Mineral Exploration

>> PROFILE 38 S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 Photograph : Cour te sy Gar th Kirkham Right place, right time GARTH KIRKHAM LINKED WAVE AFTER WAVE TO AN AWARD-WINNING CAREER By Ryan StuaRt Meanwhile, in his professional life, he's surfed his way through a 35-year career, seamlessly linking one emerg- ing trend to another in an endless ride. A tireless volunteer and mentor, at 57 years old, he just won the CJ Westerman Memorial Award, the highest honour for a geoscientist. "Maybe I subliminally planned it all, but at the time it felt like everything just fell into place," Kirkham says. K irkham grew up in Edmonton. After high school, with no idea what he wanted to do, he dabbled at the University of Alberta, first in commerce and then in engineering. "I hated it," he remembers. And it showed. "The dean asked me to take a holiday." Pondering his future, he consid- ered his past. He liked the thinking in commerce, but it didn't have enough math; engineering had the math, but not enough original thought; and he liked geology. When he told a counsellor, she told him he was a geophysicist, and Kirkham started the next semester. The fit was perfect. The geology fac- ulty was tight. With a beer fridge in the lab, they'd hang out all night identifying minerals and playing ping pong. After graduation, he worked in the Calgary oil patch. It was the early days of computers – Pac-Man, Space Invaders and multimillion-dollar, 10-megabyte mainframe computers. "I remember thinking, 'Oh my god, this is Star Wars science,'" he says. "It was the perfect job for me, combining the geology, the phys- ics, the engineering, and I was at the fore- front of the tech curve." In other words, he was ready for the wave. When the oil industry took a dive, Kirkham found himself in Vancouver – a friend had invited him on a sailing trip. Kirkham never returned to Calgary. "I fell in love with the city," he says. "The connection to the water and mountains. The lifestyle. I can't imagine living any- where else now." At the time, the mining industry was five years behind the oil industry in three-dimensional, computer modelling. Kirkham had skills and experience that few others in Vancouver had. He landed a new job in a week with Lynx Geosystems, an early adopter of 3D modelling in min- eral exploration. He worked with clients mapping deposits just as the early per- sonal computers came out. "A lot of the methodologies and algorithms created then are still used today," he says. "Just the horsepower has increased." Early in 1997, Kirkham started look- ing for a new wave to ride. It seemed like a good time to head out on his own. Mining stocks were f lying; investors wanted to get in early on the next Bre-X. The Calgary-based miner had discov- ered a massive gold deposit in Indonesia. Its share price launched from pennies to more than $200. Then the illusion came crashing down – a Bre-X geologist had salted the ore samples. The stock crashed, bringing the rest of the mining industry with it and exposing other bad habits, like insiders performing resource estimates and then cashing in when the stock rose. "All of a sudden, we were looked at in the same league as ambulance-chasing lawyers," recalls Kirkham. "We had no credibility." And there was Kirkham, the princi- pal at Kirkham Geosystems Ltd., with one client and a new baby on his knee. "The prospects were really brutal," he says. But again, he had positioned himself to catch the next ride. In the Bre-X aftermath, the stock exchanges and security commissions introduced National Instrument 43-101. To protect investors, it mandated that professionals with no vested interest would sign off on all reserve and resource estimates. "Ever since I could remember, rules were really important to me," says Kirkham. "In elementary school, if I saw someone cheating in a game I would either cry or start swinging." He embraced N I 43-101. "Garth has been at the forefront of both the To catch a wave, timing is everything. Paddle too early or too late and you'll miss it. You can get lucky occasionally but not consistently. Geophysicist and geologist Garth Kirkham knows this literally and metaphorically. He's a passionate outrigger canoeist in a sport invented by the Polynesians, perfected in Hawaii and popular in Vancouver's inner harbour. A seasoned waterman can steer an outrigger onto huge ocean waves; a beginner would wallow and flip. Kirkham has paddled in the biggest outrigger race in the world, the Molokai Hoe, a 62-kilometre crossing between the Hawaiian islands of Molokai and Oahu. Six times.

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