Barren Lands

the long version

"In the late 1970s, two men set out on what would prove to be a twenty-year quest to find a North American gem mine, along a fabled path that had defied sixteenth-century explorers, Wild West fortune seekers, and modern geologists. They are an unlikely pair: Chuck Fipke, a ragged, fanatical prospector with a singular talent for finding sand-size mineral grains, and Stew Blusson, an ultra-tough geologist and helicopter pilot. Inventive, eccentric, and ruthless, they follow a trail of clues left by predecessors - and a few actual gems - all the way from backwoods Arkansas up the glaciated high Rockies into the vast and haunted barren lands of northern Canada. With a South African geochemist's secret weapon, Fipke and Blusson outwit rivals, including the immense De Beers cartel, and make one of the world's greatest diamond discoveries - setting off a stampede unseen since the Klondike gold rush.". "A story of obsession and scientific intrigue, Barren Lands in also an elegy to one of the earth's last great wild places, a starkly beautiful and mysterious land alive with great herds of caribou, primeval rock formations, echoes of a violent past - and endless present danger. Now that the barrens are "open for business," what is in store for the far north?"--BOOK JACKET.