Hardrock Gold

This young gold miner's story, told in the third person, puts 20th-century gold mining in a wide historical and geographical context. It conveys the miners' commitment to their work, which may lead them across continents as it did the author, Tom Morrison. Morrison's mining career began in 1972 in his native England, where he took his first job as a timberman in a Cornish tin mine. He found his vocation in mining, which he describes as "a hard, dangerous profession and like the sea, remarkably unforgiving". The smell of dynamite, the shattering roar of the blasthole drills, the drunken mayhem of a bunkhouse camp, haunted workings dripping with water and seeping deadly gas, all come alive in these pages - as do the eccentric characters who face the dirt, darkness, and danger of underground mining. In 15 years, the author worked in such famous mining districts as Cornwall in England, the Harz Mountains in Germany, Porcupine and Yellowknife in Canada, and Cripple Creek in Colorado. He has lived in mining towns and bunkhouse camps in remote and starkly beautiful places. Morrison tells us that the book "is not a biography; it is not a technical or historical treatise.
It is a tale of mines and mining camps and the people in them." The book aims to convey the author's ability to play many different roles. In telling this tale, he recounts his own rise through the ranks to assume the responsibilities of the shift boss and the mine captain - and how some engineering problems never could be solved. The tale ends - and the ending can only be temporary - with the author as the field superintendent at an isolated exploration site. This book consists of tales and episodes, some of them surprising, bizarre, even macabre - but all true. Written for the general reader who has a taste for adventurous life-styles, it should also satisfy mining buffs who cannot get enough of drilling and blasting.