Back from the Dead

--This was written months ago in the summer of 2007. I was totally blown away by this place.--

So, here I am in Galore Creek. It’s a very remote place. I traveled here by way of a flight from Edmonton to Vancouver, after which I transferred to a flight which left Vancouver for Smithers and then Bob Quinn Lake. Upon arriving at Bob Quinn, I jumped a shuttle to an encampment from which I rode a helicopter that stopped in two other camps before finally touching down in the one that I would be staying at: Galore Creek Camp.

It’s quite amazing really, the amount of money that is being poured into this operation. How much it must cost to buy food for all of the people in the camp, give them all TVs, give them each their separate rooms. And the helicopters are pricey too. One of them up here (the largest in the world, I’m told) burns 3,000 L of fuel per hour. Insane.

The weather is quite predictable. It’s been cloudy since I arrived here. I personally do not know how they got the satellite photo of this area as shown on Google Earth, but they must have been waiting forever to let the skies clear up.

However, the rain here is sort of strange. I don’t know if it was just how the rain was today, or if it is this way all the time. Regardless, the rain today was very persistent and quite a lot of water was coming down, but it was in very, fine drops. Not quite like mist, but fine enough that you couldn’t really hear them or feel them as they struck your clothing. At one point, I couldn’t tell if it was raining or not anymore so I took out my hand from my glove to feel for it. It was indeed still raining.

Now, at this point I began to let my mind wander a bit. Don’t tell it to the Safety guys around here, but for this moment, I was not thinking about safety at all. As I stood there, hand held in front of my face, I noticed the sheer absurdity of the situation. Yes, this was my hand. Yes, it was raining. But the fact that both my hand and this rain were happening at Galore Creek all of a sudden struck me as very odd. Extremely odd. I wanted answers.

Sure enough, I found one. On that very hand I was wearing my Iron Ring. I had not noticed it all day, but now there it was, talking to me. I lifted my eyes from the ring and looked at the landscape. Glaciers, hundred-year-old snowpack, mountains, thick forests, a drilling rig.

They always said that Engineering would take you somewhere. They always said that it would take you far. And if you wanted it to, it could take you farther than you had ever imagined.

I suppose that they were always right.