I didn't think general bull moose could die from antler lock-up. I knew Elk, Caribou and Deer could. Let this be a lesson. Roaring, screaming and pawing the ground are good confrontation techniques and perhaps head butting too, but locking antlers is not macho, it's just plain stupid, kids.
I bain in Whitehose, but never worked there for any extensive period. I did work on the Red Mountain property, a Copper-Moly thingie about 50 miles away. I see to recall 70 million tons of some sort of low grade stuff. It was in Tintina Mines at the time.
Whitehose is a pretty little town with so-so food and not much going on. Kind of a tourist trap. No gold mining. A little bit of copper in the old days and some explo going on in the area for base metal.
One thing that struck me about the Yukon is the sparse undergrowth and the ease of getting around there. The ground is fairly even and easy to walk. You could walk most places in street shoes. The tales of rugged terrain that abound from the Goldrush days make you wonder. The reverse is true in most places - flatish ground, and smallish trees. (compared to the Kootenays and the Coast of BC where everything is giant sized and the ground is really "accidental" and hard to negotiate.) One thing is that the trails themselves had generally been trodden by a few thousand people before and were rugged by that time. Also people were carrying thousands of pounds of gear in dozens of loads. With a prospector's standard grubstake to go a mile took a man 20 trips and the whole day. And that was 80 and 100 pound loads.
Iffen the fed guvmint kills placer mining as they are trying to do desperately, it seems, then they will decimate the Yukon's population. Other mining explo will allow them to hang on, but the tourist trade is not enough. In ten years the Yukon will be halved in population. My position is that after 105 years of placer mining, the situation is pretty stable. It's knee jerk what the feds are doing. From what I hear 80% of the placer miners are stopped now, with the new DFO regs. The DFO premise is that the in stream placer miners in the YK River are adding sediment load which will affect fish habitat. If they haven't done this in 105 years, why will it suddenly affect the fish now? The reality is the sediment load of the YK cannot be exceeded. You can't count your fingers in 4 inches of water and you never could since prehistoric times. Any fish use to that kind of sed load in a river that large could not possibly be affected by a few lousy placer ops. It's thinly disguised gov't bullshit like the NDP stopping the Windy Craggy.
I figger the cause is that lawyers who want to get elected are either queer and/or namby pamby sissies who never could the hang of physical labour and failed science in school. This traumatized them to the point that they became lawyers so they could both live off and torture anyone who was in that sort of business. At any rate these city bred pin stripes who have never handled a spade and never been more than ten feet off a main highway into the bush seem to start out with an radical environmentalist agenda, an anti industrial prejudice and they work from there to justify it to thousands of mouth breathing morons who will elect them. Not one of them has more than a passing acquaintance with what they are talking about since all they know about the hinterland is what they read in colouring books they stole from their older sister's room when they were allegedly growing up.
I give up.
EC<:-} |
