Three months ago, Darcie Cohen was in Newfoundland and Daniel Mendez was in Melo, Uruguay, and neither were spending a whole lot of time thinking about rocks.
Now, they can't help it: "everything smells like rocks," said Cohen, hanging out in the staff room of the B.C. Museum of Mining, at Britannia Beach. The museum is the work placement for Cohen and Mendez, participants in a cross-cultural exchange program called Canada World Youth.
Cohen dumped out her water bottle: somehow, it smelled like rocks too. She re-filled at the water-cooler, and then went outside to start a tour.
"First, all I was doing was going on other people's tours," said Cohen. "Now, me and Daniel do the tours together." Mendez and Cohen met the tour group at the opening of the mineshaft. Mendez walked to the front and hopped up in the driver's seat of the tour train. The tour group boarded; the train moved into the tunnel, deep into the guts of the mountain, to the drills.
Mendez speaks English very well. He wanted to lead the tours himself, but he's not quite confident enough yet. Maybe later in the summer. There are a lot of big, strange words to know on a mine tour so he works the drills.
Considering that Mendez is 50 kilograms (110 lbs), and then considering that the drills weigh about 34 kgs (75 lbs), seeing him behind an antique mining drill is a little disconcerting. But Mendez had done this many, many times, the largest disaster being a trapped pant leg.
The group moved on, Mendez showing and Cohen telling. They finished the tour outside, panning for gold flakes.
Later in the day, a group of about a dozen people affiliated with the mining museum headed up into the mountains to the old mine and the accompanying town site, which is off-limits to anyone without permission to be there.
Basically, the really big stuff went on up in the hills: there was a large open-pit mine on a mountain-top called Jane Basin, the Jane landslide in 1915 left 60 men, women and children dead, and is considered one of B.C.'s worst natural disasters to date, the town-site, complete with swimming pool, bowling alley, cinema, school and 3,000 residents (the miners and their families) was up in the hills; and the network of shafts bore down through the mountains beginning at about 4,500 feet above sea level and ending well beneath it.
The convoy made two stops on the way up to the Jane Basin open-pit mine. The first stop was at the town's swimming pool, the site of competitions and cool-offs for the townsite's residents, through the '20s to the '50s.
The second stop was at the powerhouse. There was machinery, machinery, machinery, rusted and stuck fast in the concrete foundations, rising up between puddles of skunky rainwater. The floor of the building was covered in little cylinders of rock: discarded test pieces, extracted from the mountain with hollow drills. Back into the trucks, the group headed up to the original mine-site, the open-pit, at Jane Basin.
Saying that the original open-pit mine is at the top of a mountain isn't quite accurate. Half the mountaintop is still there, and the pit mine is the half that's not. Softwoods crowded at the edge of the cliff; the orangey-red rock went down, below where the trucks were parked, into a deep, muddy pit. Below the rubble and muck at the bottom of the pit was a clogged-up glory hole - an opening into the mine tunnels, which miners funneled rock into for transport down the mountain.
The group started rummaging about, picking through the ore. Some were heaving stones against boulders, breaking them up, trying to find good samples. Terry Johnson, the guide for the trip, a former supervisor in the mine and later the general manager of the mining museum, answered questions about mining, pointed to the site of the Jane Landslide, then answered more questions about mining and switched the subject to rocks, and after about half-an-hour, it was time to go home. Someone joked about staying overnight. Packed into the trucks, the convoy started home.
Everyone's invited to our "Educational Activity Days," where Canada World Youth Participants learn about Squamish. They are on Wednesdays, roughly from 9 a.m. to 5. p.m. Next week's topic is Being Human in Squamish. We usually meet at St. John's Anglican Church (behind Sea to Sky Hotel and near Extra Foods), but since this sometimes varies, e-mail [email protected] for information on where to go.
For more information on Canada World Youth, go to www.cwy-jcm.org.
