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September 7, 2009
In the 1950s, a huge copper ore deposit near Stewart, BC started to be developed at the Granduc Mine. Due to the rugged terrain and extreme winter snowfall in the area, in 1964 work started on a tunnel to carry the ore from the massive copper deposit down the mountain. The resulting 17 km tunnel wormed its way from through the mountain under the Leduc, Frank Mackie and Berenden glaciers to the Tide Lake flats and was the longest mining tunnel ever bored. The 5-meter diameter shaft had just been started when an avalanche roared down the mountain in 1965 killing 27 men and wiping out the nearby camp. Work restarted and the tunnel was finished in 1968. Most of the shafts and tunnels near the mine have been boarded up, but some could take you right through the mountain if followed. Although too dangerous to enter now, you can truly see "the light at the end of the tunnel" in this picture. Photo courtesy of Bob Wall.
This page was last updated September 28, 2009
September 14, 2009
You might be wondering what the Stanley Cup, the most coveted prize in professional hockey, has to do with gold mining. Looking for a diversion after the 1898 gold rush, the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association, having just constructed the first fully enclosed hockey rink west of Winnipeg in 1902, formed a four-team hockey league to play in it. Soon the best players in the Dawson league were selected to form the Dawson City Klondikers and challenge the champs, the Ottawa Senators, for the cup. The team started their 6,000-kilometer, month-long long journey on December 14, 1904 traveling first by bicycles (due to lack of snow) and dog sleds to Whitehorse, by train to Skagway, by ship to Vancouver, and finally by train to Ottawa. After the long journey, a request to delay the challenge a week was denied, and the Klondikers were the part of the most lopsided hockey games in Stanley Cup history - losing two games by scores of 9-2 and 23-2 before going home without the cup!
Gold extraction from the gravels of BC's creeks is a multi-step process. The first step is to feed the raw ore into the top of the plant with the hoe, and then as the material passes over the shaker deck, bigger rocks are shuffled out to the bottom of the plant and the gold and heavier materials drops into the low spots - the boil boxes and sluicebox - which are water charged and riffled to help catch the gold. Once a few hundred meters of material have been processed in the plant, the boil boxes and and various traps are emptied by running their contents through a small cleanup sluice. The result is a dark concentrate of gold and black sand, with a few nuggets interspersed through the material for good measure. There are various ways to do the final separation - some use the slow method of hand panning, while others use spinning spiral wheels that move the gold up a path to a cup at the center while spinning the black sand off the edges. Some miners further work this black sand for its bounty - more gold and precious metals - but some just send it out for processing.
September 21, 2009
Northern BC has seen miners and prospectors exploring its river valleys and mountains for the last century or two. Many of the early prospectors came in search of placer gold in the gravels of the old creek beds, but some came looking for other minerals. This old abandoned mine shaft on Mount Maroon, a popular hiking and recreation area just north of Terrace, lays abandoned to remind us of the struggle men had in search of their fortunes. This area is home to several abandoned mine shafts as well as the remnants of old cabins, rusty mining equipment, and even some old tailings ponds still holding water from the spring runoff. This shaft appears to be a fairly shallow one; the results must not have been encouraging enough to break through more solid rock to go much deeper. The area is home to many different minerals, including both placer and hard-rock gold, copper, molybdenum, zinc and lead among others. Early miners have seen the area's potential, and recently electro-magnetic aerial survey results have been published to encourage others to explore the area. Photo courtesy of Bob Wall.
