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Oh, the stories I could tell about this subject. However, rather than get myself into trouble, I will give you a good book recommendation that chronicles the story of the search for diamonds in the Canadian Arctic. This covers some of the stuff you are asking.

• Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic by Kevin Krajick
  
  You’re basically familiar with the main components already on a how to become a junior. There’s a few different pathways to actually running a junior mining company, but they all basically fall into two categories:
  
  
• 1. be an entrepreneur
     
     
• 2. work for an entrepreneur
     
     I’ve in been in the business since the late 90’s and have worked with majors and juniors. While I have been a self-employed consultant at times, I don’t consider myself that much of risk taker to actually start an exploration company. I’ve been around enough of these personalities and talked with successful ones and not-so successful ones to provide some high-level advice.
     
     The tl;dr version is:
     
     
• 1. do some grassroots exploration; find something interesting
     
     
• 2. stake the claims
     
     
• 3. attend PDAC; talk to juniors with a geographic fit or commodity class to your property
     
     
• 4. get someone interested; sign a buy-in deal, where they invest into further exploration for an increasing ownership stake
     
     
• 5. sell off your majority stake in the property, but hold on to a royalty deal
     
     
• 6. rinse and repeat
     
     The best way I found to explain (and to relate) the junior exploration business is to think of it as a very niche branch of investing in real estate. No matter the technical details of a project, the end result is a land deal. Someone is investing capital for a piece of land that has the potential for higher economic value if developed (i.e. a mine is built).
     
     Now comparing the junior exploration industry to real estate brings into a comparison where investment capital comes from.
     
     
• Private money
  
  
• Public money
  
  Public money is basically most of the companies that set up a booth at PDAC. These companies are listed on the TSX or TSXV and are soliciting the public for investing capital by offering shares in their companies.
  
  Private money basically comes from all the wealth management groups or hedge funds. Look up the various companies that have set up shop on Bay Street.
  
  To access these sources of money isn’t straight forward. It does require some networking, which requires time. The other aspect is that you will need to find a lawyer that can help with drafting contracts and various other agreements.
  
  
  This is how I would approach this situation if I were a 22-year-old fresh geology grad, with the intent of owning my junior mining company.
  
  
  
• 1. Work 5 years; for a few different juniors on a few different projects. Save some money.
     
     
• 2. Take that saved money and the knowledge gained to find some prospective ground that you can stake a claim or buy into. With about $5000 to $10000 you can self-finance a small exploration program. Review the claims and geology on the various provincial websites. Find an area that might have had historic mining, historic exploration, similar geology to a new ore deposit model..etc. You could connect with a local prospector and strike up a deal. Offer your services as geologist for free for some type of back-end deal.
     
     
• 3. Through out this time period, continue networking. Become familiar some VP of Exploration of various companies. Seek out some gray-hair geologists. Maybe bug a former Thayler Lindsley or Bill Dennis award winner for advice.
     
     
• 4. Between networking and finding your “own project”, you should be able establish a connection with someone directly or who knows someone that would be willing to listen to your story on your project. That person will be your first investor and you’re off to the races.
     
     
• 5. You’ll also need to be an avid reader. You’ll need to pick up books on contract law, public markets, take some short courses at conferences, work on your public speaking.
     
     
     In terms of direct sources of information, Edumine.com has a lot of online coursework and webinars. I’ve taken a few and they are pretty decent. I wouldn’t spend too much money here, but if there’s a specific topic you want to learn more about, it might be worth the cost.
     
     
     Sedar.com; Every publicly traded company in the minerals business publishes a NI 43-101 report on a project. If you want to get some great background info, this is a good place to go. Look up a claim map, find the company name, go to their website, find their project name, look up the NI 43-101 on that project.
     
     Short Courses at Conferences; Roundup/PDAC/CIM and various provincial conferences will have short courses where you can get an infodump quickly on a specific topic. For instance at Roundup this year, there was a short course called “Capital Markets for Geologists”. Basically, it was a mini-mini-investment MBA for geologists in a two-day course.
     
     
     There’s another subset of this discussion I haven’t even touched. Many, many junior mining companies are simply shell companies. They are only setup for accounting purposes. People play the stock market game by moving projects in and out of companies, selling and buying shares, and even changing their company name to match the investing euphoria of the day. For example, add “Cobalt, Blockchain, or Cannabis” to your company name and watch your share price skyrocket.
     
     Anyway, there’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll pop back in periodically and see if anyone asks anymore questions.

Whilst I don't know where you could learn online, I highly recommend looking up publicly available field courses in basic geology. You would learn alot and be able to go out hiking!

If you're interested in sedimentary geology, Gary Nichol's book is excellently written, organised, and I would say is very accessible by the layman.

I'd also recommend the different Geology Field Guide Books as they are small, easily looked through and designed to be taken into the field. They have one for sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic and structural I think, very good books that would definitely get you through at least the first 2 years of an undergrad bachelors in Geology.

EDIT: on further investigation I think I meant the Field Description book series. Either look pretty good for a basic grounding.

EDIT 2: I also forgot to mention they're relatively cheap compared to most academic texts!

Outcomes of the Life of a Geologist is an excellent narrative introduction to geology that I think would pique your interest.

