Life North of the 54th

Transcript

• 00:00 - Flowing Veins of Gold
• 15:24 - Glaciology and Geology
• 32:10 - Some Interest in Gold
• 41:56 - Seeing Tomorrow
• 59:16 - Some Final Stories

00:00 - Flowing Veins of Gold

Opening Theme Music:
[bass guitar riff]

Garett:
Welcome back to Life North of the 54th. I'm Garett Brown.

Preston:
I'm Preston Brown and we're pretty happy to have Rob Blum with us again.

Rob:
Well, it was fun and glad to be back and to be here and visit with you guys.

Garett:
So, Rob, last time you were telling us about the geography and the geology of the Peace Country, and I was wondering if you could tell us more about that

Rob:
The geography here? So I did some work lots of times up in Fairview. I knew Bob Salmond and he started Tri-S Concrete, so I was handling his product, lots. Bob, he had some health issues and he ended up the hospital. And I go there and I had my son with me and he was nine or ten, Shawn, our son. We went to his room and sit and talk. And so he told me some things. So one day [laughs] he said, there's a big piece of quartz, went up the conveyor belt to the crusher and it jammed, you know there's a rollers under it, and then there's sometimes arms, well it jam there in the rocks and everything there was falling off and it's causing a mess. So he shut it all down and climbs up there and he throws it off. He says there was a gold nugget in there. He says, about the size of your thumbnail. Everybody figured, yeah, that's got to be gold. [laughs] So one of the guys here running the loader says, "Well," to Bob, "Well uh, Can I have it?" he says, "Sure, you can have it. I don't care." He said, "What are you going to get for it?" And these are his exact words, "What are you going to get for it? A steak tonight for supper?" You know? Okay?

Garett:
[chuckles]

Rob:
So anyway, the geologist, in his infinite wisdom, whoever they had there, said, well, all the gravel in the Grimshaw gravel deposit came from the Hudson Bay. He said it was carried there by glaciers during the ice ages. And I thought, uh-huh, and you believe that? Because that's not where it came from. See, it came from the west, from the Rocky Mountains.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
And as I got to understand how things were like remove the Peace River, we've all drove lots of times and fill that full of ice, 300 feet to 400 feet thick glacier. Now it starts to melt. Well, it's going to erode a river basin through it. Okay.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
Well, a glacier is like a giant conveyor belt. It goes and it drops dirt as it melts, it goes and drops, it goes... The Grimshaw gravels, and I really like this place because I poured a lot of concrete. In fact, the walls of my shop are made from this concrete with the panels. I had to get them hauled in special. And I didn't tell them why. Because the gravel has gold in it see.

All:
[laugh]

Rob:
Aside from the fact a truckload of that fell on me and broke my leg when I was 18, it's like. But anyway, here's the story. The Grimshaw gravels average between 25 and 35 feet deep. Okay, 25 miles wide and 55 miles north and south. If you take out your calculator, there are ten cubic miles of gravel.

Garett:
Yeah. It's a lot of gravel.

Rob:
And when a glacier receeds, it drops riders like big rocks where it came from, not where it was going to. So going west through Fairview, when old Bob Reynolds was alive, he was the Mayor and he went around all around Fairview and he'd pick up these big granite boulders, like the table here. Anyway, he'd get them like 3 feet by 4 feet and he'd take two backhoes and he'd have them come together. He'd pick them up with the two buckets and back a trailer under it and sit them in there and then take them and he put them all around his house. And I poured his floor and his shop, Reynolds Plumbing. And he was the mayor and he told me how he did it, how he moved all those rocks. So Salmond built on this gravel pit. [laughs] So I got to know them quite well. And Rick is there and he's running the gravel pit. And his brother Tom, Bob passed away, but his brother Tom runs the concrete end of it. Rick does the gravel end of it. And so I says to Rick, you know, there's gold in your gravel eh? I said, have you ever taken the bottom of your wash bin apart and clean it out like once in a while. He says, "You know how heavy that would be?" [laughs] Yeah, that's the best part. He says, "No, I'm not doing that." Okay. I said, well, you know where your wash plant is, that four inch hose that comes out of there pumping water, you run it. All the gravel that they ever take out of there. It's washed. I said, the gold dust that's in your gravel is in that washout area, did you think so? I said, yeah. So I go there and I take my truck and I said, I want you to sell me a truckload of sand. Okay? He says, "Where from?" I say, right underneath your wash plant.

Garett:
[laughs]

Rob:
You can see all the sparkles in it eh? He takes the Bobcat, it's smaller, not the great big loader. And he gets me two scoops there they put in the truck. I go home and I built a little gold sluice out of wood. I actually did all this stuff. I'm not making it up. And I take the garden hose. I'm in my shop, it's dark, nobody knows what I'm doing. And I put a shovel full there and I wash it all down. And I thought, shoot you know, there isn't any? Well, it was made out of plywood. I just nailed sticks on it. It's very cheap and humble. I don't know what I'm doing, but in the morning I go and what had happened is on the side of my gold sluice, the nails weren't real solid. So there was a little tiny crack from the wood and the water had been dripping out there. And there was a fan of nice yellow sand on the top of the floor. And I swept it all up. I learned that it's actually really gold. And I thought, okay guys. If you could get all the gold out of the Grimshaw gravels, it would probably make a block of gold the size of 214 place because you got ten cubic miles of gravel! And I was like, yeah, but who's going to dig up the farms and communities and everything? So talking about money in the bank, I want you to think about something. In the oil industry here now, we do lots of hydraulic drilling, okay? They want to expose a line or something. They just come along and, you know, hydrovac.

Garett:
Yup.

Rob:
So if the stuff is only 35 feet deep, max. I want you to think about something. Say like a mosquito, we just poke it down. Okay? Now we're at 30 feet, right? And we go over 10 feet and we put another one and we take and we start flooding this one with water and we suck it out of that one. We didn't dig anything. We just pushed it in and we're going to get a whole bunch of dirty water out of it, right? That's what you're going to get.

Garett:
Yup.

