Diamonds are Forever: Chuck Fipke in Profile
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By Frances J. Karon
The kitchen table is in a state of organized chaos. Thick white binders; thin red binders; a three-hole punch; scissors; clear tape; paper printouts; a box filled mostly with yellow HB 2 Paper Mate pencils, their erasers worn to the nub. From where Charles “Chuck” Fipke is seated at the table, he need only glance up to see Forever Unbridled’s Breeders’ Cup Distaff trophy. To his left, down the length of the wooden table, is a window bench that was overtaken long ago by more fat white binders, behind a Nikon with an 800mm lens on a tripod.
This is where Fipke plans his matings, like the one that produced Eclipse Award-winning champion older female Forever Unbridled.
The view through the back window is magnificent: the house backs up to the shore of the Okanagan Lake in Kelowna, British Columbia. And the Nikon is pointed at the top of a tall perch, recently frequented by an osprey, on the dock outside. On the ground, plump quail, unperturbed by a fat squirrel in their midst, peck at the birdseed that Fipke tosses out from a container near the door.
The yard, says his son Taylor, the youngest of Fipke’s six children, is “like a mini-ecosystem.”
For as long as anyone knows, Fipke has always had this connection with nature, linked with his fearlessness, fervor for adventure, and the methodical approach of a passionate and unwavering workaholic. Listen – you don’t discover diamond mines by accident or luck.
Nor has his Thoroughbred breeding operation been run by accident or luck.
“In both disciplines [horses and geology], I do my own little research,” he says. “To identify minerals that go with diamonds, I’ve got my ways of doing it. It’s pretty complicated, and I do the same with horses, too.”
They’re really not so different, finding diamond mines and breeding champions.
Chuck Fipke was the first of Ed and Anna’s four children, born in Alberta, Canada, in 1946 with independence and a take-charge attitude.
Anna was, she says, “always right behind” her young son.
“I remember when he was just a little boy and he used to take his little tricycle and go down a hill,” says Anna, “and there was traffic down there. That really scared me. I didn’t want him to do that but he did it anyway. It was a challenge for him to go fast down there and just stop.”
Instead of curbing his strong personality, she gave him freedom. “I always encouraged him to do things, I never restricted his doings. He was quite a kid to raise.” And here she laughs again. “He had his own way and he wanted it done his way. He always was a leader. Whenever he was with a group of boys, he was the one that was always arranging things and taking them wherever they should go, which he still does. And it seemed like he did good because I never heard complaints about it.”
His family couldn’t afford much, and with Ed drifting in – and mostly out – of the picture during the early years, Anna resolutely raised four children. “I always found a way,” she says. “They never went hungry.”
“My dad left us once for two years, eh.” Fipke says matter-of-factly. It’s consigned to the past now. “We had this garden, and at one stage all we had left was celery to eat. I didn’t like celery after that, but now I love celery, because I ate it when I was young.”
Jerseytown
Fipke was a quick thinker, precocious and clever enough to devise means of earning money – though not always in ways that he could tell his mother. “I actually was quite a good entrepreneur,” he says. “I was probably the richest kid in my class. And you know, I never got anything from my parents.
“I did a lot of questionable things, to be quite honest. Even though I was a Scout,” he says quietly, looking back on a child’s survival instinct through an adult’s filter.
When his father started an aerial farm photography business and settled down somewhat, moving the family from Alberta to British Columbia – to a Peachland farm on the outskirts of Kelowna – Ed was more present in their lives, although his work took him away often.
Anna used a paintbrush to turn Ed’s pictures into beautiful works of art, and their oldest son knocked on doors to sell the photos. Young Fipke was, he discovered, good at sales, and the job helped prepare him for the future. “It doesn’t matter what you do, you have to sell yourself,” he says.
“My dad was always critical, which was good. It’s good to have criticism. But my mum was always positive, so I had a balance of both.”
While finding his balance, Fipke began to yearn for a horse. He says, “I liked all animals, but all I dreamt about was having a horse. I never thought I’d get one.”
He’d raised a collection of birds, from pigeons to owls and even a falcon, from a very young age. Maybe he was attracted to the freedom that birds experienced. One day he’d stood helplessly watching as his falcon flew away, never to return.