For a more rigorous or sciency introduction, you could look at intro geology textbooks. this was the one my course used (now in 10th edition).

But perhaps a better way to approach this, depending on where you're going to school, might be to just try to learn some things about the local geology. This will help you to get more out of your courses, if they have field components. The local rocks can be a gateway to all kinds of interesting topics, since they are marked by all the crazy shit that's happened to them over thousands to millions of years. For example, lots of rocks in New Hampshire have striations from the last glacial maximum. Let me know if you would like help finding sources/guiding an inquiry in this vein.

PS don't let this subreddit scare you in terms of careers. But DO take the excellent advice here in mind moving forward. You will have many opportunities to distinguish yourself to professors/employers through courses, internships, supervised research...take advantage of these!

Best of luck

Read the entire regreview guides, ideally twice. If anything is confusing then it may help to read this book: Engineering Geology: An Environmental Approach (2nd Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0131774034/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_iAr9BbR1ZAY8R

Also, if you are in a state like California that has major laws that matter to geologists happening right now.... SGMA comes to mind... Then know a little about it.

Good luck!

I think your probably fine then! Also since your not too far from Geonics HQ they might have a sales guy come and train you on it for a few hours if your buying one (man they are $$$!). Again, just brush up on it before you go charge. Nothing makes me more deer in the headlights than putting a figure in a report that I dont understand. Saying the machine spit it out is not a valid answer!
 


This is the best book IMO for readability and not making you derive curl-curl equations or being bogged down by stuff no one cares about: here. I think 20 bucks used is well worth it.

Was doing some just the other day in a coffee shop... actually can be quite invaluable when you combine with kinematics (if you're a structural person).... found that axial planar cleavage + oblique/normal faulting was offsetting a mineralized zone that had been mined/explored for decades... nobody had really done any structural work at all (this is more common than you'd think, I've found!).

The USGS maps had faults where there was nothing, and nothing where there were BIG, obvious faults. I did a pretty basic analysis and my mode lined up pretty well with the regional stuff that's well documented, with some local nuance thrown in. It makes sense.

So... yes, they're quite useful.

This is a good, quick book for reference:

https://www.amazon.com/Stereographic-Projection-Techniques-Geologists-Engineers/dp/0521535824

> Really, I just want to work in pretty country and find gold

Yeah that would be awesome. At least in the US you'd get to do a lot of work in NE Nevada and Alaska.

I know you've been working environmental for quite some time, how are you with mineral ID (sulfides and ig/met minerals specifically)? Did you take an economic geo classes? If you want to drop $100 on a text book the Geology of Ore Deposits is the quintessential economic geology text.

For what it's worth before my GRE (admittedly many decades ago) I found that reading Earth helped immeasurably.

Read it as if it were a novel, for the enjoyment of being reminded of items learned long ago and the overall refreshment of memory in areas outside your own particular favorites (igneous and metamorphic petrology for this then Vert Paleo student).

I don't have to do exploration in the field but I reference "Field Geology Illustrated," and "Sedimentary Rocks in the Field" when I need a visual reference.

Comptons is a good techniques and organization guide.

Other pocket sized guides you may find useful are "Field Descriptions of Igneous Rocks" and "A Pictorial Guide to Metamorphic Rocks in the Field."

Fire up those walking sticks! Do flights of stairs and hills if possible. Start jogging. Rock climbers did very well in field camp.

Field camp is amazing. I recommend looking into UMich (I hear they've been cutting their program though), IU-Bloomington, University of Oklahoma, UH, UT, and UW-Seattle. IMO, take the longer field course if there are options within these programs.

Contour mapping, compass usage, and field techniques are important. I'd practice those now & buy the Compton book now since I've seen it sold for as much as $350 in the past. There's a cheaper, slightly less encompassing version of this book as well.

I'm the south west so this purple bastard saved my buns.
Geology of the American Southwest: A Journey Through Two Billion Years of Plate-Tectonic History

Also: The Geoscience Handbook for the most information dense. Great if you know what you're looking for and need a refresher.

Communicating Rocks by Peter Copeland

You can probably find it cheaper, but I really enjoyed this book. Helped my writing about geology quite a bit.

One thing to do is look at who has written authoritative books on the topic. For example, Dr. John Ridley just came out with a very well respected new book called Ore Deposit Geology. He teaches at Colorado State University.

Pick up this book. It doesn't cover everything, but it will definitely give you a head start in the right direction.

Now, if you're predominantly doing CAD, you'll essentially be a "drafter," that is, you take a specified object and put that object into a computer. You won't be expected to do design work (at least not early on or without additional training).

I'm not as sure about the "technical assistant" part. Did they have any insight as to what that means exactly?

Source: took several drafting classes before deciding what to do in college.

This is the portable charger I use and I really like it.

https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Power-Charger-Flashlight-Splashproof/dp/B07FDXDB3W/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1549238897&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=solar+power+bank+portable+charger&psc=1

Also Ore Deposit Geology by Ridley

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1107022223/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_r88KBb0D42R5X


It's good for basics. It's not terribly long or overly technical but it's thorough and covers most type of deposits. And it won't break the bank.

Here is the mobile version of your link

The Bible

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Applied-Geostatistics-Edward-Isaaks/dp/0195050134