Rob:
Plus gold dust. Someday somebody will figure out how to do that and they're going to be wealthy. It's going to happen. And I go back to them guys and I say, what's going on now? Because I go see it once in a while because one of the byproducts of their gravel pit is they have black chert. Okay? Now black chert, how do you explain it? It's jet black. Okay? That's the first thing. It's really black and you can nap it like you can make arrowheads or stuff out of it. Most of the arrowheads that are from the Peace Country come from black chert, believe it or not. Spear points, scrapers, arrowheads. That's what the thing that worked the best. And before I leave the gravel pit, I'm just going to tell you this. So I go and I become a member of the Paleontology society here in Grande Prairie. They were going to build that museum, which I worked on too. But anyway, they had this anthropologist there and he had all these examples in this case and they're all black chert. And then he makes a statement, he says, "We never found the quarry yet where they got all the black chert from." And I thought, really, in all your education, you can't figure that out. It's in the rivers. It's not in a quarry. So, let's say we're all sitting around a campfire 500 years ago and we move a rock up against the fire or we build the fire beside the rock. And when we heat that rock, it expands and breaks off in chunks eh? And they're not thick, like if you camp along rivers and you put rocks out of the riverbed against it and build fire around them, usually in the middle night they go bang.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
They break because there's a lot of moisture in those rocks eh? And I thought, you know, can't you see that that rock came out of the gravel? So the Peace River system is full of black chert in the gravel beds of the river, you know, small pieces. But in that gravel pit there's some big pieces and I wanted to get some to carve them. So I keep going back and say, you find any big pieces of black chert yet? No, we haven't found any. But anyway, so I said to Rick Salmond, you've been running this... [chuckles] Environment Canada required, instead of them just pumping water out of the bottom of the gravel pit, putting it through the wash plant and then back into the pond, that they had to build a pond out of clay with four foot bottom and then sides. So think of an elevated dugout. Alright? Here's the rules: gold does not go through clay or bedrock. So now you've made a pond with a clay bottom and you're putting your washings out of your gravel into that. So I says to Rick Salmond, so Rick, what did you do before you washed the gravel into that for 20 years? Because I'd be interested in buying some of that sand. You know, buy a truckload, or 20, or 30 truck loads.

All:
[chuckle]

Rob:
He says, "Well, I buried it." I say well that's interesting. So my next question, I said, well, what are you doing with all the silt that's in your brand new elevated duck pond that you built? He says, "Oh, once a year we clean it out." I say, what are you doing with that sand. He says, "Well, we pile it up in the yard by the shop there and people want to put it under their floors, so we sell it to them." He still won't believe me there's gold in it. And I was like, well I can't help you guys. [laughs] It's like the people that are doing this, they're building the garage or something on their house and they get this silty, gravely, it's got little tiny bits of rocks and stuff in it. You know, it's easy to work with.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
But it has gold dust in it you guys. [laughs] It's like, come on! You know, you can't convince people and it's like, fine, I can't help you. So I'm going to show you something else. So I started really becoming a student of the land here on what's going on. So before I leave gold, I'll teach you something. You go to Taylor, the World Gold Panning Championships. They got a great big sign. They do this every year. A bunch of old guys go down there and there's not too much nuggets there, it's mostly dust. So it takes some skill to pan it. Okay, does that make sense?

Preston and Garett:
Yup.

Rob:
But during the Depression, people were going along there and they were making better than wages, just panning gold. So I have this employee that worked for me and [chuckles] and it was a Sunday and this guy, he was a roofer before he came to work for me and they were broke. They had no money and they're up there at Fort St. John. And so they decided to go down the Taylor and see if they could find some gold. So Bruce says, he says, let me show you. We just went up around the corner from the bridge there, tried not to say. He says, we shoveled gravel all day and they actually found six little gold nuggets the size of match heads. I thought, yeah, but every shovel full of that gravel you throwing out has gold dust in it a little bit. You're throwing it away. So he says, that night they took it to the bar and they go to the bartender and they say, "What'll you give us for this." And he says, "I don't know, I'll give you a bottle of the cheap stuff or whatever." So for all day shovelling gravel, they got a couple of drinks. Now, they hold the World Gold Panning Championships there, right? There's that sign, right in Taylor. My wife's family lived there. I tell them, guys, you guys are looking in the wrong place. You don't understand the hydrology of a river. You don't understand about gold. Gold floats. Gold dust floats in water. It's carried along. So I thought to myself, Well, I don't have to pick up a gold pan or shovel. I can show you where the gold is. They don't believe me. It's like, okay, take out a map of Northern Alberta. You follow the Peace River from Taylor and you watch and you'll see it makes a big "S" turn. And there's what's called many Islands there and under many Islands is gold. Has to be! Because the current changes velocity and the gold drops. And I look at that and say, I don't care anymore. I just wanted to find it. So I found actual gold in the gravel pile. I know where there's gold in the river. And I'm sitting here still working for a living, you know? But it's okay. That's fine. I'm going to tell you one more thing about gold. Another guy that I've met along the way, Roy McCarty. Roy McCarty is in Spirit River. And I was telling Roy, I said, you know, Roy, if I was retired like you and I had nothing to do, I said, in the spring I'd go up the Alaska Highway and I said, I go to every culvert under the road and I'd clean the culvert out and I'd pan it. Because the bottom of the culvert is like a gold sluice, okay? And I said, then I would just take a map and I'd put at kilometer such and such, this one has gold there and this one has gold there, this one has nothing or whatever. I said, you could just go every year after that and just go to the right culverts. Hmm. Now listen to his story. He says, "Yeah, I bought a camper van there years ago and my kids were small and we went up to Alaska." He says, "So my son Darren," and I know Darren! [chuckles] I worked with him. He says, "Yeah, he came out of the culvert with a gold nugget." He says, "that's about a half inch around." So I said to him, [laughs] do you know which creek it was or what mileage it was?

Garett:
[chuckles]

Rob:
He said, "No." And I thought, Roy. [chuckles]

Garett:
[laughs]

Rob:
Surely you would understand that if there was a gold nugget in the culvert that upstream from there, there's gold in the Hills. Yeah.

Garett:
[laughs]

Rob:
He says, "I don't even know where it was." He says, "My kid come out and got a keepsake." So that's things happen. Okay?

15:24 - Glaciology and Geology

Rob:
So I became interested in glaciers. And it's just, I don't know, I don't obsess about it, but I decided I wanted to learn about where the glaciers went. So our son Shawn had in junior high, they had to have a project, you know, a science project. Okay? So what the heck, I got a camcorder and I said, okay, I'm going to help you because, you know he, you know how kids are about a science project. [immitates moaning and complaining sounds]

Preston and Garett:
[laugh]

Rob:
So I said, okay, we'll go have some fun. I said, It'll be fun. And why I had him there is I took him to, just in the county of Grande Prairie, all right? Which goes all the way to the BC border. He says, I'm going to take you to the big rocks that I've seen when I've been out hunting or driving or working or whatever. So we did about ten or twelve of them. And why I would do that is I'd have them go stand beside the rock. And that gives you a definition of how big it is because it's always the same person. So anyway, then we took the county map and we wrote down the land legal land quarters. I had the map with me. I said, okay, this is where we are right here. This is a science project. I said, Okay. All the green rocks have green pins, all the grey rocks have white pins or white rocks or black or whatever, and brown and red and green, all the different colors. I said, now, when I put it on a board and we took the same color of string as the pegs and joined them together. All right? And they all converge. Same place as the highway goes between Grande Prairie and Dawson Creek. So the glacier came out of there and fanned out over the County of Grande Prairie. And it doesn't mean anything other than that there are places that the glacier didn't touch. Okay, top of Saskatoon Mountain. If you go to the west side of Saskatoon Mountain, you can see that it was like an island in a giant glacier at one time. And if you go straight west from Grande Prairie after Wembley, where the elk always hung around, that guy has that field with the elk in it there. When they cut the new highway through, they cut through, there's lots of river rock this big that was carried by the. You know, it's all in the fields. There's rocks everywhere. And they're not big rocks, they're little rocks. But the big rocks that I was showing, Shawn, are riders. They rode on top of the glaciers. Does that make sense?

