Ice Road

So is the cost to produce them. Gahcho Kué’s billion-dollar price tag could have been 30 percent less elsewhere in the world, Truter says. In seven years of operation, Snap Lake never made money, crippled by the costly engineering challenge extracting diamonds from beneath a subarctic lake.

The best way to understand what it takes to mine diamonds in this part of the world is to view it from above. The landscape, for hundreds of miles in all directions, is almost entirely binary: snow-covered rock and too many lakes to count. The temperature ranges from minus 50 degrees Celsius (-58 Fahrenheit), to plus 35 in the summer. Scattered aboriginal communities inhabit the area, along with caribou and grizzlies.

Each winter, mine operators spend three months constructing a 350-kilometer ice road across this terrain. Once the ice is thick enough to support the movement of heavy equipment, a convoy of trucks crawls along at one-kilometer intervals to avoid stressing the ice. This year, the road was open eight weeks before it started to melt. After that, the only way in is by air.

Irish Billionaire

Historically, diamonds in Canada have tended to be found by lean and nimble junior exploration companies, although De Beers continues to invest heavily in exploration. Those that go broke scare off future investors, making a benefactor like Ireland’s Desmond and his private equity money invaluable.

“Without the support of the Irish we would be up the creek,” says Patrick Evans, 60, Mountain Province’s CEO and, until this April, also of Kennady. It was Desmond’s team that insisted Kennady be spun off to maximize the value of both companies. The Irish billionaire, who made his fortune in software and betting shops, has done well this year with diamonds: Kennady’s stock is up about 40 percent in Toronto. Mountain Province has gained about 60 percent. Neither company has any revenue.

Friendly Debate

Evans, Comerford and Kennady’s new CEO, Rory Moore, have flown into Kelvin Camp to go over the geological data. It’s a spare but cozy operation: two neat rows of red-walled sleep tents surrounded by an electric bear fence. There’s also a plywood office, communal washroom (hand sanitizer, no sinks), carb-heavy kitchen and a core shack. The latter is crowded with executives, a handful of camp personnel and Tom McCandless, an independent director of Kennady.

A geologist, McCandless, 61, has been wheelchair-bound since a desert bike accident in 1975. That’s never kept him out of the field; he’s spent the day gamely wheeling through snow. At frequent intervals Evans and the others step in to lift his chair in and out of buildings, vehicles and aircraft, at one point jury-rigging a sled to drag him through a challenging patch of slush.