leathery pad instead of top front teeth.  Camels have large canine teeth on top that may only serve the purpose of inflicting a painful bite to a neighbor when they compete for water at the trough.  Their lips and nostrils are a wonder of evolution.  Like a seal or walrus, they can close their nostrils tight.  Their lips are as dexterous as the tip of an elephant’s trunk.

Looking like tourists in the Sahara.

After the men had a good laugh at our attempts to ride their camels, they showed us how it is really done.  The camp women gathered under a tree with a drum and began to chant, sing, clap hands, and beat a drum.  The men cantered their camels in a tight circle around the tree whooping.  We were squeezed into the center of the circle with racing camels passing just inches away.  After the show, a round of speeches was made pledging mutual cooperation and friendship.

This is how it is really done.

The regional well is in sorry shape.  Hundreds of animals are brought there daily for water.  The well is over 50 feet deep and the men and children labor to draw water and fill cement troughs so herds of sheep, goats, donkeys, cattle, and camels can drink.  Everyone in the village drinks from the same well.  All of these animals have left a rich layer of droppings around the well and the ropes used to lower the buckets slither through this muck with each hauling cycle contaminating the water in the well.  A government health agent was present and despaired of the situation and his inability through lack of resources to rectify it.  Homeland Uranium through their non-profit foundation has pledged to rebuild the well and create a system to alleviate the contamination problem.  A contractor will begin work within the next few weeks.

A model of how the well could be.

That’s all for now.  My next post will be from Niamey on the way home.  Be sure to check out more pictures here.

So long pard.