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
The glacier receeds, they just plop. So if you go to the west of the County Grande Prairie, you have all these green rocks and there's some big grey ones there. And there's a couple of rocks that I know about, and they got to be ten to twelve feet in each dimension, you know? And there was one down on my place and you can map them. It's actually quite easy to do, and how they follow. So then I was doing the job where the new swimming pool is in Grande Prairie. And they had to make a cut because, you know like, into the dirt and it was straight like a cliff, but it's all soil, silty soil. And you could see layers and layers and layers and layers of about three-sixteenths of an inch to an eight of an inch. It's like the lake would come up, and the lake would go down, you know, in the summer, go up, melt, go down. And Bear Creek that runs through Grande Prairie is what drained Bear Lake. But Bear Lake used to go right over top of Grande Prairie.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
That's why it's so flat around Grande Prairie.

Garett:
Because it's the bottom of a lake bed.

Rob:
That's right.

Garett:
Yeah.

Preston:
And Bear Lake is so shallow.

Rob:
Yeah. And if you go east to the Kleskun Hills, yeah it's funny how you meet people. But anyway, I did some work for Cliff Innis and Cliff owned the Kleskun Hills. He had 13 quarters of land up there. Listen to his words. He said, "Yeah, I got four quarters of land up there to have gravel on." And I said, yeah, that's glacier gravel that was carried from the west. And when it come up against the Kleskun Hills, it stopped and went around it. If you go on the north side of Kleskun Hill, there's rocks all over those pastures. And they're about two to three feet in diameter. And then on the south side, elevation rock. Do you know what I mean by elevation rock? You're coming to the Kleskun Hills. It's right by the highway. It's painted white with a rose on it. And it tells the elevation, that's elevation rock. We see that rock was carried there by glaciers and stopped there. It's all smooth and rounded. It's about five feet by three and a half feet by five feet. And some old pioneer, he knew the elevation there somehow and he wrote it on, painted it on. But when they cut the north side of the highway through, they actually had to move it uphill. So it changed a couple of feet. So the elevation rock was moved from the south side of the freeway is the old highway, the north side is new, and they went right where it was.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
So anyway, I've learned all these things because of personal interest, not for personal gain. It's just like it's something I'm interested in. You know, land forms and stuff here and the people that you meet along the way, and they always add to your knowledge of the land. You know what I mean? And I just, it's sad to me that in a sense, we're losing this knowledge. Because if you talk to young guys, say somebody is 14, and you say, well, the glacier went here and it's like, so. And it's like, fair enough. So I don't know how to run a computer either, so. [laughs]

Garett:
[laughs]

Rob:
See, we're all living in our own element. [laughs] But when my wife, before I married her, I'm going to show you some things. She had a place in Fort St. John and I went to see her. We weren't married. I guess I was courting her, I guess you call it that. And the next door neighbour was busy in his garage doing something there. And I was kind of bored because she was teaching school. So I'm waiting until she gets home to see her type thing. So I go over there. I said, what are you doing? [laughs] You got to understand something here, that cement mixer going in his garage. Alright. But what I thought was a small cement mixer with a plastic tub one. He says, "Oh, I have a friend who's a pilot," and he's a geologist. He says, "So what we do on weekends is we fly to the bottom of glaciers in his helicopter and we take samples and I come here and test them for gold." And I thought, well look at that eh? So he showed me how it all works. I said, have you found any? And he says, "No."

All:
[laugh]

Rob:
Well shoot. So I'm standing there looking at this thing and thought you know what? I've seen this before. Only a lot bigger. It's like looking in the back of a concrete truck transit mix. It's the same thing. So here's my theory. You take a whole bunch of gravel like five cubic meters of gravel, dump it in there, throw a bunch of water in it, swish it around and around and you run it right down the thing. Okay? But before you do you weld some little bars on it like a gold sluice. And they guarantee the last stuff out of the truck, if there's any gold in that gravel, will be on your shoots. Guarantee it. You see gold is heaviest. So I said this to Bud that drove for Inland. Listen to his words. He said, well I always tease these guys you know, I say, because they're washing their trucks out and I've seen thousands of trucks washed. I always say, do you guys find any gold nuggets? And they always say, "No." [laughs]

Preston:
[laughs]

Rob:
I say, oh, all right. So one day I said this to Bud and he says, "No. But when I was done washing out the truck, there was a wedding ring on the top of the little washout pile of gravel, like a gold ring." Now, somebody running a loader, somebody whatever. But the point is, it was the last thing out of the truck because it was the densest material in the truck.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
Does that make sense? It was on the washout pile. I thought, I've been vindicated. I was right.

All:
[chuckle]

Rob:
So in the process of all this, I worked in High Prairie. You see, I'm telling you stuff that I don't tell people, but what the heck, it doesn't matter. So anyway! I say my famous line to be people, oh did you find any gold nuggets there. And he says, "No." But listen to this guy. He said, "In the winter we had no work. So I took a job where I was running a cat." He said, "I'm building the lease." And he was up at the tower road north of Salt Prairie. So you go to east from High Prairie, you go over the end of the lake at Grouard, you come to Salt Prairie and you go up to the tower. So disguised as a hunter, one fall I went up there. I was hunting, actually. Anyway, I got to know this for sure, for myself. So this is his story. He said, "From the cat. And on the south side of the bank, he's building this lease, it's flat and so there's always that black dirt and stuff. So there was a shiny thing." And he was interested enough, that he shut down the cat and walked over there to see what was shiny. He says, "It was a rock, about three quarter inch around, and it was pale blue." He says, "When you held it up the sun, you could see rainbows in it." Did you know the first diamond in Alberta was found in Entwistle? Did you know that?

Garett:
I did not, no.

Rob:
Did you know De Beers from Africa? The diamond cartel staked 22,000 acres around Peace River for diamond exploration. Did you know that?

Garett:
No, I didn't.

Rob:
And two shops down from my shop through the back ally. You see those mini bags are about four by four by five or whatever. They're vinyl bags that they put grain in or whatever. Well, they would bring those mini bags there like 30 or 40 at the time and they'd take them in there with their little Bobcat thing or whatever they had. And they had a sign that was no bigger than the screen on this thing that says De Beers Canada. There's no great big sign or anything. It's just. And I thought, this bears is watching. [chuckles]

Garett:
[chuckles]

Rob:
And you know what? They left. And they never found any diamond producing ground around Peace River. All right. But I worked with another guy [chuckles] who I got to know quite well, and he was a rodbuster. And he went up in the Northwest Territories and he was the foreman that tied all the steel in the diamond mine there. That was his trade. He was a rodbuster and he wasn't just a peasant there. He run that, that all that job. Anyway, you have to have kimberlite to have diamonds, right? kimberlite is like a chimney coming up out of the center of the Earth.

Preston:
Oh. Yeah, yeah.

Rob:
So you have heated pressure, okay?

Garett:
Hmhmm.

