Better Living Through Geology

Alright, I have been in camp for about a month and in that time some crazy shit has happened man. As my friend Rob would say, “I’ve seen some things, and some stuff. I wouldn’t recommend it.” Well actually, for the most part I would recommend this life in the north for the summer. If you possess that want for adventure and the possibility of extreme bodily harm, this fills the void right up. You end up in places where your only connection in the outside world is a satellite phone for daily reports to head office and a helicopter dropping food and supplies every once in a while. This is the life of a soil sampling fly camp. You spend the day walking between 5 and sometimes 9 km up and down and occasionally over mountains, digging holes and filling a pack up with soil samples. My only other co-worker is my brother Tyler and we averaged about 50 samples each a day, which turns a back pack into an extra 50lbs of heft by the time you head back to camp. It feels fucking great. We are both skinny as hell (even with excessive carb and protein intake). Soil sampling is by far the hardest job I’ve done up here but it actually does feel okay. It makes the days fly by. By the time our sampling ended I was in good shape, which is something new to me.

My psyche and my brother’s for that matter has become warped and twisted. We spend our evenings having conversations that go nowhere and mean absolutely nothing. We argue about things that do not matter in the slightest just so we can have some human contact after a day of being alone with our thoughts. I don’t even want to delve into how weird my imagination has become but in case you are interested I’ll print a small list of outlandish and just plain stupid things we have said to each other in the last month (they’re at the bottom dummy). What else? Just yesterday, I screamed at the rain. It wasn’t an angry scream, more one of those “manly, standing on a cliff, yelling at the mountain” type screams; you know the one? Oh, other points of unnecessary, insane aggression: when our magazine order from Whitehorse stuck us with the People magazine Twilight special edition instead of the Maxim we asked for we got annoyed. We decided to do some target practice. Ty got a nice shot at Taylor “Downy” Lautner and I put one right between the eyes of R-Pats with the .303 British rifle we had for bear control.

Speaking of bears, if you know anything about my brother, then you know he had some encounters with bears last summer. This impacted our camps. We were pretty aware of the fact that they’re definitely hanging around. The first day I saw fresh bear shit while working I started going through my plan for fucking a bear up if need be (we don’t take the gun while we’re working. Too much weight and we work alone throughout the day etc...). My first plan was to just scream at it for a while because at this point that seems logical. I would be scared of me. My beard is insane, I look so sickly dishevelled and for some reason I feel like I could probably punch a bears teeth through the back of his goddamn skull. After all the bravado died down, I realized that I’m still just a puny human. Major bummer. My plan now is to pee myself, drop my pack, after grabbing my bear spray and bangers, grab my Auger – the tool we use for soil sampling; it’s Finnish – and back away like a scared asshole. If necessary, the Auger could probably do some damage to the bastard’s nose and we all know bears have super sensitive noses.

The smell in our tent became border line third world by the end of the month I’m assuming. My sweat started to smell like pot – a blessing and a curse. Spending time in a fly camp means no shower. Oh sure there’s a creek but have you ever tried bathing in a high alpine creek in the Yukon? I’m no doctor but I’m pretty sure there’s a point when a man’s... manhood decides it has taken enough abuse and packs up and takes off. I believe a freezing cold Yukon creek would be the tipping point for mine. I poured some water over my head a couple weeks ago and that was enough for me. Basically we wipe ourselves down with wet ones when we feel it’s necessary and dream about showering back at the crew house in Whitehorse. This is a good motivator to work faster. This could be the only situation where I suggest not bathing for a month. My sample taking and hiking speed skyrocketed near the end of the project.

Mount Hinton is a beautiful place and I suggest checking it out if you ever get the chance. We spent time in Keno City as well, which used to be a pretty busy place with a silver mine. I think it has something like seven full time residents now but it’s a cool looking little town and it has an informative mining history museum. My brother and I could drive into town at times when we were at our first camp spot and the little general store actually has WiFi, so we had a minute or two of outside world contact every once in a while. One night when I was checking my e-mail at the general store, a driller (they’re all fucked) or possibly just a local old prospector from Keno berated us for about 10-15 minutes for stealing internet ( for the record, I gave the owner a bunch of cash for his hospitality). We didn’t pay much attention to the crazy old fella because it was pretty clear he was balls deep in a box of red wine. Ty and I still aren’t sure what he said to us but I think he warned us not to use the Keno City public showers (apparently they’re for locals only), he tried to hire us to soil sample his claim in the middle of Archer Cathro’s (the company we work for) claim and he tried to use our laptop to look at pictures of his wife. Again, his speech wasn’t quite up to snuff so I’m guessing a lot here. When we left, we heard him yelling something about “those fucking Archer Cathro boys.” He also said he was coming to our camp later that night. We slept with the gun close by...

