A Really Stupid Mistake

Greetings bloggers. Why did I not make the connection between what sits in my flickr account and what appears on my blog? It is my understanding that I can upload a whole lot more pictures at the stroke of midnight on May the first. The account allows me to do this every month. I have been looking forward to that prospect all day. An hour ago (10 o clock)I got the brilliant idea of removing all of the pictures that I had used over the last month on my blog. What was I thinking? I have no idea. It would seem that the blog does not remain unattached to the flickr. Without my photos sitting somewhere in flickr land my blog does not exist either. Now you face the dismal prospect of clicking on an image only to read "Oops, some moron deleted this". I suppose I can try and upload everthing again. What a job. Well look forward to midnight and lets see what I can do; 53 minutes to go.

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A Hell of a Hole to Cross – The Hell Holes

Greetings Bloggers, Just thought you might like to hear that I am still alive and had a good day at the Hell Holes. I will provide details tomorrow night. There are a couple of really good pictures to show you and as my flickr account is renewed this Sunday night that is when you will see them.

In the old days the pioneers had the unfortunate task of crossing through this shattered terrain in their wagons. As Ron Storring (The owner) told me, the reason that they are called the Hell holes is that the settlers would say of a certain area that it was , “a hell of a hole to cross”. The upright rim of a rusting wagon wheel was offered as testament to the early hardships. It sat in the middle of the forest beside a winding track.

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Exciting News – Ontario Cave Exploration

Greetings bloggers, Some exciting cave related news has just come my way. I immediatly thought to share it with you. Greg Warchol and I have been communicating back and forth over the last few days trying to throw together some sort of reconnisance to the Hell Holes. It is a promising area of karst just north of Napanee. Some time ago I had spoken with the owner of the Hell Holes and he had indicated that he was interested in a cave dig. He remembers seeing a tunnel through a crevice in the bottom of the biggest hole. Today that crack is covered by debris but not forgotten.

It appears that we are to meet with Ron (The Owner)tomorrow morning at 11:30 to discuss the options. Greg will be bringing along some specialist digging equipment and hopefully “Lady luck is on our side”. As Ron said on the phone this morning, “I was thinking of calling some of those, what do you call them, CAVERS, to help us”. I assured him that we were indeed the right people and that my partners were well experienced in similar excavations. Greg is famous for his technical expertise with the microblaster. He has asked me to mention the microblaster site. (www.microblastercanada.ca) Check this out if you are in the least curious as to the nature of microblasting. I should have a picture in the archives from this month that shows the ladder in the largest hell hole. Check the bar to the side of the post, it lists the archives. The digging will take place beneath in a small room to the side of the main crevice. I suspect that a significant amount of water once passed down that hole but tomorrow should confirm or shatter that speculation.

An added bonus to the journey tomorrow is that Brad wilson should be meeting us up there, he is the Owner of “True North Gems” and an avid caver as well. Brad is Canada’s microblasting dealer and also possibly the best gem faceter that I know. I recall buying an especially fine sphene that he had faceted a few years ago and talking with him about his tourmaline claim in the North West Territories. Sphene is the gem form of the mineral titanite, it is usually found as a yellow wedge shaped crystal displaying great fire when properly cut. I am sure he would not object to a blogside interview tomorrow. He is what you might call, the “Rock” in Canada’s “Rock” community.

Please excuse me but I have to run, I start work in two hours and Friday nights are always a funny time. It pays to get there early on Fridays as one never knows how things will play out.

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Forgotten Ontario Railways

IMG_1368
Originally uploaded by Mic2006.

This last summer my father and I had visited the old Bessamer Iron Mine near Bancroft. We had been looking for magnetite specimens. Apparently rare black octahedrons of that mineral can occasionally be found there.

Just as the sun was setting we noticed an indistinct path running through the woods. It was the now defunct remains of the Barry’s Bay and Bessemer Line, a spur line that had been constructed in 1906 running from the Central Ontario Railway out to the mine and ultimatly on beyond toward Barry’s Bay.

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Underground Travels – The Croft Mine

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Originally uploaded by Mic2006.

This is the entrance to the Croft Mine. It was a wet wade into the tunnels which had been carved from within a garnet bearing pegmatite fissure. There was plenty of the pegmatite debris lying out in the forest dumps, strewn betweeen the trees and wooden beams that had once been buildngs. Beyond the tunnel entrance the stagnant air and smell of mold was overpowering. My shoulders having brushed the walls appeared to have released a cloud of spores. Bad air, rotting timbers and an unstable roof are but a few of the hazards that are encountered in an abandoned mine. In weighing the odds I felt it sensible to cut my underground explorations short.

I had ventured into the forest to photograph the head frame that was supposedly still standing. The land above was on a steep slope and at times the woods were almost impenatrable. In that crazy tangle the visibility was limited to a stones throw in any direction. I never did find the mine’s tower, I dont doubt that it was there, I just could not see it.