With horses, he, too, could fly. Their wildness that could never be fully tamed was a buzz.
“The thing about riding a horse going full blast is it’s exciting, because with downhill skiing, you can control yourself, but with a horse you never really know exactly what’s going to happen. You direct it, but it doesn’t necessarily go there!” He laughs, his enthusiasm boyish and pure.
He had two horses before he was out of high school, an Arabian filly he lost when his father still owed money for her and an ex-racehorse he sold after it nearly killed him, giving Fipke a concussion and fracturing his skull in three places.
“I used to love to ride like the wind. You develop quite an attachment to them, too. It’s one of the things I don’t like about having so many horses, that I can’t really see them all,” he says.
He rode the ex-racehorse against Exhibition (now Hastings) Park racehorses that were on their way to the Calgary Stampede. “I came dead last, but it didn’t discourage me,” he says, remembering that he’d ridden Western against real jockeys on lightweight saddles. “I didn’t think I’d lose, you know.”
Taylor tells his dad, “That doesn’t cross your mind often.”
Unbridled Forever
Fipke graduated from high school in Kelowna and enrolled at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His father had advised him that there were nine jobs available for every geophysicist who earned a degree, so he started off in that direction until a required course unearthed a talent for geology.
“Before I went to university, my little brother liked rocks, but I didn’t really. You know, they were interesting, but…”
Rocks, he soon learned, presented him with the intellectual challenge of discovery and the physical challenge of the hunt that drives him even now. Geology could unlock the secrets, billions of years old, of the Earth for anyone with the intelligence, patience, and derring-do to find them.
On a typical day, Chuck Fipke spends his mornings poring over the papers in his horse binders and afternoons poring over samples, results, charts, and maps at his lab, where he’s in the process of finalizing a “very important” diamond indicator mineral classification scheme that no one else has done.
C.F. Mineral Research Ltd. is in a modest building that’s been the company’s base since it relocated from the kitchen of Fipke’s first house. His parking spot – which he uses more often now that he isn’t bicycling or rollerblading to the office anymore – is marked with a sign: “Stud parking only. All others will be towed.” An old, broken-down Oldsmobile, AKA “The Shark,” occupies a parking space, too.
“We do things cost-effectively. What I found when we were starting out is that it was cheaper to put five guys in a car and drive than it was to have everyone go on a bus, eh!” he says. The Shark is kept around as a reminder of how Fipke once had to make do on a shoestring budget.
The work that goes on inside the lab is, frankly, staggering. The process of sifting through each sample of what, to the uneducated eye, looks like dirt, dirt, and more dirt is incredibly detailed and exacting. No single grain is ignored; each step sifts out particles of earth whose analysis will not lead to diamonds, gold, or whatever element they happen to be looking for, until they are left with a small, viable sample that warrants closer examination.
The man running the wet-sieving equipment removes every last speck of dirt before moving on to another bag of dirt. If he doesn’t do this perfectly, the next sample will be contaminated. And so it goes for each of the weeding-out processes. One tiny misstep can put prospectors on a costly false trail – or turn them away from a legitimate one.
This lab, it’s been said, is the world’s best in its field. “One reason we’re so successful in mining,” Fipke says, “is we developed the technology ourselves.”
That technology has helped Fipke identify what he thinks is his second diamond mine, in the Attawapiskat area north of Toronto.
“It’s fun finding diamonds!” he says.
But despite using the highest level of technology to separate and analyze millions of grains in a bag of dirt – or to breed and develop horses – Fipke doesn’t use the internet. For him, the fax machine is still king, and, though his horses sometimes wear heart monitors and GPS equipment, there’s nothing better than a stopwatch when it comes to training.
Fipke, who has a perpetual hint of mischief in blue eyes and a laugh always percolating under the surface, says, “I’ve learned how to use a microwave! People call me a dinosaur, but I’m high tech now that I use that microwave.”
Maybe his reluctance to embrace all aspects of modern technology is a vestige of his earliest days in the field when, just out of college with a wife (from whom he’s divorced) and young son, he lived among cannibals, warriors, and bushmen, sometimes sleeping with a double-barreled shotgun by his side.
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