Mineral Exploration

PROFILE PHOTOS: COURTESY ANDY RANDELL The Buzz Behind the Beard Meet Andy Randell By KYLIE WILLIAMS W alking home along an Edinburgh street one dark, snowy November evening in 2006, geologist Andy Randell received a life-altering phone call. A colleague at a Vancouver-based exploration company was looking for a geologist to log core on an exploration project in Guyana on South America's North Atlantic coast. He needed an answer immediately, so Randell took a breath and replied, "Sure, why not?" He quit his bar job that night and, less than a week later, he found himself in a hotel in Georgetown wondering how he came to be there. The next day, he boarded a tiny, leaking plane for a two-hour flight over the dense rainforest and touched down on a dirt strip. That first six-week stint reignited his lifelong passion for geology after a 10-year hiatus in other industries, and he hasn't looked back. "It's completely nuts," says the epically bearded Randell, P.Geo. "But I just say yes and make the best of every opportunity and challenge that comes my way." Today, Randell has swapped the Guyana jungle for a recently expanded o—ice in downtown Vancouver where he runs a successful geological consultancy and two fast-growing initiatives: HIVE and Below BC. The "crowd consulting" model he has developed for HIVE is closing the gap between academia and industry by exposing students to real industry experience. His not-for-profit public outreach business, Below BC, is raising awareness of the rocks, minerals and resources in British Columbia, and just launched an exciting new 360-degree digital geo-archive online in January 2018. Despite his success, Randell still wonders how exactly he got here. YOUNG ANDY Randell says he "can't remember not loving geology." As a young boy growing up on the Isle of Wight o— the south coast of England – also known as "dinosaur island" for its wealth of Cretaceous fossils – he spent his early childhood tramping across the island collecting fossils with his grandfather. "My grandfather loved the outdoors," says Randell. "He taught me to watch the tides and scamper up cli—s to look for fossils. I had about 500 fossils by the time I was 10, complete with map co-ordinates and notebooks full of descriptions." Randell's passion for geology continued after his family moved back to mainland England near Portsmouth, where he scoured recently tilled neighbouring fields for fossil shark teeth, and drew cross-sections across the two old and tattered geology maps in the local library. But at university Randell "really struggled" and, although he scraped through to earn his geology degree, he ventured into other industries after graduating, including as a certified financial planner and a retail store manager. "Even though I wasn't doing what I loved," says Randell, "I gave it 100 per cent and learned skills that are particularly useful now, like managing people, projects and budgets." BACK TO GEOLOGY After a decade away, Randell happily stepped back into his field boots and spent five years working in Guyana and Yukon, but he was soon up against the global commodity downturn. Out of work and frustrated by the industry's inability to embrace change or to stem the tide of new graduates leaving the industry during the downturn, Randell created HIVE in 2014 to "close the gulf between university and industry" by adapting the crowd-sourcing business model to geological consulting. 22 Mineral Exploration | amebc.ca

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