Wow!  What a great day with our class and Miss Warden’s class.  Praise the Lord for very little traffic, safety for all, and fantastic tour guides at an amazing venue.  The Britannia Mine Museum was one of the most interesting field trips that I’ve been on and I can guess that the highlight for most students was the train ride into the mine.  Here are a few of the pictures that I took of our day together.

Thankfully the traffic was light and we arrived in ample time before our tour.  This allowed us some time to stretch our legs and enjoy the short hike up to Shannon Falls.

The first thing we did at the Britannia Mine Museum was to meet our tour guide, Marshall.  Marshall was a wealth of information and had many personal experiences and memories of Britannia since he had worked at the mine from the age of 18-27.  His stories and passion for the community of Britannia were contagious.

We started off our tour learning about acid rock drainage and the environmental concerns that arose with so much mineral-polluted water running into Howe Sound.

Next was a walking tour around the community of Britannia.  Marshall showed us which dorm house he lived in as a young miner.  We saw the elementary school (high school students had to travel 4.5 km up the mountain to go to school) and the church which had two entrances.  Why two entrances?  I asked my family and their guesses were men/women, whites/other races, and children/adults.  None of these guesses were right.  The real reason was that Protestants entered one side and Catholics the other with an interior wall inside separating the two congregations.

After much begging from the students, we got to enter the mine.  Hardhats put on, loaded onto the train, & transported back into 1904 when the mine first opened.  We saw the drills they used, the explosives – 8 minutes to boom after the fuse was lit, the ‘mucker’ machine to get the ‘muck’ out of the mine, and the honeywagon – also known as the double toilet to provide relief, and little privacy, for the miners.

The final stops were in the core sample building and the mineral processing plant.  We were able to see and hold core rock samples taken from the mountain that the geologists would analyze to see if there were minerals worth mining.

The mineral processing plant is where the chalcopyrite was separated into copper, iron, and sulphur.  In the next 5 years, tourists should be able to take full tours of the plant, once it’s made structurally sound and the 375 stairs are up to code.

Thanks for the great day everyone!  Enjoy your weekend!