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Perilous Journey – The Road to Croft Mine

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Originally uploaded by Mic2006.

The area around Bancroft is one of my favorite places for rock-related explorations.

This sodden swamp is a road if you can believe it. It once led to the Croft Mine. Pink zircons are said to be found in the mine dumps and I had ventured out here to see if I could find some. Thankfully I had parked by car on a hill about a kilometer back as the road was becoming to treacherous to drive. Maggie stayed behind and I continued on into the mire. Stinking marsh gas drifted up with every step. I was soon knee deep in a filthy, black, organic soup.

Later in the day as I trudged back from the mine I found Maggie in the car attempting to negotiate the incline. She was worried that I had been attacked by a bear and was coming to find me. Thankfully I cut her reckless journey short. There would have been no turning round at the bottom, just a one way trip into the swamp. My car still bears the scars of that day’s exploration.

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Travels in “Raw History” – Cobalt Ontario

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IMG_1873, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

This is it, the town of Cobalt as you look over the trench that was the Nippising Mine. Millions of ounces of silver had been dredged from the furrow in the foreground. In the background there is Long Lake and behind that, the station.

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Adventures in Ontario Rock – Mineral Collecting

Greetings bloggers, rockwatchers, rockhounds, cavers, historians and anyone with an interest in geology. You might like to know about an important event taking place in the northern bush this summer. No, it is not me doing a reading from my book “Rockwatching”. It is a bonafide mining town rock and mineral show. The event takes place in Cobalt, about an hours drive north of North Bay Ontario. It is a region that is the source of many of my mine pictures. Appropriatly it is called “The Rock and Mineral Show and Great Northern Treasure Hunt”, running between July 29th and 30th.

You can visit the miners tavern pictured below or any one of dozens of mines along the famous silver trail. Samples of cobalt and raw silver are still plentiful in the debris scattered through the bush. For pictures you will never find a better place. The town is in my opinion a national treasure and a few years back it won the title of “Most Historic Town in Ontario”. The locals can tell many exciting stories as mining was the exclusive occupation in this place. A train runs from Union Station in Toronto and makes daily connections to the outpost. It seems quite surreal to find such a large and beautiful station so far out in the wilderness.

Other events taking place are the live theater, adit tour where you can take a guided tour underground and of course the festivities in “the blind pig beer tent”. “A Blind pig” is an illegal drinking establishment. Cobalt was the Ontario Provincial Police’s first official detachment and a great deal of money slid beneath the counter to keep the bars running.

One of my favorite Cobalt stories is of the Chinese Laundromat. Apparently a customer had walked in there one evening and the place was sitting in good order, the food was on the stove, the various machines were running but everyone had vanished. It was as though they had evaporated. Nobody ever heard “head nor tale” of them again. Today the laundry is a senior’s centre. Some think that they must have ended up at the bottom of a mine shaft. The underneath of the town is honeycombed with tunnels and locals tell of crazy underground explorations across deep chasms on cast iron air pipes.

Do your best to make it up here this summer, it is a rock lovers dream. There is all manner of natural discovery and adventure and for the historian it is an exploration of raw, untouched history.

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Cave in Ontario – A Window through the Rock

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IMG_2693, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

This particular picture is of an airy cavern below a sizable skylight. From above the window looms as an ominous blackhole just to the side of a well traveled path. The sumac densely blankets the area and hikers need to keep a wary eye lest the earth swallow them. D, Gord and I examined a watery tube within the cavern that Rob Laidlaw had reputedly followed out to the nearby river.

As can be seen by the picture the rock is very fractured. The underground passages hereabouts are in a seriously unsafe condition. Large caves seldom develop in this crumbling terrain. Kirk MacGregor says that an ideal layer of cave forming rock lies just beneath this strata and its appearance further up the river accounts for the development of some really large passages there. That system is well known to local cavers and several miles of tunnels have been mapped.

The countryside near Belleville is an area that has traditionally been considered as Ontario’s premier caving country. The TCG makes several trips here every year. They have as of late been conducting explorations in a riverside system that was discovered by Lori Nichols, Rob Laidlaw and Nina Muller.

James Sled spoke to me of a large cave in the area that he called Bell Cave. It is said to exist atop a high rock ridge. At the bottom of a relatively deep shaft there is a watery tunnel that runs on for some distance.

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Species War is Declared

A study at Rutgers University has revealed that there is an increasingly high number of violent human/chimpanzee interactions. The chimp often ambles away as the victor. This is not surprising as despite his diminutive stature, the chimp is thought to have an upper body strength of between 5 and 10 times that of a human being. The Rutgers study documents 11 chimp killings that have taken place since 1970, 8 of which have occured along the borders of the Kibale National Park in Tanzania.

