Port Alice, there's an end of the road town ... my late neighbour had a friend who wrote a novel in which PA was thinly disguised, name of Jack Hodgkins[sp?] or something .... the mill is shut down right now, you know, you could buy it for a dollar, easy .... if you, um, assume a few debts ... it's been up and down like a yo-yo for years, this time [just three or four weeks ago] the most recent owners hit the wall - high loonie, high log cost, high oil, and low capital .... these guys started out slow and then petered out altogether, didn't take long ...... this mill is famous for having a digester with the inscription Deutschland 1903 or something like that, bought as used equipment when they built the mill, and still works fine
Logs being exported from there would have been cedar and/or high grade hembal, you don't make pulp from cedar and it would be a shame to chip high-grade, these are rightly sawlog .... sawmills never have been economic in places like that - even Tahsis, which would have made it if anybody made it, gave it up in the end .... i think there was a sawmill in PA once upon a time, well there were lots of them all over ..... in mills, be they pulp- or saw-, it's go big or go home, you need economy of scale to cover today's costs for logs, labour, energy, parts, etc ..... it's all megabusiness now, supremely boring - seems like technology does that to a lot of industries, takes out the one-horse shows, like Walmart takes out family stores
Asians pay big bucks for prime sawlog, you wouldn't believe .... seven hundred loonies the metre for temple quality yellow cedar, ahem ... and not so far below that for fir Ds ... this is what has stimulated so much heli, going in and trying to pick just the berries .... but i hear cedar just tanked by forty more bucks, nice hembal is being offered way cheap and no takers, so there'll be a lot less noise around the coast for some time
Don't know what's up with Zenda, they had a re-org of some sort, forgot the details, but new folks now ... EC will likely know ... and, oh, there he is -g-
grs.to - this is one i had good luck with two years ago [or last year??], going to look at it again, it's got that spring-summer tankola pattern, and not out of it yet
rac.v - i meant to try for some this morning, couldn't be online, checked it later and it was up twenty per cent, aargh ... gap-up, scarey-boo ... low volume, 180k
gyd.v - Grayd should be starting up the drill part of their programme about now, if they're on schedule ... plan was to do geophysics first, presumably to pick drill targets |
