But his high school studies in maths and chemistry set him up for an engineering career that has taken him from New Zealand to Australia to Argentina, working with gold, silver and coal.
For the last 18 years, the married father of three and keen snowboarder has been based at Arrowtown, working as a mining consultant.
His newly created role for Santana Minerals Ltd as general manager New Zealand begins on January 23, and his task is to produce feasibility studies for a working gold mine hidden in the hills behind Bendigo, near Tarras.
"I grew up in Dunedin and we always holidayed in Central Otago, but we moved to Auckland when I was 11 and continued on holidays into the Coromandel, which also has interesting gold mining history.
"I started collecting rocks there, not that I am a geologist. But I got the odd funky rock, which I have still got."
His student vacation work took him all over New Zealand and Australia.
In his first year, in 1988, he spent the August holidays prospecting in Northland with BHP Gold, which was was also drilling at Bendigo Ophir.
He was just 19 when he went to Mt Isa in Central Queensland. Another holiday was spent at Waihi Gold.
After he got his degree he went underground at the Golden Cross mine.
"Part of being a mining engineer is doing underground time, doing actual hands on, so I was operating trucks, loaders and drilling machines.
"You need that to do what you call a first class mine managers ticket, which is still required today.
"I ended up doing 20 months there and then came down to Macraes [Palmerston] and did my first mining engineer’s role there for 12 months."
But snowboarding is also a big part of his life and Andorra was calling. So he spent three seasons following the snow before heading to Western Australia to manage an underground mine producing high-grade gold.
He then spent three years managing mining-induced seismic events at an impressively large nickel mining centre, Perseverance, four hours north of Kalgoorlie.
In 2004, he moved to Arrowtown and a job with coal miner Solid Energy, before contracting to Frasers underground gold mine, near Palmerston.
A job with a silver and lead mine in southern Patagonia, Argentina, popped up, so he did that for two years before continuing his Arrowtown consultancy business.
Bathhurst Resources, the largest coalminer in New Zealand, was a client from 2010 to 2017, and then Mr Spring joined as an employee to manage domestic pits, and later work on resource development.
He was looking forward to putting his experience in stakeholder and iwi engagement, baseline studies and financial modelling to good use at Bendigo, he said.
He was also looking forward to meeting the Tarras community and consulting iwi.
"One of the key aspects of the role is to understand their concerns ... Right now it is about defining what the mine will be. We can talk generally to stakeholders but we are months away from having anything definitive to talk about ...
"The whole baseline process takes years. It does not just start when you put your consents in. It is important for me to get out there and meet with individuals and with groups," he said.
