An edition of Barren Lands (2001)
Barren Lands
An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic
By Kevin Krajick
Publish Date
October 2001
Publisher
W. H. Freeman
Language
eng
Pages
464
Description:
"In the late 1970s, two men set out on what would prove to be a twenty-year quest to find a North American gem mine, along a fabled path that had defied sixteenth-century explorers, Wild West fortune seekers, and modern geologists. They are an unlikely pair: Chuck Fipke, a ragged, fanatical prospector with a singular talent for finding sand-size mineral grains, and Stew Blusson, an ultra-tough geologist and helicopter pilot. Inventive, eccentric, and ruthless, they follow a trail of clues left by predecessors - and a few actual gems - all the way from backwoods Arkansas up the glaciated high Rockies into the vast and haunted barren lands of northern Canada. With a South African geochemist's secret weapon, Fipke and Blusson outwit rivals, including the immense De Beers cartel, and make one of the world's greatest diamond discoveries - setting off a stampede unseen since the Klondike gold rush.". "A story of obsession and scientific intrigue, Barren Lands in also an elegy to one of the earth's last great wild places, a starkly beautiful and mysterious land alive with great herds of caribou, primeval rock formations, echoes of a violent past - and endless present danger. Now that the barrens are "open for business," what is in store for the far north?"--BOOK JACKET.