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Kelvin Camp is located just up the road from Gahcho Kué (or would be, if there were a road). How Ireland’s Desmond came to have a foot in both camps is a story Evans and Comerford never tire of telling.

The area was discovered by Mountain Province in the early ’90s. Like most exploration companies, to fund development it ended up in bed with a major, in this case De Beers.

Back in 2005, as Evans recounts it, De Beers was focused on developing Gahcho Kué and balked at paying $10,000 to extend permits on the surrounding land. “I sat in the meeting and thought: my God, what fools,” he said. Mountain Province leapt in to take over the mineral rights for free and when it got around to drilling in 2011, Evans’s instinct was validated. “It was clear from the results we were getting that they’d put their holes in the wrong place and we asked the question: what the hell is going on?”

Without the support of the Irish we would be up the creek

The Mountain Province team tracked down a geologist who solved the mystery: A builder changed the height of the building on which the radio beacon was located without alerting the geologists and the company ended up drilling the wrong coordinates.

How Chuck Fipkeand Stewart Blusson, two prospectors down to their last nickels, found diamonds in this part of the world back in 1991 is also the stuff of legend. The discovery started a frenzy reminiscent of the 1940s gold rush on which Yellowknife was founded. Tom Hoefer, executive director of the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines, remembers the heady days well. People mortgaged their houses and every helicopter for miles around was booked, ferrying prospectors to remote areas. Above the tree line, even the wood for the stakes had to be flown in after Yellowknife hardware stores ran out of two-by-fours. Some 50 million acres were staked, he says.