Rob:
So I started doing some homework on diamonds because, you know, I'm still interested in the ground here and I'm still pouring, blah, blah, blah. But anyway.

All:
[chuckle]

Rob:
Let's do have the Ice Age traveling over top of a kimberlite tube and grinding some of that to pieces. Why wouldn't there be a diamond dropped here or there in gravel? So I met another driver from Slave Lake, this old guy, [chuckles] they had the gravel pit there and they give him a little trailer to live in it. He was the hound dog. He was the security guy. Plus he worked there. So at night he lived there. He said, "One day, I walked over to something in the gravel pile." He said, "There was a shiny rock there." He went over and picked it up and he says, "I kept it for quite a while." And finally he had a geologist look at it. He said, "Yeah, if this had been a little hotter and under a little more pressure, this would have been a diamond." He said, "It's broken half." He said, "I looked all over the gravel pile for the other side of it." He said, "I never could find it." And I thought, I've had two guys sort of on the ground teach me something. And, you know the guy that found the blue rock? I says to him, [chuckles] what'd you do with that thing? He said, "I gave it to my kids. It was up on the fridge for a long time. But, I don't know. Somebody lost it."

All:
[chuckle]

Garett:
That's the way it goes.

Rob:
Yeah. So you meet these people and you ask these funny little questions, all right? And you think, is information worth something to, you know, is knowledge worth something? So I met this other superintendent named Kim. And those poor guys, they sit on those job shacks half their life, and they want to be home, and they take a lot of pressure. Being a superintendent is a terrible job. So anyway, I said to Kim, I was talking to him, I said, where were you born? Because I'm always interested in where people come from. And he said, "I was actually born in the Yukon." That's not normal.

Preston and Garett:
[chuckle]

Rob:
Most people went to the north, but they weren't born there.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
And then he's come back see? Down into, and he was actually from Regina. So being naturally curious and poor and broke, I said to him, do you know anything about gold? [chuckles] He says, "Yeah, I do." He says, "The first job I had, I'm 14, I shoveled gravel into my uncle's gold sluices." Then he explained to me what they were doing. You know, when you walk into people's houses, they have that mat. It says, welcome. It's got that kind of fibery stuff.

Garett:
Yeah. Like the coconut hair.

Rob:
Yeah. So they take those things and they put them in a long trough end to end, and they run the gravel over the water. They would stack them all up after a week and burn them. And then they would sift the ashes and pound them. I thought, well, that's really stupid. Why didn't you just take a club and pound them out and put them back? Why did you burn them? But anyway, that's what they were doing. Then he stops and he says to me, "It's funny, you should ask me that." He says, "You know, I've just been in Mongolia for two years. I've been building a gold sluice, you know, smelter for Kinross." Now, right away I'm interested because I own shares in Kinross. So who's Kinross? Well, Kinross was a company that was spun off from Canadian Pacific when they went through southern BC and southwestern Alberta with the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Railways needed coal, right? To run coal steam engines at that time. So they developed those coal mines on there. You can drive. They're still there. But once they were done with the coal stage, they spun that off and it's called Kinross. And I actually had bought some shares in Kinross. So I asked him, what was their gold like in their mine in Mongolia and he says, "It's very rich." That doesn't do anything for you, right? But here comes the knowledge of the man on the ground that's worth real money. He says, "But on the other side of that mountain range is B2Gold. And it's even richer." So knowing I don't know how to run a computer, I phoned my trusty computer friend here at the house, my wife. I said, I want you to buy me [chuckles] $10,000 worth of B2Gold.

Garett:
[chuckles]

Rob:
$0.20 a share. So I watched BNN. I'm just a guy. You know, I eat macaroni like anybody else.

Garett:
[chuckles]

Rob:
Okay? So I watch BNN. So one week it's $0.20 a share and about a week later, it's $0.22. And I thought well, I could sell it. I'd make 10%. That's pretty good money, isn't it? You know, 10%. That's $1,000 on my 10,000. I was watching it and then it go back down to 20 cents and go up to 22. And I did about six times. I thought, man, why didn't I just keep flipping it, you know? But I did.

Garett:
[chuckles]

Rob:
But one day there was a piece of land that I really wanted to buy. So I cashed in my chips. I sold B2Gold for $3.93 a share, $0.07 less than 20 times my money. Had I sold everything I owned, could borrow, or steal and put it on B2Gold, I would have been retired in quite a while ago. You see, knowledge of things is worth money.

32:10 - Some Interest in Gold

Rob:
And now, you know, money is an interesting thing. Money gives you a lot of freedom, okay, to do what you want to do.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
I'll show it to you again. I was working in Fort Nelson. This is this man's story. It's always about, I always go back to gold because I've always been interested in it, because I've worked with gravel and concrete all my life. So this guy, he got a one ton truck, just what you'd think of a one ton, put a flat deck on it and he mounted a portable gold sluice on it. It didn't come off the truck. He bolted on. Then he had a trailer and he put a Bobcat on the trailer. Alright? Do you understand that? Spring comes, he just drives up the Alaska Highway to where the Klondike Goldrush was. This is what he does. He takes his little Bobcat, he gets his Honda pump, just like we all think of a two inch pump. And he's got water pumping, and his gold sluice is going, and he sifts the gravel. Old tailings, from when those guys were up there in 1890. And he's reworking their tailing piles. They're all along the rivers. Okay.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
And he just camps and does it. 3000 ounces a year he recovers.

Garett:
Wow.

Rob:
Yeah, that's what I said. You may have known Cam Jones that lived in Fort St. John. You remember Tim Jones. You should know him.

Preston and Garett:
Yes.

Rob:
Yeah, well Cam is his brother. Right. Listen to Cam's words. Cam became Assistant to the Deputy Minister of Mining and Minerals or whatever in BC. Right? How I know he got to that? I don't know, but he come in that through the back door, through the oil industry. Does that make sense?

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
So Cam tells me this thing. I'm always interested in what people are doing you know, and their thoughts. So Cam says, yeah. He says when all of his stuff was coming over his desk, it was a conflict of interest if he had done anything with it. But after that job ended and he went back into private work, not in government work, then he could do something. Go back to the Caribou Gold Rush, go to Barkerville. There's a huge pile of tailings there from that gold rush. He bought it, the whole pile. I don't know what he paid for it, it's not my business. Because there's proven gold reserves in that pile of tailings, $40 per ton. When I talked to him, he said, yeah, I'm just putting together the equipment to go through it again. You see, people have, everybody, they have their thing. But when you start talking to people about gold, all of a sudden they change. All right? Did you ever watch Gold Rush Alaska, that crazy program? Those guys are up there and snivelling and whining about everything, motors going.

Garett:
No I did not. Sounds like a reality TV show, though.

