Few people can claim to have crammed as much adventure into their lives as St. Albert’s Charles Grenier-Green. He’s just 21, and he’s already roamed rainforests, fled bears, eaten tarantulas and explored six continents.
And now he hunts for gold in the frozen north – a bit of a shift from his childhood goal of photography. “I never thought I’d be mining for gold up in northern Canada,” says Grenier-Green.
Grenier-Green is an adventurer. His Facebook page resembles an issue of National Geographic, packed with shots of ancient ruins, frozen wastes, exotic foods, mist-shrouded mountains and AK-47s. With his flannel shirt and stubbly beard, he bears a slight resemblance to a lumberjack.
Born in Ottawa, Grenier-Green says he moved to St. Albert when he was two. Graduating from St. Gabriel High School at 16, he decided to take a few years off to travel the world.
Grenier-Green’s mother, Louise Grenier, describes her son as a very focused man, who, while adventurous, takes only calculated, thoroughly researched risks. “By the time he was 20 he’d done all the continents,” she said, excluding Antarctica.
She recalls how Grenier-Green pitched his first trip abroad to her. “Mom? Can I go to South America?” he asked. “Yeah, sure,” she replied, forgetting about it until he said, “Okay, I’m ready to buy my plane ticket,” two weeks later.
“He did everything, all the research,” she says. “By the week after, he was gone.”
Grenier-Green’s first trip was to the Peruvian Amazon – a place with giant spiders, colourful butterflies, and a zillion mosquitoes. “There were monkeys everywhere,” he says. “They’d make tonnes of noise every morning and you’d see them jump above you in the trees.”
Grenier-Green was there with a group called Rustic Volunteer Travel, planting trees and building animal homes with the help of local indigenous peoples. “It was completely different from Canada,” he says: no electricity or telephones, and no one who spoke English or French.
“The food was really neat,” he says, and involved a lot of beans, rice and quinoa. “You could pretty much pick (food) off the trees and eat it there.”
His next voyage took him to South Africa in 2009. “I’ve always had a passion for animals,” he says, so he took a safari guide course and hung out with leopards, elephants and giraffes. “Every day, you’d see hundreds and hundreds of animals.”
His next two years took him to Australia, China, Cambodia and Vietnam, often to places that lacked clean water and comfortable beds. “It really puts things in perspective as to how lucky we are here,” he says.
Looking for work in 2011, Grenier-Green says he spotted an online ad by Pika Exploration about gold exploration in the Yukon. When he called the employer, the guy told him to meet in Whitehorse next week to discuss the details. “I really didn’t know what we were going to do.”
He and a small crew spent that summer jetting about the forested hills south of Dawson City taking soil samples in hopes of finding gold. He took similar jobs in Nunavut during the next two years as well.
“Anyone can go out and find a little tiny bit of gold,” he explains, but you need a geologist to find enough to justify a mine. His job was to collect core samples for geologists to analyse.
He spent his days that summer jumping in and out of helicopters while lugging hundred-pound sacks of core samples. “Our legs got really strong.”
Sometimes, he’d have to jump off the chopper into swamps that swarmed with more mosquitoes than the Amazon. They had to wear mosquito nets and duct-tape gloves to their hands for protection, he says. “We looked like beekeepers running around in the woods digging holes.”
Other times, he’d hike up and down mountains lugging his gear, often stumbling upon bushes so thick with blueberries that he could chow down for half an hour without making a dent in them.
And sometimes there were bears.
One time during the fall, he recalls, he was digging a hole in the snow when he heard a little noise behind him. He turned around and saw that a cute little black bear had popped its head out of the ground – he had been digging on top of a bear’s den.
The bear was just two- to three-metres away.
“He must have been really surprised because he was probably sleeping,” Grenier-Green says of the bear. Leaves and dirt tumbled off of the bear’s head. The bear eventually jumped out of the hole, and was standing on all fours, just staring at him, presumably befuddled by the strange figure that had interrupted its nap.
“I really wanted to run away,” Grenier-Green says, but his boss had said that was the worse thing to do in this situation. He eventually used two bear-bangers (explosive noisemakers) to scare off the bear and then booked it out of there. “I decided not to take the soil sample.”
While some of his adventure stories make her uncomfortable, Grenier says she likes her son’s approach to life. “It would be easier to have my kids working at the McDonald’s at the end of the street, obviously, but that’s not what I want for them,” she says. “They can think outside of the box now, and I’m happy with that.”
Grenier-Green says he plans to take another trip up north later this year, and hopes to eventually get into the corporate side of mineral exploration.
“It’s an experience I’d never give up,” he says of his travels, and he recommends that others give travelling a try. “You’ll see a whole bunch of new things that you’d never think were possible.”
Charles Grenier-Green Q&A
Weirdest thing you ever ate? <br />“I had tarantula once,” he says, which was roasted black. “It was like a crunchy, burnt-tasting chicken.” He has also eaten guinea pig and cockroach.<br />Coolest thing you’ve ever done? <br />Jumping in and out of helicopters up north, he says. “It usually didn’t even land. You had to jump out or pull yourself in, sort of like in the movies.”<br />What animal would you like to be?<br />“Probably a bird, maybe a bald eagle … I’ve always wanted to be able to fly.”
