Alteration Halo

The Bolivian Altiplano, 2010.

It is my first experience with any length of time at altitude. I am at 4,100 metres (13,500 feet), and am ‘sleep-convinced’ I am going to die. I awake with a gasp from an oxygen-deprived slumber only to find the situation did not improve with my eyes open and a light on. I cannot catch my breath, and realize in that moment that I do not know precisely where my colleagues are in the ATCO trailer camp configuration, nor where the company’s medical clinic is, and I am out of air. Fight or flight kicks in and all I want to do is ‘get down’, but how? Feeling increasingly light-headed and panicky I freeze; tears begin streaming down each cheek. Alone, not knowing where to turn for help, the only thing I do know for sure is that I have one valid option – to calm the fuck down. So, I do. I sit cross-legged on the floor; and focus on all the people and all the llamas that can survive just fine at these heights with this precise amount of oxygen. I close my eyes and will myself to take long intakes of breath through my nose, and slowly exhale through my mouth until my heart rate slows, my mind stills, and I believe that I too will live.

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I returned to Bolivia seventeen times over the next decade, becoming enamoured by its beautiful people and rich culture, the enormity of the San Cristobal Mine and the extraordinary landscape of the Altiplano. This was all after I had already spent close to two decades working in finance, investor relations and corporate communications in mining exploration, and was making my way into the field of Corporate Social Responsibility.

I don't think I could have deliberately planned a career that connected all of these dots if I tried. In fact, my entrance into the mining sector was through two layers of happenstance in the early 1990s.  The first was a surprising early career twist into finance. My undergraduate degree was in criminology with a psychology minor, and before announcing to quite bewildered friends and family that I was becoming a licensed Financial Advisor, I had put my Crim degree into action and been supervising teens and adults sentenced to perform community service hours. I didn’t even know how to balance my own chequebook, so successfully completing the Canadian Securities Course was no small feat of mental horsepower for my naturally right-brain leanings.

I joined national brokerage firm Midland Walwyn in Vancouver in 1993 and, as an assistant to a top producer and avid trader, was immediately right in the thick of things. These were the highly speculative days of close-ology—being “adjacent to” or “contiguous with” a discovery—was making a lot of people a lot of money, and by this time the junior exploration market had become particularly frothy. They were also more animated and tactile days of manual trading; we were literally running buy/sell tickets to the trade desk while dodging brokers and traders yelling at each other through the little circle in the plexiglass. It was crazy fun.

But a year or so into things, one time “fun” crossed a line, which became happenstance two. The assistant sitting beside me found herself on the receiving end of - let’s call it a “vibrating prank” - which she reported immediately and was whisked away that same day to another firm. As the sole witness, I was promptly summoned to the Branch Manager’s office and asked one question and one question only: whether there was something I would perhaps like. I decided I would like a shorter commute.

That desire landed me a transfer to a branch much closer to home with blue-chip, dividend-paying, bond and mutual-fund guys whose days were filled with portfolio reviews with retirees. Given my experience and preference for a bit of hustle, any junior-resource trading was naturally offered to me. After a year or so, a regular client I worked closely with asked me to join him at a public company, and that’s how I officially crossed over to the junior mineral exploration side.

My first investor-relations position was with an exploration company that claimed to be “adjacent to” Bre-X’s Busang discovery in Indonesia. Mining, and in particular exploration, has always been both speculative and cyclical, and for a long while my career was too. That first gig lasted six months and I spent the next several years oscillating back and forth between brokerage firms and a series of junior exploration companies – always preferring the small family feel over big company bureaucracy - with each cyclical rise and fall. I had formed Akashic Communications in 1996 for corporate communications and investor-relations contracts. Over time, market cycles only reinforced the merits of counting on myself. If full-time roles could evaporate, I preferred the clarity of a contract, along with the independence and agency of choice; and thus the entrepreneurial spirit was born.

One of the things I loved most about investor relations and corporate communications was the travel. My company’s projects took me throughout North America, Thailand, Chile, Peru, Brazil, the Philippines, and Alaska, and years later, my final pubco brought me back full circle to Indonesia. I loved the dynamism, travelling to the world's financial and business centres where capital markets thrived and to middle of nowhere locations that could make even experienced travellers dig out a map to see where the heck I was coming and going from. There were back-to-back conferences and dog-and-pony shows, accompanied by the youthful stamina required to booth all day and explore fabulous cities at night. My favorite conference moment by far was donning a $200,000 True North Gems ruby and pink sapphire necklace for a PDAC hospitality suite.