To sum this thing up, our first month was a pretty good start to the summer and holy Christ has it flown by. Between Ty and I we have dug about 1500 holes, found some amazing rocks (Ty found a fist sized crystal), logged hundreds of kilometers of walking, had our blood sucked by thousands of mosquito bastards, fought no bears (though we were probably in the presence of a few), got out some aggression by shooting a magazine we didn’t like, came close to falling down a few cliffs, had our entire camp blow away in an insane windstorm, and I took one naked picture of myself for the 2010 Archer Cathro calendar. Is that even happening this year? Oh well, I can cross “standing naked on a mountain” off my list of things to do before the summer’s over. Peace out. I have to go dig more holes.

Lists of things we miss, music we like and stupid shit we said...

MUSIC:

Top 5 after work albums

1.Corb Lund – Five Dollar Bill (Songs about fighting Americans, working on oil rigs, taming horses and swilling back whisky. This makes for good camp hangout tunes.)

2.Hank Williams III – Straight to Hell (Songs about strange pills, Kid Rock being a “Yank” and a lesson on what is and isn’t country. This album explains everything about being a rebel/country punk in great detail.)

3.Mother Mother – O My Heart (This entire album has been stuck in our heads for a month. The weird moodiness and strange lyrical content goes great with our collective weirdness out here.)

4.Tragically Hip – Trouble at the Henhouse (A nice dose of Canadiana, strange poetry and Gordo’s weird voice are all I ever need from this band.)

5.Screaming Trees – Sweet Oblivion (Even though this album can get pretty loud it’s pretty relaxing as well. Weird. Awesome.)

Top 5 Work Albums

1.Queens of the Stone Age – Songs For the Deaf (I really never gave this album much of a chance but it might replace “R” as my new favourite. I’ve listened to it every day so far.)

2.Black Mountain – In the Future (Good for early morning twilight walking up mountain type situations.)

3.Screaming Trees – Sweet Oblivion ( Lanegan’s whisky drenched voice over the Connor’s guitar work is retarded good fuel for the hiking. “More or Less” has one of the best guitar intros evar!)

4.Bison B.C. – Dark Ages (Metal Thrashing Madness. Listening to this usually results in me digging ridiculously deep holes.)

5.The Bronx – The Bronx (Hard fast punk rock that makes me feel like I could fight bears. Maybe not the safest thing but it helps me work faster.)

You know what’s great?

1.Dames...

2.Swinging yer legs over a bed in the morning and not waking up on the ground.

3.Having a glass of liquor with ice. Maybe just ice in general.

4.Downtime. Although no downtime does make for a quicker summer.

I've been patient and maybe it has paid off...

A new Eddie Vedder song was leaked on the internet two weeks ago. It was nice. It was something you would expect from Vedder. It is going to be on the soundtrack for the new movie Eat, Pray, Love, based on the book of the same name. Sounds like an interesting story and I'm not surprised Vedder would lend his music to it.

As much as I enjoyed the accordion heavy song, I've been missing something from Pearl Jam. It was cool to see them do the pop punk/rock thing so well with Backspacer. Who doesn't like seeing their favourite group of musicians happy? The only problem I have with Backspacer is that it doesn't keep dragging me back in like, say, Yield or Binaural. What I'm getting at here is that last week, while my brain was slightly altered I checked out a music website that I frequent and I found something amazing. Yep, Pearl Jam have been sitting on a song called Of The Earth since the Avocado album was released. No surprise this song wasn't on Backspacer but holy sweet fuckballs was I happy to hear it. Since I found this track, it has been on repeat everywhere I go and I could not be happier with this new, old sound.

Of the earth goes from a stomping, trudging through a thick swamp, angry march with incoherent but brutally pissed off vocals from Ed, to a wall of soaring guitar work courtesey of McCready and Gossard. Ed provides some chanting vocals and then matt Cameron and jeff ament slam that marching drone back down to end the track on an incredibly heavy note. This song is something that Pearl Jam has been missing a bit lately and with the current environmental crisis in the Gulf, I doubt it was a coincidence they decided to debut it now. They're kinda big on the whole environmental thing and on the evening they played the New Orleans Jazz Fest Vedder suggested BP "send their children to clean up their fucking mess."

I’m a fan of the mellow stripped down songs from Into the Wild and I even enjoy the pop punkyness of Backspacer but Of the Earth is by and large the band I fell in love with in the first place. And who knows, maybe this song is the spark of a new album? Here's a link to the song...

http://www.antiquiet.com/news/2010/06/pearl-jam-of-the-earth/

Oh hey there... I didn't see you come in. Would you like some cake?

It took me this long to start a blog? Jesus, I'm not paying attention to things. Well the timing of this isn't the smartest considering I'm going to live in the middle of nowhere Yukon Territory for three months but, I do plan on giving irregular beard updates throughout the summer. That should be fun and maybe I'll keep some form of my sanity in check. It would be nice not to let the Id completely take over. That might make things weird in camp.