Fresh from college, Albert Lamarre spent the next thirteen years climbing western mountains from Alaska to Colorado to California and camping out for weeks at a time with a backpack, sturdy boots, and an ever-present geologist’s hammer. With his nose to the rocky outcrops, he searched for clues to a geological past and for mineral deposits in quantities large enough to mine economically. He also travelled back through American history, in ghost towns and abandoned mines of the southwest where earlier generations searched for gold, silver, or copper. He retraced trails where Spaniards prospected for copper and Native Americans collected this blue-green oxide to make face paint. Although the job of a minerals exploration geologist consists of locating prospects, staking and filing claims, drilling and examining core samples, making maps, and reporting findings back to company managers, the man himself was always looking to discover the rocks’ own story.

Educational field trips took the author to Canada, Mexico, and British shores. He willingly shared his expertise with younger team members. Now readers of Lamarre’s book can learn about geological principles and terms, like the theory of plate tectonics at fault lines thrusting up mountains and producing earthquakes. Rifts in the earth are easily understood when illustrated by the Rio Grande. Insight comes when viewing the Colorado Plateau as formed by sedimentary rock.

Lamarre, alone or with teams he led, served America by locating copper, lead, gold, silver, and molybdenum stores to support twentieth-century manufacturing. The author believes that those “later 1970s were probably the golden years of modern minerals exploration in the United States.” But there will always be those who seek elusive gold, silver, or diamonds. This 213-page book provides a helpful glossary of geological terms and may just point out a few locations left for modern prospectors to explore.

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