ODDS’N’SODS — Scout’s honor

The local Boy Scout troop at Ontario’s Red Lake camp traditionally held their annual campout on a beach on the northern shore of Red Lake. The beach could be reached only by water, and had a reputation for rewarding diligent gold panners if they were willing to put out the required effort, which was usually considerable.

During its 1969 campout, the troop managed to acquire something more than a few specks; it returned to town with a pail of high-grade gold sample the boys claimed to have found in about 4 ft. of water northeast of the beach.

Being the area’s resident geologist, I was intrigued. Where did the gold originate? Was this a new discovery?

A quick run through the information in the office indicated that although the area had been staked numerous times, no showings with significant free gold had ever been uncovered. None of the area’s prospectors had any tales of lost showings, lost mines or saltings.

Dave Hutton, exploration manager for the nearby Cochenour Willans mine, and I set out the following Sunday to see if we could find what the Boy Scouts had found. After about 15 minutes of retrieving rocks, we began to connect with the odd rock sample containing visible gold. The six or so small samples we managed to find were no more than a couple of inches long. The most interesting thing about the specimens was that they were fresh and angular; they had not spent any time being chewed up by the Wisconsin glacier; nor were they weathered by the wave action of the lake.

We concluded that these specimens had been recently transported to their present location from an unknown source.

Although the samples had no visual characteristics that we could tie to any of the area’s active operations, our best guess was that they had been stolen by highgraders from one of the local mines. That highgrading was going on at that time was certain; a manager’s eight-year-old boy came home one day with a plastic bag of highgrade he found by a security fence.

It appeared that the thief stashed his cache in the lake in order that most of it might be retrieved later. The ever-prepared Boy Scouts, however, put an end to any salvage plans that might have been in the works.

— The author, a consulting geologist, resides in Thunder Bay, Ont.