Mining conferences were peppered by site visits and analyst tours; there were drilling camps in the Chilean Andes, charter flights over the Nasca Lines in Peru, I stood where Bre-X once stood in the Sumatran jungle (which, required a side-bar piggyback deal with a large, Indonesian geologist once I learned we were well entrenched in boa constrictor territory), and so much more. For a time, I didn't fully unpack my suitcase; leaving it in the corner of my living room ready in standby mode.

At various points I returned to the investment side, including as a Portfolio Management Associate at Goepel McDermid and later in the National Training department at Canaccord before junior exploration would beckon me back again. I even spent some time with a venture-capital incubator in technology/biotech, which only served to clarify that I missed mining.

It was not until decades later, I could consider the possibility that all of that professional movement may have had another function. I describe the travel with excitement leaning into romanticism, because that is genuinely how I experienced it. I loved seeing new and interesting places and the stories I came home with. But the jet-setting pace may also have provided brilliant cover for the metabolization of grief that I did not consciously realize I was working through. Rather than remaining in one place long enough to feel my mom’s absence, there was another project, another team, another country, another flight, another challenge.

We lost our mother in 1980 to breast cancer, when she was 39 years old and I was eleven. It was also a geologically devastating year: Mount St. Helens erupted after having been dormant since the 1850s. The catastrophic fallout and newspaper headlines eerily mirrored our family’s irrevocably changed landscape. Even the fringe areas described as a moonscape resonated: a complete void in which someone had turned off the volume. Mom loved to laugh, and she always had music on in the house and in the car. Quite suddenly, it became quiet; uncomfortably and breath-stealingly quiet.

But the line of work I landed in as a young adult had volume – lots of it – and the distraction of movement. So, while I may have gotten into mining by happenstance, it is very possible that I stayed in mining because it facilitated a version of what is affectionately known in loss-and-grief circles as “pulling a geographic”.

By 2005, I was firmly back on the public-company side as VP Corporate Communications for a Vancouver-based group of mineral exploration companies. After close to two years there, I wanted to flex my grey matter a little more and enrolled in an MA in Professional Communications program. I was paying my own way and asked management only for some flexibility in hours while continuing my day job. Their response was not supportive and and knowing they were not going to budge, I quit.

That very same afternoon, me, my banker's box of personal belongings, a silk plant, and a framed print walked over to an exploration company led by a President with whom I had been talking for some time about joining him when the timing was right - although no offer had as yet materialized. I went straight to the only empty office and started unpacking. He appeared in the doorway with his eyebrows raised, laughed… and luckily, I got to stay.

Which I did, for close to three years in that VP Corporate Communications role. From that desk, and with my master’s thesis thoughts percolating, I began slowly transitioning into what was then the relatively nascent field of Corporate Social Responsibility. Starting in 2010, I was one of the earliest independent CSR/sustainability framework builders and report writers in the mining sector. Between my communications and corporate-governance experience and years of accumulated mining knowledge, it was a seamless fit; repeat clients and referrals kept me as booked-out as I wanted to be. Gap assessments undertaken for reporting purposes had a convenient habit of revealing, well, gaps, and I was quick to expand my value-add and practice into social performance, most notably stakeholder engagement and human rights impact assessment.

I became so busy with that work, combined with a residential move, that I more or less vanished from all the venues where I had previously been a regular part of the social fabric. There was a bit of a “Where did Michelle go?” quality to it. Sustainability work also brought an entirely different kind of travel itinerary: materiality assessments and stakeholder engagement: workshops, focus groups and individual interviews over trade show booths, road shows, and raising capital. It shifted my attention to yet another collection of countries: Bolivia of course, as well as Mexico, the United States, Sweden, Honduras, Eritrea, Serbia, Ecuador, and Ghana to name a few. The cadence of movement continued, but the work was challenging and fulfilling in an entirely novel way. And for the most part, it remains so to this day.

