Okay, the lull is over.

It lasted about 25, maybe 30 minutes, after I wrote those prophetic but ill-considered words in late January! Shortly after that point I was in Vancouver for the annual Cordilleran Roundup mining conference, an annual barometer of mining activity in western North America if not the world.

What I saw at the 2007 conference was a crowd well in excess of 5,000, populated...