Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Picture of the Moment - Follow the Yellow Brick Road

When you come across a sign for the Yellow Brick Road, you follow it. We didn't see any munchkins, and these Oz friends are obviously disguised as homo sapiens from the "Red Green Show," but we did see a little bit of gold over the rainbow. And I discovered an affectation for show tune choreography.


Looking westward, in the far distance you can see the headframe of the David Bell gold mine. A staking rush after discovery of the Hemlo Gold Camp in the early 1980s was Canada's largest since the Klondike. Taxes from locally-derived gold bricks have paved plenty of roads in the thirty years since. I visited here in September, 1994 as a stowaway with the Queen's University Minex program's annual field trip to major ore deposits of the Canadian Shield.

While the rest of the group were busy looking at rocks, three friends and I organized an impromptu homage to a different kind of treasure. If memory and character placement serve, I'm the Scarecrow on the far left. The other two gentlemen were Best Man and a groomsman at my wedding two years later. I've only bumped into "Dorothy" once in the ensuing twenty years. The name of the poor photographer is lost to history.

The Yellow Brick Road is located near the Hemlo gold camp, about 55 km east of Marathon, off the Trans-Canada Highway (17), halfway between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.