Dual Prospectors' Awards Go To Indian River Team

by Jane Gaffin

 

It was their voracious "stick-with-itness" and a series of eclectic accomplishments over a 12-year-partnership that earned 49-year-old Vern Matkovich and 42-year-old Tom Morgan the 2004 Prospector of the Year awards.

This is the first year a dual award has been presented since the Yukon Prospectors' Association (YPA) launched the tradition of honouring individual prospectors in 1988.

YPA president Bill Harris presided over the November 22 presentation ceremony during the 32nd annual Geoscience Forum banquet at the Gold Rush Inn in Whitehorse.

Besides receiving personalized rock hammer wall plaques, their names will be engraved on the base of the bronze prospector statue that watches over downtown from Main Street and Third Avenue.


Tom Morgan (left) and Vern Matkovich (right)
Photo Used With Permission
Copyright 2004 Robert Stirling, Whitehorse, Yukon

The self-educated prospectors, who live with their families and high-speed satellite Internet on the historic Indian River Hay Farm, roughly 20 mapsheet miles south of Dawson City, complement each other with their respective talents.

What each knows, he knows well and teaches the other; what neither knows, they learn together.

"We have to do record-keeping, report writing and all that other stuff we're not really trained for," confided Matkovich, who met his partner on Montana Creek in 1992.

"Our public speaking is what we have to work on," he quiped.

They laughed heartily, remembering. During the presentation, Harris, who has worked with both gentlemen, went through a litany of accolades as to why the prospecting team was chosen for recognition. He then handed over the microphone to the celebrities. A laconic Morgan said, "Thanks," and dashed, drawing laughter from an appreciative audience saturated on a day of technical talks.

Meanwhile, Matkovich had pulled a Houdini. What more was there to say, they wondered? Harris had adequately covered their achievements. While very pleased with the attention, they were not yet comfortable in the limelight.

Both prefer the personal one-on-one exchange, which accounted for how they finalized a pending placer-option agreement during the mining conference. "All our little hardrock blocks in the Indian River area we have optioned to Klondike Gold," explained Morgan.

"The placer that underlies some of the hardrock goes through the (Indian River) farm to Eureka Creek on up to Indian River and Montana Creek. We're partners with the company in that ground."

Matkovich picked up the thread. "It's 60 miles of placer claims. It's a big theory. There's good things here and there and on each end, which makes it tantalizing."

Who knows what they may uncover. Anything's possible in the wonderful world of rocks, which has fascinated both prospectors since boyhood. So, it's not odd their personalities clicked when fate finally brought them together out in the wilds of the Yukon.

The Edmonton, Alberta-born Morgan, who was schooled in various provinces due to what he called "active parents", attended St. Francis Xavier University at Antigonish, Nova Scotia. There, he met Steve Mooney, a Yukoner who invited him North in 1983.

Morgan came, looked and stayed. Mining-related adventures, offset by a few misadventures, throughout the Yukon bush suited him, as did paying prospecting junkets into Alaska, California, Philippines and Magadan, Russia. During the 1988-89 winter, he had enough pesos to enjoy a holiday in Mexico.

The British Columbia-born Matkovich's first year of schooling started in 100-Mile House; the other half was taken in an Alberta town near the Montana border called Manyberries. "I like saying it once in a while," he chuckled. "It's like a buffalo-jumping-off-the-cliff name."

The rest of his education was in several places in central Manitoba before his parents settled on what they thought was the best place for raising two children.

His later work career in construction, heavy equipment, truck driving took him all over Canada, mostly the northern parts.

In 1986, he found his way from northern Alberta to Whitehorse where he fixed and fabricated equipment until the mining bug bit. In taking mining beyond a hobby, he went looking at both hard rock and placer prospects.

"I don't think I knew what the price of gold was. I was going mining and had the qualifications but didn't know anything about it."

Eventually, Matkovich made an arrangement with a fellow on some placer ground in the Dawson City area. Heading into the creek he couldn't reach, he came across Morgan working with Yukoner Charlie Brown on the corner of Montana Creek, where it flows into Indian River.

"Kinda neat," recalled Morgan. "Out of a 1,000 yards, we got just over 20 ounces on the corner of that bench." Matkovich's partnership turned sour. Yet he fortunately had realized the mistake in time to retrieve his initial investment.

