Brandon Isakson

Director of Operations

 

This is always an exciting time of year for Big Rock. Although the winter months provide ideal conditions for many of our clients’ drilling programs, summer is undoubtedly the peak season for field geology work such as mapping and sampling. As the melting snow exposes outcrops and provides better access to field areas, Big Rock is ready to put lots of boots on the ground. In the busy season ahead, we’ll have over 30 technical staff deployed in the field on at least 13 active programs.

Our footprint this summer will span a dozen states and provinces, and in the process the team will collectively cover some 55,000 miles of travel in a few short months. Office hours will be sparse and that’s just the way we like it. After months of planning, we’re looking forward to getting in the field and helping our clients explore and discover.

Cheers!

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For grassroots exploration programs, the main goal is to identify discrete areas of interest (AOI) with the intent of developing specific drilling targets. Sometimes previous mapping, mining, or exploration efforts can provide clues as to where to begin targeting, but our geologists take an ‘outside the box’ approach.

In order to execute a successful and efficient exploration program, the Director of Operations must not only be a technical expert, but also a logistical master. Planning, organizing, and moving 16,000 pounds of personnel, supplies, and highly sensitive equipment over thousands of miles from headquarters to remote wilderness job sites is a thing of beauty when executed to precision.

In the realms of big data, advanced weaponry, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy, China has ambitious plans to surpass the United States as the world’s next techonomic superpower. The race to manufacture and bring new technologies to market is dependent on the supply of resource inputs; most critically the supply of minerals. From civil to military, nearly all sectors of the U.S. economy need minerals, which means net import reliance will play a huge role in our future economic outlook.

Developing an exploration program is a long and time-intensive process with many steps prior to any drilling. After a grassroots exploration program has been conducted with extensive research of geophysics, geochemistry, and surface mapping, there is still a small chance the explorer will have identified a viable target (AOI). In the rare case of finding positive mineralization indicators and potential for a deposit, the next step of the exploration team is to sample the subsurface targets at depth using exploratory core drilling.