Britannia Mines - Where Pennies Came From...

 Alrightee!!! Here we are! We are going to visit the Britannia Mines National Historic Site!!

If you're a history buff... this is the place for you!

We've driven by here many times and that big tiered building is huge feature of the place. It is the concentrator building... we'll talk more about that later...

Can you see me??? In the R? Back in the late 1800s, a Scottish prospector went poking around the mountains inland from here and found an excellent mining spot!

Copper was the big find but it was remote from any smelters (nearest ones in Crofton on Vancouver Island and Tacoma WA). So they needed to build an ore concentrator so they weren't spending a lot of $$$ shipping excess rocks around.

They built a town down where we are... and then there was another village/town way up the mountain... Lots of the miners lived up there and then ore was sent down to the concentrator... 

It was dirty, dark and noisy work but the mine was pretty successful back in the day.

They still have a ginormous truck sitting out there!! Can you see me??? 

These tires are huge!!!

We wandered through the museum part... you can do gold panning here and they do sprinkle gold in the sediment so some people actually find some!

This is one of the old machine rooms. After WW2, with a decline in the demand for copper, the mine switched to processing zinc... but even that eventually dwindled and the mine shut down in 1974 for good. At its peak, Britannia was once the largest copper mine in the world!

This was a little rail car that transported mine workers deep into the mines. After the mine closed, it became a museum... and they've done really well. During the 70 years it was open... the mine produced 640,000 tonnes of copper... along with zinc, lead, cadmium, silver and gold!

Lots of old buildings are still here...

They had a pretty narrow gauge railway!! For all those ore carts... and miners.

But in the years after the mine shut... they discovered a problem. You see there are over 200 km of tunnels in the mountain. And it rains a lot here... so all that water seeped through the rocks and then over all the exposed mineral-ore and picked up copper and stuff and then flowed into creeks and out into Howe Sound where it was not good. Not good at all. It's called acid rock drainage and it is a HUGE environmental disaster... So back in the 1990s... the government and the mine owners came up with a plan to catch the runoff and treat it...

Because this drainage was killing all the aquatic life in Howe Sound, including salmon...

They tried different things and now...

There's a huge treatment plant up in the mountains and EPCOR annually treats 4.2 billion litres of runoff... And Howe Sound is slowly recovering...

An Adventure - The Stawamus Chief

 Hullo! We got up uber early one morning and headed off to the ferry line-up!

We are bringing Gramma's car over to Auntie Pam and Rose... but along the way... this bear has decided we are doing an Adventure (with a Capital A!)

OK... sooo it is a bit choppy out on the Salish Sea this morning and beary windy... we heard some people upchucking their cookies in the bathroom...

But it is a gloriously sunny day!

Although if Mama wasn't holding onto me... I might get tumbled all the way down the deck by the wind...

Onwards!

Alright... we are having a pit-stop in the Starbucks in Horseshoe Bay... bear blogging and stuff like that you know!

We then drove up Highway 99 towards Squamish. We were a bit early for an appointment so we thought we'd stop at Shannon Falls but... there was a line-up of cars to get into the parking lot!!! This is what it looks like...

We drove a bit further and stopped here to admire the flowers... 

Isn't this cool!!! Glacially scoured granite...

Cause we are just opposite the Stawamus Chief... a granite monolith that is over 2200 feet high! That's pretty impressive.

It's hard to get a good picture cause it's backlit...

I can climb my own mini-version!!!

If I had paws that could actually grip anything. Sigh.

The Stawamus Chief is a world-famous rock climbing location...

Seee... people come from all over to climb up here. The parking lot was packed.

Let's see if we can spot some climbers on that rock wall behind me...

Hah!!! I see two!!! Do you see them??

How about now???

That's crazy... This little bear is not going to be taking up rock climbing anytime soon!

We thought about doing the hike but it was getting a bit late and so we decided not to...

But if we ever come back here... we'll come early!! And then do a hike!

Onwards!!

Another Conqueror Challenge Completed!

 For the last little while, since Little Fox and I finished the virtual PCT, I've been doing the virtual Cabot Trail.

It's nowhere near as long as the PCT! Only a few hundred km and it was easy peasy...

Well I like the ribbon!! And the medal is pretty nice too!!

Ta-dah!!!

Those are puffins on the front... and one the lighthouses that line the Cabot Trail. It's beary pretty and one day... we will drive it.

The back says "Stay Wild"... you betcha!!!

But now... do I do another virtual challenge? And if so... which one??

I have four contenders at this point,... Anyone have any preference...?? 

The Appalachian Trail because... well... it's a classic and 3343 km long soooo... doable in two years (the deadline for completing any Conqueror Challenge) if I did 5 km/day... might be a squeaker though.

Then there's the Continental Divide Trail... a tad longer - 4611 km... and probably not doable at the current hiking rate... although if LF got onboard... maybe.

Then there's this one... the North Coast of Scotland... 806 km - almost like another Camino... we thought this medal had been retired (they do that sometimes) sooo... might want to snatch this one up.

And, of course, the West Coast Trail which is just the other side of the Island... it's also a classic and the medal is pretty... And it's short!

Thoughts? Votes? Anyone?