Rob:
That's what it is.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
So anyway, as I got to know, Paul Fries, Paul is the guy that owns Panda Oilfield right here in Grande Prairie. And he sold it out at the peak of the oil industry when it sort of was at a peak. He sold his business lock, stock, and barrel, and at 51 became quite wealthy. He marched over to me and says, "I want to buy that section of land that you have." And I said to him, I said, well Paul, it's not for sale. He said, "No, no, no, no, that's not what we're talking about." He says, "I want to buy it." Who's this guy? [chuckles] Well, the very next day, we're going to Costa Rica. We had booked a trip when we were taking our son Shawn, and we're leaving because it was spring break all over America for universities and stuff, and we had a hard time booking a trip to Hawaii. Anyways, there was no rooms. So we got two days in this hotel, two days in that hotel, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We go to Costa Rica. So while we're there, I said, Paul, well I'll think about it. So I go there and I talked to my wife. She says, you're going to be 78 when you get that land paid for. [grumbles] So we made the decision to sell, and we come home. So I phoned him and I said, Paul, I'll sell you the land. This is my price. It's not negotiable. He says, I'll have a check with your lawyer's tomorrow morning. Certified check. Four days later, he's farming my place. See, that's what happens when you're dealing with somebody actually has some money, they can live their dreams. Does that make sense to you?

Garett:
Yeah, it does, yeah.

Rob:
It's not the money that, it's not the wealth or anything. It's like, it gives them freedom to do what they want. So we became neighbors. And he's a good farmer and he's looking after the place. And we talk once in a while, once a year or something, compare notes. One day he says to me, "You want to buy my gold mine?" I said, Paul, I don't know anything about gold mining, but I have some interest in gold, for what it represents. I've always been interested it. You go 30 miles past where they filmed this reality gold rush Alaska thing, which is actually the Yukon. And that's where his claim is. They went up there and they would get there as soon as the river opened up and they could go. They were making a million dollars profit a year mining gold. This is an oil man, okay, he says, "Do you want to buy it? I've had enough." He says, "I'm never home. I wanted to be a farmer. I wanted to raise grain. My boys just want to come home and farm with me." You know, they were sick of never being home. Those guys had girlfriends who were getting to be marriage age and stuff. And they're gone for half the year up there, slopping around in the muck, in the gravel. You know that he finally just decommissioned it. He said, "The camp is there. The fuel tanks are full of fuel. There's a big trackhoe there that's loose the D8-Cat. It's all there. Just, walk in and take over." I said, first of all, I don't know anything about it. Second of all, I don't have the money. You see, I've been exposed to this around me all the time. So, when I sold him the land, we sold my wife and I. He asked for a condition that if we sell anymore, that he has right at first refusal, that's fair, right? Because it took me ten years to make this block of land.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
I bought out neighbors. But I still own land that I know he'd like to have. And his two boys, they like cattle and I've fenced all my land and dugouts and stuff. And he said to me, I wish I'd have bought on this side of the Red Willow. And I thought, you know, Paul, you made a classical, really dumb move here. Why didn't you just come and say to me, you've got twelve quarters of land here and I've got money. So we're going to sit here and we're going to play some kind of a game. And when you're happy with the amount of money that I can give you, then I'll be happy with the amount of land that you can give me. I would have sold it all to him, but that's not what he wanted. He only wanted to buy. He bought five quarters from me and I kept the others. Now he wants the others. [chuckles] But of all the gold that family mined up there, you know, they haven't spent one cent of it. You know, they take it to the foundry in White Horse and they melt it down and make those little gold bricks out of it. So I said to my wife, wife, when I've had enough playing cowboy, you go talk to Paul and you trade him gold bricks for that land.

Preston and Garett:
[laugh]

Rob:
Isn't that a good guy to know? He's not broke! He doesn't have to go and get a loan for it. It's like, well, I'll see, I'll give you twelve gold bricks and...

All:
[laugh]

Rob:
But you see, there's a guy that lived his dreams. He came with his family to the La Crete area and his dad started farming, cleared land, and they were from a big family. And finally, the economy being what it was, his dad had to sell the farm to feed his family, and they left. Paul was 17. He went and started working in the oil industry and by 51, with the work ethic he'd learned on the farm, he built that business and retired out as a multi-millionaire. From 17 to 51. And you think about that, that's 34 years. Then he goes and he, you know, his dream was to have a farm. So he starts buying farmland. Now he's going up there and decided to become a miner. And you know, people say this to me all the time, well, everything you touch turns money. Not doesn't. But I get out of bed in the morning and I go to work. And I try. Some days I really, really mess up bad. I really fail [chuckles] and you don't do so good. And I've learned a few simple things about business and about work, but I've been exposed to people in this country. They weren't dreamers. They were builders of this country. And I've been able to rub shoulders with them. And, you know, I really honor their work ethic. And they just could see tomorrow. Like, if you can look at what do you think is going to happen next year, that's cool, right? And you think, well gee wiz, you know? Well, if you can look ten years out, that's good. But if you can look 20 years out and say, this is where this city is going to be, or this is where, this is what's going to happen, or whatever. Tell me you won't be successful because you position yourself accordingly?

41:56 - Seeing Tomorrow

Rob:
So talking about water, water is wealth. My wife is from Nevada. And down there, water is everything. Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam now has only 40% of the water that it would hold. The allocation of water out of Lake Mead exceeds its rechargeability. Communities, like Las Vegas, that get their water from there. That's a poor investment because in your lifetime, there will be no water there. It's going to be like a ghost town. My wife's grandfather, see, this is about somebody who could see tomorrow. He was a dirt farmer, okay? He raised cabbages and lettuce and radishes and stuff. And he had migrate Mexican workers come and work for them to harvest and plant and stuff. That's what they were doing. They lived east of Las Vegas, about 35 miles at Overton. And there's what's called the muddy there and really it [sighs], but it can flood. But in the middle of summer. You can easily jump across it. You or I, easy. Certainly Preston could! But anyway, this old guy knew that country down there, and west of Las Vegas, I don't know. I was there. It's a fair drive, 50 miles or something.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
There's a community called Pahrump. Well, when Pahrump wasn't there, my wife's grandfather went to the government. And what he paid for it, I have no idea. Pennies per acre. But there was something there that he seen that nobody else saw. There was a spring there and they didn't see the value of water. So he bought where Pahrump now stands. He owned it all. And in his diaries, he would list this year, I ran over with the disc this many rattlesnakes. Like we're talking about, like 180 the first year. And then you can see it's going down. And he planted that all to cotton. Yeah, it was hard. He's buying fuel. He was selling cotton. My wife is hoed cotton. You think about people working as slaves in the US. You think about raising cotton. My wife did that. She went out and hoed cotton as a girl. She said, you'd come in and you'd be all green like the Jolly Green Giant or picked tomatoes all day and you'd literally be green. But the grandfather, her grandfather could see 50 years ahead. He passes away. Developers come. There was my wife's dad and his brother and two sisters, so four kids. And developers come and they wanted to build a town site there at Pahrump. Each of those kids got one and a half million dollars.

Garett:
Wow.

