Day 11........The Berendon Glacier and many others too

Today we returned to the Salmon Glacier Summit but this time went further into the icefields. The road continues to the Berendon Glacier below which was the Portal Camp for the old Grand Duc copper mine. This mine was started in 1964 and a large camp to house the miners was set up at the base of the Berendon Glacier.This area gets some of the heaviest snowfalls on earth, averaging about 800 inches each year, with the record at over 1,100 inches. To the men working at the camp, the 16 feet of snow that fell in the second week of February 1965 merely meant some extra work to keep their work areas usable. But high above the camp, incredible pressures were building as the snow deepened. The snow piles up deeply in the coastal mountains - it's heavy snow, perfect for building glaciers, awful to work in. On the steep mountainsides above Portal Camp of the Granduc Mine, millions of tons of snow let loose at 10:16 AM, February 18, 1965. Virtually the entire camp was wiped out by the avalanche. Some of the survivors were missed when the slide split into two forks, and many were able to dig themselves out when they were buried. A massive rescue operation was mounted but 26 men lost their lives.

   Portal Camp was never reopened. No technology available could protect men working in that location against another avalanche. The options for extracting the ore were few - an open-pit mine would be impossible due to the snowfall, so engineers had to find a way to cut the tunnel using only the camp at Tide Lake, 10.3 miles from the main ore body. The huge extra expense involved nearly forced the mine into receivership, but on the basis of reserves of 32,500,000 tons of 1.93% copper ore, refinancing was arranged. After many tears of ups and downs, the mine closed in the 1980's and the camps were dismantled and the towns of Hyder and Stewart shrank dramatically.

    All that I could find was the concrete mine heads and scraps of metal plate and roofing today. Mum did a 2 minute slience for the dead while I took pictures of the place. This area is high in the mountains and I was just trying to visualise how it must look in the Winter with at least 400 inches of snow. Something I couldn't do.

We continued on till we reached a wide valley with a river flowing from the base of the Berendon Glacier and saw a small encampment of miners working at some other prospecting job. Mum had to feel the fresh glacial water and I counted 6 glaciers surrounding us........a truely marvelous sight. We were at the end of the road so we turned back and had lunch at the Salmon Glacier Summit spot then wound our way down the treacherous road back to Hyder and Stewart. In Hyder we stopped of at a Grocer Store and the owner was telling us how the snow starts in October and by January tops 15 feet and he can walk off his second floor balcony into the snow without a drop. All the folk round here have told me that they love the excitement of Winter but that they are all very prepared with generators and the like since they can be without power or roads for up to ten days at a time. This made me look at everything round here in a different way wondering which house would be the best one to have in the Winter.

So tomorrow we are off  down South to the Nass Lava beds and New Aiyansh and believe it or not but the weather is set to be super sunny again with temperatures in the low 20's.....we are so lucky.