Last night’s article in the Toronto Sun (April 21st) entitled “Killer Chimps” bought the issue to my attention. Apparently a group of chimps attacked four people at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sancturary in Sierra Leone. Three of the four victims, tourists, escaped with serious injuries but the group’s driver was killed. Seventy apes live in the Parks borders and today paramilitary police are combing the surrounding jungle to see if they can capture any of the perpetrators.

Maggie and I had been discussing the primates of Costa Rica yesterday and she had mentioned that she knew of three types of monkey, the howler monkey and spider monkey who were quite passive and some other type of monkey who had on a number occasions demonstrated some unusually cruel behavior (“Hateful litle beasts” as Maggie called them.) The agressive primate species were known to have captured other small animals and tortured them, throwing the hapless victim amongst themselves, poking out its eyes and generally making sport of the killing. By their actions it is hard to not describe chimps in anthropomorphic terms.

What really intrigues me is why chimps choose to attack. They are a species that are so close to humans. I suspect that there are so many social and emotional connections that if we understood them properly, we would be horrified at not having given them the vote! I think that they might attack for many of the same reasons that humans attack each other. This manner of judgement would hardly seem all that inappropriate, to me they are so human-like that their actions would be quite obvious if we simply stopped seeing them as “animals” and instead considered them as “Distant cousins”. Like humans I think that at times the spirit of the moment might govern their actions. Controlled by a dominant individual or the frenzy of a mob, otherwise gentle beings might be induced into some rather uncharacteristic acts. There is also the aspect of territorial aggression and of course the age old motivation of testosterone.

Eight of the 11 attacks documented by the Rutgers study took place along the border of the Kibale National Park in Tanzania. A number of reasons have been suggested for this concentration, in particular the high population and the shrinking territory in which the chimps are confined as the local logging industry approaches the park’s borders. Its the age old problem of diminishing resources and increasing population. Somethings gotta give; we humans usually end up in a war.

An article by Wairagala Wakabi entitled “Drunk and Disorderly Chimps Attack Ugandan Children” comments on the prevalence of attacks in situations when the band is thought to have raided illegal brewing establishments. The moonshine industries are concentrated in river valleys along the Kibale Park’s borders where the chimps are also especially prevalent and once intoxicated they are known to become very agressive. There is onee notorious chimp known as “Sadam” who is reputed to have killed at least 3 babies. An untended child is usually snatched up by the drunken band and torn apart in the trees.

It appears that most chimps operate in a similar manner when attacking. It is not unusual for groups of chimps to attack the red columbus monkey, biting off its limbs and disembowelling it. Chimps are thought to only attack when they perceive that they have the advantage. They usually demonstrate by their facial expression,(A tight lipped grimace) what their intentions are. I suppose that their might be some variation in their method and by the manner of the attack one might surmise something of their motivation. In a great many attacks the victim’s feet are torn off. Genitals are another favorite target. I wonder if there is any corelation between the nature of the damage and the reason for the attack?

In an attack that took place in a California sancturary where an elderly gentleman had his foot torn off and genitals mutilated by two male chimps, Jeffery French, a physiobiologist from the University of Nebraska suggested that the presence of two other female chimps might have spoken of the motivation in some way. Apparently male agression in chimps increases in the presence of sexually receptive females.

The California situation arose when a couple visited the sancturary with a birthday cake for 39 year old Moe, a former pet and current inmate of the facility. They were just about to cut the cake when the lady present was pushed aside, having her thumb bitten off and the two male chimps that had been skulking on the sidelines then asulted the older gentleman. Moe stood by uninvolved in the incident. A theory proposed by Deborah Fouts, a chimp behavior specialist is that there was some jelousy. She says that primates have a highly developed sense of what is fair and what is not fair. It may have been that they resented the attention being lavished on Moe. The attack finally stopped when the agressors were shot by the owner.

The chimp’s tendancy to display individual agression is not surprising as it exists in most animal species but their tendancies to wage war seem very unusual. It is eerily human. One observer commented that though they wage war, they only pursue it as long as the odds are very much stacked in their favour. We humans dont always follow that logical path, a fact attributed to the increasing tendancy for the “war makers” to not nessisarily be the “war fighters”. The article “Wired For War”, a special to World Science” cites a case in 1998 in Uganda where a number of male chimps were seen beating and jumping on the body of another dead chimp. They had torn out his wind pipe and fingernails as well as pulling off his testicles. There are also examples of where “chimp genocide” has occured, whole population wiping out other populations.

Up until last night I had always considered chimps to be docile, hairy caricutures of a dim human but this mornings investigations have proved otherwise. There complexity seems astounding and their reactions quite complex. Next time you see some dopey looking little fellow staggering along in a pair of diapers, realize that there is a complex and developed brain behind those eyes, as capable of loving and trusting as it is of sheer, calculated ferocity and malice.

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