Rob:
This old man was worried about how many rattlesnakes he ran over. Like, imagine going out there and working in all the rattlesnakes in there. You know, like it's a desert. But he seen value where nobody else could see it. So my wife, being from Nevada, I have learned something. So Joanie, my stepdaughter, went to school with Katie Prescott. And they graduated together and we went to graduation. So she says to me, "Would you like to go to the Prescott Ranch and stay overnight?" I said, sure. I don't know these people. But around here, that's house and a barn and some cows, right? So we get to the Prescott Ranch after graduation. It's 54 thousand acres! So the old guy he says to me, "You want to see the place?" So we finished breakfast, you know, bacon and eggs or whatever. Jump in the pick up and when we got back it was supper time. He says, "Well, that was one road." Listen to his story. He says, "I've nearly lost this place twice. The power company has offered me $12 million for the water rights under this ranch." He said, "What would you do?" I said, I'd sell it. I said, you're here to raise cattle. But, I said, you told me yourself that you've nearly lost the place twice. I said, you have one daughter, that doesn't want to be here. Maybe your wife would like not to have that stress, because these are not young people.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
I said, why don't you take it a little easier? And I said, you could still raise cattle, but you don't have to worry anymore. You see, the principle of that was not only could they have the water rights, but they could run the power grid in a big power grid along that ranch for miles without having to interact with a whole bunch of other people, because it's just, you're only dealing with one customer, so to speak.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
To wherever they're taking that power to, Las Vegas or whatever. But this is what I learned talking to that old guy. And when I sat in his home and I read their local paper and it talked about water call. Do you know what water call is?

Garett:
No.

Preston:
They limit how far you can...

Rob:
This is what it is. Say your guy's grandfather and my grandfather all went to Idaho, but your guy's grandfather got there three years before me. And you took out water rights onto your land. And I get there and I homestead a piece of land, but my water rights are three years behind you now. We both got potatoes growing and it's dry and hot. And you do a water call who gets the water? People with the first water rights. And my potatoes sit there and shrivel up and die. Is water valuable? And as I was down in that desert country and watching from the sidelines what was happening there, I made up my mind everything that happens in the US happens here. And I'm going to tell you something, in the future, water is going to be valuable. And people don't believe me. And I say, all right, little experiment for you. I want you to go to any corner store and buy a liter of water. You're going to pay whatever, you're going to pay $2.50, $3.00 for it. You go out and you stand beside the pump and you look at the price of gasoline and it's less than water.

Garett:
Yup.

Rob:
People don't believe me. It's like guys, water's everything. So when I made, my wife calls the Money Pit, the dam, the spring, I did it so that I always have water. It's spring fed. And I look at that and I think, you know, the day will come. You see these pipelines that we build now all through this country. I bet you and your guys' lifetime, you'll see pipelines going to the US from these big rivers here for communities just like Las Vegas and communities. I have the farm magazines right over another table for this month. And it shows in Oregon that reservoir behind that dam, you can see the bottom of it, and nice big house boats sitting there. They're hardly in any water. They can't get them out of there because it's and, you know, you go all through the west, the Southwest of the US, I tell you what, it's serious. The Ogallala reservoir underground, what do you call it? It's under three States. It's not charging as fast as water is being pumped out of it to raise alfalfa or whatever. Okay? So a guy punches a well on his place and they're pumping out of the water reservoir, that's not the right word.

Garett:
Hmhmm.

Rob:
It's like a great big underground lake, that's hundreds of miles across. And it's in the soil. It's being depleted faster, than it's being recharged. And the guy that I watched this program on, he said, in my son's lifetime, we're going to be back to dry land farming here, he says there's no water. So when he took the farm over from his dad, he was pumping water at 15 feet, he says now I'm down to 75. The aquifer is going dry. And I look at that and I think of this country where we live, and I think, you know, who is right? These people that came here from other parts of the world, and all they wanted was their dream. They wanted the land, they wanted to build a home. And sometimes it's three and four generations, and some have given up, some have moved away. I talked to one old guy in Fairview, and he said, when I got to Fairview, he said, when I left Europe, he said we had roads, we had railroads. I got to here he says, like, I went back 50 years. He said there was no roads. You couldn't go anywhere. You were going on still horses and buggies. You know, like, in 100 years we've gone from people clearing land with axes, to jets landing here every day. In 100 years! And I look at it and I think, where are we going to be 100 years from now?

Garett:
That's something I've always found fascinating about the Peace Country, is that it's like you're saying about the home steading and like the settling part of it, that it happened much later than it happened in other places in North America.

Rob:
That's right.

Garett:
And so it's sort of like, you've learned a bunch of stuff from settling the rest of the continent, and now you're settling this tiny corner of the continent with some lesson learned.

Rob:
Yeah. You know, I've had some very unique experiences with some very wonderful people. And this one is a real tragedy. Reg Isley, who built fluidic power here and Risley Steel. He is the man that invented the rotosaw, the first mechanical logging system, you know, where it grabs the tree and it cuts it off at the bottom and then it stacks it in the pile and that limit machine. See all these forestry machines? Reg Isley had grade six education, then his parents move out to a homestead. And what he had for school books after that, Popular Mechanics. His parents would buy him those. He, before his death, had, not his death. Wait. That's not the right words. He held already 2500 patents on things that he invented, and one of them was for helicopter and used in aircraft. It's now on, bought that patent and it's all on every helicopter that's in the air. And there's something to do with up at the top, just some little thing he made. So I got to know Reg and, you know, everybody's different. And he was a pilot, and he could make anything out of steel. Do you know that right here in Grande Prairie, he had purchased a machine, it was only one of two in Canada? And I made these tracks for it, and I put them into the floor. So I had to cut this out. And I did all the concrete for him. But I got to know him quite well. And this machine was sitting there, and I'm working, and he would go over and it would pick up a drill bit, and it'd go over the exact spot and drill a hole, put that bit back, pick up a threading, take it over, thread it. All night long. It would make stuff. It never stopped. It was all computerized. And he told me he could make anything right here in Grande Prairie except an engine, because he didn't have a foundry. And I went out to his home and I'm doing this big, it was a long sidewalk, and then he had like a gazebo out there. Listen to his words. He said, I want it to look nice from the air. He's a pilot. I never had anybody say that to me ever before or since.

Garett:
[chuckles]

Rob:
I thought, well. See, it's a different perspective. He liked to fly, and he wanted his place to look nice when he flew over it. So one day I'm there doing some more work for him. And because I had known him and we had dealings, I guess he trusted me or something. I don't know, something like that. But anyway, he's building a helicopter in his little private shop, not in town. This is his own place. And he had this aeronautical engineer from Alabama there timing the two turbines that run this helicopter so that they were stroking identical. And, you know, I'm working and I here this [imitates turbines spinning up], you could hear this helicopter. And I go in there and look and it's not like any helicopter you've ever seen. You know how a helicopter has that little thing come out and a little propeller on the end, doesn't have that. It has two sets of chopper blades, and they turn opposite to each other, one's going clockwise, one's going counterclockwise. He had a fuel tank over each tire. And you sat in it, the pilots sat here and the passenger right behind him, not side by side. It was tiny. And I stood there and I thought, I'm looking at tomorrow. I'm looking what, maybe in your guys' lifetime, where we kind of follow the roads with something that's not on the road. It's like a corridor. You know, the day might come when we park our own personal helicopter on our driveway. Do you ever realize that? We travel through the air? You know, it's not so far fetched, because I saw it with my own eyes.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
You want to hear tragedy. That man with all that ability and that knowledge and the businesses he's built and the people he's employed here, he got dementia. He doesn't know who he is. And that's sad. He does not know anything. All that ability that we've lost. But you know what? He wouldn't let anybody into their back place where they had all of these design things, like they're building brand new equipment and stuff. But he let me. Because he knew that didn't mean what it meant to other people. I wasn't there to pirate his knowledge. You know, this country is full of people like that, that they have knowledge. The Peace Country is a special place because there's people here that have knowledge that does not exist in the rest of the world. And I'm amazed by that. And, you know, a lot of people, they come here and they go, man, I can't wait to get out of here. And it's like, go. Be gone. [laughs] You know? Just get out of dodge.

