Rye, Underground Miner
A career in mining has been a golden opportunity for Rye, an underground miner at Northern Star’s Pogo Mine.
Decades ago, while doing excavation work, he met someone from a similar background who had recently transitioned into mining.
“He told me there would be a lot more opportunities and financial security if I could make the switch to mining,” Rye remembers. “And it turned into a good career for me. Achieving the lifestyle I have now would have been a lot harder without that early introduction to mining.”
Rye took the advice and entered the mining field, never looking back. While working at a mine in Nevada, he learned at a job fair that Pogo Mine was hiring. The opportunity to get involved in a new mining project in remote Alaska immediately caught his interest. He arrived in October 2006 and still vividly recalls how shocking the extreme cold felt, particularly coming from Nevada where temperatures are far milder by comparison.
“The weather wasn’t friendly to us people coming from the Lower 48,” he says. “-40F is never going to feel natural.”
Despite the extreme climate, Rye says that seeing the wildlife and natural beauty around the camp and the mine site was an exciting career upgrade: “The animals are truly amazing and who doesn’t like to look at the northern lights?”
Rye made the permanent move to Alaska in 2013, settling in Tok where he made a home for himself and raised his family.
Mastering a New Trade
When he first joined the team at Pogo, Rye was introduced to the wide range of tasks essential to daily operations at a mine site. He learned about bolting, where steel rods are placed into drilled holes running through mine roofs and walls, binding rock layers together to provide stability; and mucking, the process of removing ore and rock from drilling areas, loading onto trucks for transport to the mill for processing or to repurpose for backfilling stopes. Rye says he enjoyed the bolting and ground support work the most and still does “a little bit of everything” in his daily work.
Regardless of the task at hand, Rye says that safety has always been the key focus throughout his 20 years at Pogo.
“The most important part of this job is that everyone who goes into that hole comes out, with all their fingers and toes. We have safety meetings every day that keep everyone thinking and we have a checklist of things that we are always running through.”
Making Modern Life Possible
Beyond the long-term reliability and opportunities his career has provided over the past two decades, Rye sees how mining connects to modern life through the everyday products people rely on, often without realizing their origins.
“Every time you reach for your phone or power up a computer, you are relying on mined metals,” Rye says.
Gold is one of the best natural conductors of electricity and one of the most reliable, since it doesn’t tarnish or rust, making it a critical component of the circuit boards, memory chips, CPU processors that transmit data and connect us to each other and the world.
“From the gold in smart phones to the copper wiring that runs through homes to conduct electricity, if it doesn’t grow it has to be mined,” Rye says. “People don’t usually think about where those metals come from, but we all benefit from them.”