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Oliver Maki: still going strong at 82

Most people work hard all their lives and look forward to retirement. Not Oliver Maki. Born and raised in Copper Cliff, Maki has spent more than a half a century crisscrossing the world in search of buried treasure.

Most people work hard all their lives and look forward to retirement. Not Oliver Maki. Born and raised in Copper Cliff, Maki has spent more than a half a century crisscrossing the world in search of buried treasure. His work as a geologist has taken him from the snowbound wilderness of Northern Ontario to the high Andes and just about everywhere in between. At the age of 82, you might think he’d be content to spend his twilight years with his feet up, surrounded by his grandchildren in a Toronto suburb. Instead, he continues the hunt for the Earth’s riches as chief geologist for Namex Explorations Inc. back where his career started in the Sudbury Basin.

At 45, Maki started a second career as an instructor at Cambrian College, imparting his passion for geology and mining to many hundreds of students who went on to occupy positions of responsibility in the mining and exploration industry around the world.

Not one to sit still, he spent every summer in the field, usually in Latin America.

“By doing so, I could be much more inspirational to my students,” he said.

Maki attended Sudbury Mining and Technical School, spent two years at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and got his first job working for Falconbridge in the bush north of Lake Superior.

“That’s a part of Ontario where the snow comes down about six to 10 feet and slogging through that stuff, I started thinking there must be a better place in the world than this.”

He picked up the Canadian Mines Handbook, looked up every foreign address he could find and mailed out applications.

“I got a response from Noranda asking me how soon I could come to Nicaragua. I didn’t have to think twice. Then I asked ‘Where the hell is Nicaragua?’”

Maki was appointed mine geologist at the El Limon gold mine and quickly picked up Spanish. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with Latin America. He returned to Canada, married a Sudbury girl and headed south once more – this time for a job as a junior mining engineer in Mexico. His work also took him to Chile, Argentina, Peru and Brazil.

Back in North America in the late 50s as general superintendent at a lead-zinc mine in Wisconsin, Maki received a telegram one day from United Nations headquarters asking him if he would be interested in a job as an economic geologist in Chile. It was a dream job, a once in a lifetime opportunity and he didn’t hesitate.

Los Pelambres His crowning achievement as a geologist was his role in the development of Los Pelambres, 200 kilometres north of Santiago. The famous American geologist, William Braden, discovered the first evidence of mineralization there in the1920s, but the property sat idle for three decades.

“He drove a few short adits into a hillside, but didn’t get anything that was economic at prevailing prices so he pushed on to other sites,” said Maki. The property was subsequently evaluated by others, but was always dismissed as being uneconomic.

“I think one of the reasons they turned it down was because it was so difficult to get to. They probably didn’t feel like going back a second time to have another look.” Maki thought otherwise after making the grueling trek by muleback to have a look at the deposit.

“If we had a showing like that in Canada, it would be like a Swiss cheese – full of drillholes by now,” he told his skeptical Chilean colleagues.

“They agreed to drill three holes with a winky drill, which we had to haul up by mule. The first hole was a dud. The second one had a few smells and the third one hit ore grade.”

Today, Los Pelambres is ranked as the fifth largest copper mine in the world with reserves of 3 billion tonnes grading 0.64 per cent copper and 0.15 per cent molybdenite. The mine finally went into production in 1999 and currently produces 322,000 tonnes per year of copper in concentrate. Owned by Antofagasta plc and a consortium of Japanese companies, the mine boasts an estimated life of at least 30 years and employs more than 500 people.

“My contribution in getting it going has just faded away,” said Maki. “I’m sure they wouldn’t let me in the front gate if I was to go there today.”

Currently director and chief geologist for Namex, Maki is focused on the company’s Sudbury-area Post Creek and Golden Pine properties. Post Creek covers an area of 688 hectares adjacent to FNX Mining’s Podolsky properties immediately north of the Whistle Offset. The nearby Golden Pine property covers an additional 3,136 hectares.

Maki spends the winter poring over maps on a billiard table in his basement office, reviewing data from the previous field season and conducting research at the Ontario Geological Survey library in Sudbury. He admits to a few aches and pains, but still looks forward to getting out in the bush. His only concession to his advanced years was to relinquish his axe and chainsaw.

“I’ve been told to think about retirement, but I don’t really know what it means and I don’t know what I’d do with myself,” he confided. “I don’t play golf. I don’t play cards or shuffleboard. I’d go nuts. I have to be in an environment where there are rocks, so they’ll probably find me one of these days out there under some pine tree. A fitting epitaph, he said, would be to be found with a piece of high-grade gold in his pocket with a notebook showing the location and half of the page torn out.

In the meantime, he carries on, still driven by the challenge of making the next big discovery.