All:
[chuckle]

Because if you can't be happy here, you're never going to be happy here. And I look at I think, you know what? When I die, and I don't know what that's going to be, but when I die, I would be just content to be buried here with the pioneers that came here. It's just fine by me. You know, this is how it is. And I go about what I'm doing out there, my little place there, and I raise cattle. And you know what? Everybody has their own thing. I've always wanted to have a piece of land and have some cattle. You know? And I go out there, and I take the money I have to spend. And, you know, it's not always good. I thought, you know, I want to buy some good bulls. And I don't have 100 grand to buy bulls.

Garett:
[chuckles]

Rob:
So I went to a sale, and the bull I had looked at, you know, they had them all listed in the catalog and stuff. They run him through the sale first, $16,700. And I says to myself, self, I'm in the wrong place because I don't have that kind of money. [chuckles] We had, I needed two bulls, and I had $10,000. So $16,000 wasn't going to make it. And you won't believe this. I'm sitting there. I don't know what was wrong with the rest of the guys in that sale, because there was a lot of people there. The full brother of that bull comes through the sale. And I bought him for $4,300. And I thought, well you cowboys? I happen to know that bull's carrying the same genetics. [chuckles] I'm not totally stupid here. So I'm sitting there and I bought the next bull for $5,400. I had spent most of my money. I put insurance on it, cost me $480, so I had just enough money to buy my wife and I a hamburger. Now, I have these bulls and I still have them, they're ten years old now. They still look good. I take my calves to the sale, and, you know, I mean, it's my year's work with the cattle. It's not how I make all my income, but you still want to do good. And the owner and manager of this auction stood up in front of all them people. He said, "These are the best cattle at this sale. These are the best cows here." Well, what do you think happened to the price of them? It wasn't the auctioneer that said that. And, I mean, if I had stood up and said, guys, these are my best calves sort of thing it's like, so? So anyway, I've been slowly looking at what I do. If you can be five percent better this year than last year in what you're doing, pretty soon you start gaining. Okay? So I build fences, I build dugouts, I work on the facilities, all of those things, genetics, everything. You know, I'll just get it to where I want it to be and guess what? It's going to be this old guy standing here, and it's too much work, it's too hard. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Had I started buying land when I was young, I'd've had all those years to raise cattle. As it is, I started when I was in my 50s and here I'm in my 70s. [smacks lips] Not good, huh? [chuckles]

59:16 - Some Final Stories

Rob:
I don't know what else there is to tell you. You know, I'll tell you something else before you go, because this is history. This is really, really history. I don't know if you guys seen this, but eight years ago, seven, six years ago, somewhere in that neighborhood, there was a guy built a replica of a steam paddle-wheeler stern-wheeler that used to go up and down the Peace rivers here. You think of the Mississippi River, you know,you see all the, the big thing at the back turning?

Garett:
Yup.

Rob:
They used to have them on the Peace River. And they came up the Smoky, to where the Simonette runs in, and then they came up the hill and the old Bezanson town site is there.

Garett:
Yup.

Rob:
I don't know if you guys ever went there, but there's still all foundations there. But anyway, I've seen that thing down there, and it was all painted and built, and then it disappeared. And I never knew what happened, but in October, I did a job for a guy. He was the guy that built it, and pieces of it were still laying in his yard. This is the story. He went out. He wanted to build an exact replica, of a stern paddle wheeler like it was here. The thing was 100 feet long, just like you'd think of when you see these old shows or photographs of the Missouri or Mississippi Rivers. Same thing, except it didn't have boilers and steam. It had modern engine and hydraulically driven... And took his because of the size of this thing. And he was going to have, you know, where you could go and for a ticket he'd take you up the river for the day and maybe have lunch and come back. That was his dream. He had it all finished. He went out and he cut down. He built this himself. He went and cut down trees. He got a timber permit. He cut down the trees and hauled them to his place and had a little mill set up there. And he sawed these trees into three by twelve planks. You know these, they're substantial.

Garett:
Yup.

Rob:
He built all these things. And he had a guy from Nova Scotia came and taught him how to put the oakum between the planks to seal it. It was all painted white. And one night some kids went down there, they were partying there. Whether they did it intentionally or whatever, they caught it on fire and it burned right to the ground. He had recreated history here that was lost for a 100 years. But I met that guy and I sat in his place and talked to him, and he walked around and showed it to me, and he told me the struggles he had. And you know, that after it was burned, his wife divorced him [sighs] because he'd spent all their money building it. No insurance. Isn't that sad?

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
I don't know if you have to go. I'll tell you one other thing that's history here, too. When I said about that them stern wheelers used to come up to the Bezanson township. So last fall, not the one past, but the one before, and last spring, I did work for Ross Adams on their Buffalo Ranch.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
And it goes right down to the Smoky and his dad, I had known his dad, Lyle Adams, and he used to have a crane service in Grande Prairie. He had a little mobile crane, and he went around lifting stuff for people, and he got tired and died and gave that up. But Ross went down there and he made it a company called Buffalo Gravel. And they take the gravel off at one bench of the land, and they have a big crusher there and loaders. It's substantial business. Okay. It's not a pretend business. I mean, there's hundreds of loads of gravel go out of there every day. They crush all winter, and in the summer they don't do so much in the spring, but in the winter, they run the crushers. I was building the shop for those loaders, and they're huge. Anyway, they have 2000 head of buffalo. Okay. And I took my phone and I'd make videos of the buffalo with their calves. And, you know honestly, if there wasn't a fence post in it, it's like you step back in time. The buffalo are not like cattle. They don't move. They kind of grunt. Think of like a pig grunting. And they kind of go [imitates buffalo grunts] and they're walking along, and then the calves and the birds are all singing. It was like May. It was really nice out. And you know, it's funny, I didn't notice the birds, but my daughter, I sent her the video and she said, well, the birds sound so nice. And I thought, well, yes, but it's the buffalo.

