>>1871028It was fun, but hard work. It's a form of oil exploration where they search for new deposits by laying out a bunch of sound-sensitive equipment, setting off dynamite or using large vibrating trucks to generate sound waves, and reading the data to determine where the oil is underground. Typically it happens in wild, remote areas, but can happen in civilized places too. I was working specifically in a type called '3D heli-portable' which means the terrain was too rough to drive axled vehicles over, and we were flown out every morning in helicopters with our equipment, did our work all day, then flown back in to the staging area in the evening to go back to the motel. All traveling was done on foot for the labourers or quads for the techs and troubleshooters. It's a road/camp job, and we worked 4 weeks out in the bush, then came home for 1 week off. 12-16 hour days, 7 days a week while you are in the bush.
This video kinda shows the general idea, minus all the hard work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBRWq1s-L8YI did it during three summers in my university days, and worked "up" from the lowest rank of 'jughound' to 'lineboss' to 'shooter's helper' over the 3 summers. Jughounds work like dogs. A line boss carries a radio and is in charge of 6-10 jughounds, and a shooter's helper assists the guy who sets up and detonates the dynamite charges, who is known as the shooter. It's the type of job where you make $200 per day and live in places where there is no place to spend your money, so good for saving up or for burnouts. The job carries the same prestige as a treeplanter, roofer, or carny. When I did it, in the 90s, the companies were just instituting drug testing so it was cleaning up a little bit, and is probably a little higher-class/safer now. In the 80s and before, it was a lot rougher.