Outside work, my husband of more than twenty years and I love to travel to quiet places, hike, mountain bike and as boaters, get out on the water whenever we can, taking in the glory of nature as much as possible. I am also hooked on the contemplative quality of labyrinths. In 2024, wanting to reconnect more fully with my cultural heritage, I began volunteering with the Canadian Polish Business Association (CPBA), initially managing a Sustainable Cities Trade Mission to Poland and later joining its national leadership and Board. The Polish events and connections feel more like familiar family gatherings than something new, while also bringing together business, friendship and an expanded Canadian-Polish network.  And…  I am always, always writing.

In 2014, that included participating in a project called My Mother’s Story and writing The Story of Florence. The experience was powerful, and in 2021, with the founder’s permission, I adapted the template using my own expressive writing techniques and workshop approach to create a legacy project for people who, like me, had lost their mothers in childhood. The anthology My Mother’s Story: Gone Too Soon, published in 2022, became a collection of celebration, mapping our respective healing journeys from feeling absence to finding presence, and reinforced the power of creating space to fully examine a life lived – albeit sometimes brief. From there came the broader and remarkably simple thought: I need to do this for women in mining. GEMS Unearthed became one of those over-ten-years-in-the-making/overnight ideas, launching at PDAC in 2026. Which brings us to the present.

I have been inspired by many women throughout my career in mining, most notably our early female CEOs and women behind significant discoveries, who stood out in what was then an overwhelmingly male industry, and whom I admired mostly from afar. These days, the dynamic feels different. I seem to find myself drawn to, and equally found by, accomplished women who share a desire to somehow make the path easier for other women.

If I am being candid, though, for a very long time many of the people who were most supportive of me professionally—who repeatedly respected my perspective and sought out my subject matter expertise, valued our collaboration, or gave me a hand up—were men. One of the first and the most impactful over time has been Dr. Ian Thomson; originally introduced to me as “the godfather of CSR” and geochemist I simply must interview if I was writing a master’s thesis on the subject. Our 2008 coffee shop chat organically evolved into friendship, a working relationship and ultimately years of work together, via inclusion on the Bolivia file and all those trips to the Altiplano. He praises good work, always pushes me to reach higher, and encourages my ambitious ideas. When I hear “Well done, you” in my head, it is Ian's voice.

Perhaps predictably after all these years working in mining, I went looking for a geological term to describe what I was unearthing myself, and serendipitously discovered there actually was one: an alteration halo. It is the geochemical and mineralogical footprint surrounding an ore body; something geologists can map for clues about what may lie beneath the surface. In the context of a life, I think of it as the ways we have changed and been altered over time, including those that may not be tangible or apparent and understanding those alterations with any real clarity requires deeper investigation and reflection.

Looking back through the GEMS process, I can see my own alteration halo more clearly: the choices, relationships, risks, pursuits and experiences sitting beyond the more obvious chronology of jobs, credentials and achievements. Viewed individually and from the outside, they might not appear particularly connected, but considering them together revealed the more consistent signature beneath the surface.

In my case what emerged as consistent was a combination of genuine curiosity and resourcefulness, a willingness to challenge assumptions and ask difficult questions, an instinct to connect people and ideas, and an ability to thrive in complexity. I change course when values do not align, regularly take calculated risks and remain okay in the face of uncertainty, and move forward with ambitious ideas even when there is no guarantee what I am building will work. My pattern also encompasses the people and relationships I have chosen to remain loyal to, the voices I have helped bring forward, the experiences that have challenged my assumptions, and the personal layer I eventually became willing to explore alongside the professional one. These distinctive qualities and values shape how I move around in the world, personally and professionally.  Together, they are my Leadership Signature.

Recognizing and being able to articulate that signature has given me a deep and newly grounded confidence. I can also let go of a quiet, nagging, self-criticism of not knowing exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. I seemed to be surrounded by people who could identify a clear career path when I just never had one. It has taken more than thirty years for some of the subconscious reasons behind my conscious choices to make a great deal more sense.

Perhaps this is why my memories return to the Altiplano. Bolivia, in my mind’s eye, has become an unexpectedly fitting metaphor for how I approach unfamiliar and sometimes scary terrain. Sitting on that floor, I could not change the conditions or manufacture certainty where there was none. I had to quiet the noise, challenge what fear was telling me, focus on what I knew for sure, and trust myself enough to act on it.

I can see much more clearly now what was apparently there all along, and that my signature—or at least a very small piece of it—can be traced back to the reassuring respiratory competence of llamas.