All:
[chuckle]

Rob:
And so I went there, and I don't know if you down there where you are, if you were exposed to this, but it's been very dry in Western Canada. And when I went there, Ross, you know he's not a young guy. He's probably, I'm a little older than him, but he's getting up there. And going to that place, that's just like stepping back in time. I'm not kidding you. [chuckles] Sure, they got modern balers, and tractors, and stuff. But if you look the other way, you just can erase 100 years just like that. And I'm going up there. And he had the year before put up a lot of hay. It was a good year for hay. And he had stacks. He had thousands of bales of hay there, stacked, all really well stacked and covered. And he said, well, if we ever had a dry year. He said, this year I baled 40 percent on my land, and it's better than others. I talked to others, the Hutterites phoned me and asked me if they could bale on my land. They said they only got 40 percent on their hay crop what we normally get. They have a feed lot. I said, I need my hay. Did you see that? There's a guy, that I've been saying, who could see tomorrow. And instead of selling that hay or not even bothering with it, he put it up and stored it. And now when everybody in this country has been scratching in their heads trying to decide what they're going to feed, he didn't have to. He already had it. And Lyle, his dad and him, they're just [chuckles]. You drive into the Ranch like it's pretty big, okay? And on the roads there's, I took pictures of them, but there's steel wheel tractors, eh?

Garett:
Yeah, yeah.

Rob:
And thrashing machines. Them old, you know, you think of them grey tin thrashing machines, and old trucks like they're parked along the road. I'm not talking one or two. I'm talking like 100. They've got to have 30 old tractors on steel rims eh, and probably at least 20 thrashing machines. And then you'll have a 1920 pickup there and stuff. And I look at that, and I think, man, I just like that old stuff, you know? It was just a totally interesting place to work. And you know what? When we're done, he walks over, just here's your check. It's just great if I have any more. You're coming back here. And I thought, there are some wonderful people in this country.

Garett:
Yeah, there really are.

Rob:
And you know what? They're everywhere. And it doesn't matter where you go. If you're wise, you can find them. They're very honorable people, and they pay their bills. They have ideas, and they employ people, and they make things happen. You know what I mean? I don't know if I can say enough about that. Peace Country's full of those kind of people, resourceful people. And you know what? There's people here that have failed too. You know? They just outright gave up. And their lives didn't go anywhere. And you know what? I'll tell you something else about some native people that I met here. One day I met a girl while I was driving to Valleyview to do some work saw cutting or something. And I wasn't pressured for time, I was just going there to do some work. So of course, I'm going right past the reserve. And there was a young girl there, and at that time she was 14 or 15, just a young girl. And it was cold, like early May, late April. It's cold in the morning! And they just kicked her out of the jail. Okay? She said, "I was in the drunk tank all night. Yeah, I've got problems." So I said, well, if you want to ride, I'm going right past the reserve. I said, do you have anything to eat? She says no. I said, are you hungry and she said yeah. So we stopped and we ate at the restaurant there, on the way in. And I took her right to her house. And I asked her what her name was. I want you to listen to this name. This is one of the most beautiful names I've ever heard in my life. Her family's last name is Sunshine, okay? And they named her Winter. Now, I want you to put them together. And when it's cold and nasty, isn't there something, like if you get a nice sunny day in the winter. Winter Sunshine. And, you know, she's an older lady now. She's 50s. And I asked people that I did some work out there again this year. And I said, do you know her? Oh yeah. I said, someday I should go find her and talk to her again. You know, she's just a kid and they threw her out of the jail. She made some mistakes. I'm not saying, you know, she wasn't perfect, but to see that kid discouraged. I thought, man, what's wrong with us? Our society here? Because Henry has worked for me for 17 years. And he's treaty, he's native. And, you know, people, they kind of look down on native people and like, yeah, Henry is a top hand. You get them to work, you never, ever have to tell him to get out of the truck and get to work. You get to the job site, he unloads all the tools you need. He works all day. You don't have to tell me anything to do. You don't have to tell him to get work, he puts the stuff in the truck and he's ready to go home. As long as he got in the truck in the morning. But as I learned to work with him, this is what I learned. It can be pouring rain and everybody else will be sitting in the trucks and Henry will be stay right beside me and work. And, you know, he says to me, "You never failed me in my whole life." And it's like I've had people say to me, "Why don't you fire that guy? You know, he didn't show up again." I said, Well, I would have fired him 16 or 17 years ago if I was going to fire him for that.

All:
[chuckle]

Rob:
One day, he says to me, one guy says, "How long you worked here?" And he says, "Oh, I don't know, about 15 years." Then he stops and he gets this kind of funny smile and says, "Well, if you count the days, it's about five."

All:
[laugh]

Rob:
We were doing Finning's big building out there, and [laughs], but they moved out of Grande Prairie out to Clairmont. And you can see over Grande Prairie there was this big cloud of white smoke, and they said, "Henry, what's it say?" He says, "Uh, traffic's held us up, but we'll be here in 15 minutes." Okay? Now, you know them guys at work, you know, Henry and I, we get along fine. Sure enough, 15 minutes later the truck shows up and everybody stands there and looks at him and he says, "Aw, come on you guys." Give him a break.

Rob and Garett:
[laugh]

Rob:
Anyway, I bet you got to go.

Garett:
Yeah, I do need to leave now, but we really appreciate it Rob.

Rob:
Well, it gives you some ammunition.

Garett:
It really does. Thank you.

Rob:
Okay. It was good talking to you Garett.

Preston:
Yeah. It's great to have you on, Rob, and to hear your great stories.

Rob:
They're real.

Garett:
I know.

Rob:
I didn't make any of it up. I could tell it all to you again. [laughs]

Garett:
Thanks.

Preston:
It'll have to do.

Garett:
Yeah.

Rob:
Are you smarter than you were?

Garett:
[chuckles] I sure am, yeah.

Rob:
[chuckles] Or are you confused? [laughs]

Garett:
Nope. I think you have some great stories Rob. And I always appreciate the time that we had together when I was a Deacon and you were my Deacon's quorum advisor and you would tell me stories every Sunday.

Rob:
And they say, man, you know so many stories. You guys have no idea. [chuckles] But anyhow, it was really kind of fun. I don't know.

Janice:
So, did you talk to them about Emerson trail and how people came over that way?

Rob:
No.

Janice:
Oh? You didn't even tell them that.

Rob:
No.

Preston:
Maybe we'll have to have another one in months to come.

Garett:
Yeah, we'll have to have you back, Rob.

Rob:
Yeah.

Janice:
And then the other one where they came up the river.

Rob:
Yeah, I talked to about the steamboat, actually.

Janice:
Okay. People are coming up that way.

Rob:
But you know, other people, and, I mean, you follow your heart, eh? But I came here because I wanted to live here. And that's why I'm still here. And who knows maybe someday I'll get tired of it.

Janice:
[laughs sarcastically]

Rob:
But for now, maybe I'll get dementia and won't know where I am. She'll pack me off to some other fine place and throw me in a hole in the ground.

Garett:
Well, Rob, we hope that you're still here for a while yet. If you want to email us feedback, ask us questions, or write in a story for us to share, email us at lifenorthofthe54th@gmail.com. Thanks again Rob for talking with us and we hope to see you soon.

Ending Theme Music:
[bass guitar riff with drumbeat]