He and his wife and youngster were living on Montana Creek year around; so was the Morgan family. Their neighbourly friendship developed naturally into a serious working relationship, although four years slipped by before they formally consolidated their ground Klondike-style.

In 1996, while Morgan was away on the Plata Silver project in Hess River country, Matkovich finalized a deal with an Oklahoma preacher for the 240 acres of Klondike land, situated on the old Dawson Stage Trail, eight miles below where Montana Creek comes into the Indian River, which flows into the Yukon River.

"The farm was grown up in willows and needed to be pruned back. We grow hay now and have 25 head of cattle. It's beyond a hobby but not into the economic range. We do all the work ourselves."

He assured that part of the equation was going to change in the near future. "You can't be off in too many directions...like in the late 1990s. We were developing a lot of different projects but not producing anything. The farm had to be brought to a certain level of development to be anything other than moose pasture."

The remote setting is shrunk by lightyears with self-generated electricity to power the TV and computers for on-line research, e-mail communication and home-schooling the children.

The farm is further connected to the outside world with a good 50-kilometre-long driveway to the main highway. Years of mining in the area left an upgraded access road that needs no more than a blade mounted on a truck for plowing snow, Matkovich advised. In winters, the family likes to take sunbreaks in Chile. The itinerary includes touring a myriad of old mine workings dotting the mountainsides. Last year, he did a quick sidebar working trip to Guyana to prospect with a Klondike placer associate.

Matkovich, a welder and builder, has an innate ability with anything mechanical. He pointed out that it's not necessary for both men to excel in the same vocations. "One guy is good at doing one thing and the other guy can do the other thing."

Morgan, who studied general engineering and physics at university for three years, has experience in paperwork. Prospecting involves mounds of it: recording mineral claims; plotting soil samples on maps; keeping records; reading government releases and historic information; writing reports and letters; filling out forms and applications.

Of course, prospectors prefer to be in the bush cracking rocks and drilling properties, which can lead to paperwork procrastination.

"We don't like to get anything done till the last minute," laughed Matkovich.

A report describing the previous field season's work has to be submitted by January 31 to Ken Galambos, manager of the government's Yukon Mining Incentive Program. YMIP is open to serious prospectors and for target evaluations.

The deadline for filing proposals regarding the next season's work comes the last day of February. It's a small window. Both view report-writing as good training and teaches self-discipline.

"The more report-writing you do, the more you discover about the property without being on the ground," noted matkovich. "There's actually a lot of information out there."

Morgan agreed. Digging for reports and turning up old information reveals work others carried out before. "Pile it together and you know where to take a few extra steps."

The prospectors, rich in terms of lifestyle, were suffering cash starvation. They both praised the Yukon Mining Incentive Program as the key to what kept them going through the rough times.

"Otherwise, we would have had to go find other jobs," added Morgan. During the slump, industry wouldn't have supported the pair's efforts.

Had they been forced into survival occupations, their attention would have been diverted, thus delaying developing mineral properties to proper standards for optioning when industry did rebound.

Although YMIP doesn't pay wages, they are thankful for a grant that covers hard costs like food, explosives and fuel.

"The money the government puts out is only a small fraction of the amount that actually comes back in investments in that ground," offered Morgan.

"Say, of 20 grand the government puts out, there's probably 100 grand of investment that can come in because of it. It's a program the government actually makes some money on, which is unheard of." Matkovich echoed that it doesn't take too many options for the program to pay for itself.

Now the prospecting combo has some economic freedom. "Up to now, it's been scratching all the time for every dollar, trying to keep old junk running," said Morgan. "Well, we're still trying to keep old junk alive. At least now we have a little bit of money to deal with it."

At present, the partners have several properties optioned in various locales of the Yukon and hold properties that deserve to be optioned. Some properties are underdeveloped and haven't been presented yet, they confirmed.

They work in gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, or whatever mineral is economic. "That's the key" said Matkovich. "It might be something we don't know anything about. By the time we're finished, we do."

This winter, their attention is devoted to drilling their Indian River placer property with an auger rig mounted on a mobile Nodwell track vehicle. The material brought to surface is sluiced and gold recovered on the spot.

"After 12 years of working that area, we're now trying to realize an economic benefit from our labours," emphasized Matkovich.

"It's just starting," agreed Morgan, overtly happy with the thought. "This year is the first time we got a little breathing room."

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Copyright 2004 diArmani.com