Deep inside the Pioneer

I once accepted an invitation to tour the Pioneer underground mine in British Columbia; it was my first experience with a shaft operation.

Mac Hunt and I left the mine dry and crossed the access road to the mine portal, which led to a 400-ft. crosscut and the No. 1 station. He pulled the cord hanging from the station post to sound a buzzer to summon the cage. He then went to the nearby station phone and rang up the hoistman, John Conn. John, who was to become a close friend, welcomed me to the Pioneer.

“Relax now. The cage’ll soon be here and I’ll send you smoothly to the twenty-five hundred level station, more than two-thousand, four hundred feet below,” he told me.

The cage came silently into the station. After Mac gave a three-bell signal on the pull-cord, we opened the doors and entered the cage — a narrow enclosure of steel and wood with interior dimensions of six feet by five feet by seven feet in height. I was somewhat apprehensive as Mac rang the twenty-five level station with two bells — the signal for lowering. Gently, we departed.

I was petrified as we slowly descended from the main station. The shaft timbers appeared to move by slowly at first, then rapidly as we gained speed. The cage gently swayed as we descended. Water splashed us through the cage as we swept by station-after-station.

The cage lurched and bumped against the guide timbers on the way down. I could not get comfortable. I glanced hopefully at Mac in the pale yellow glare of our mine lamps. He was oblivious to the bumpy ride.

The cage and the shaft sets suddenly slowed, and the bright lights of the twenty-five level station appeared.

Mac reached for the pull-cord and rang three times. John answered the signal and we exited the cage. Almost immediately, the station phone rang. It was John checking up on me. I told him that my knees were shaking but that it had been a fine ride.

Mac and I entered the twenty-five hundred level of the Pioneer mine, two-thousand four-hundred feet below surface. The rocks on the walls appeared stable. On passing through the ventilation door, we were immediately swept along a narrow tunnel by a blast from the ventilation fans.

Heavy rails on evenly spaced ties guided us on our route. On each side of the tunnel were pipelines carrying water and compressed air. They reduced the six-by-eight-foot opening to a narrow passage. Visibility was limited to the focused beam of our mine lamps. Mac stopped on occasion to examine the mine walls, striking the face with his hammer. Once, the steel point glanced off the solid surface. “This is granite,” he advised me. “When we reach the veins, we will be in greenstone.”

Strangely, I felt comfortable, even confident.

We traversed the two-thousand, two-hundred feet from the station to the Twenty-seven Vein workings, stopping often to examine faults and other irregular forms. Suddenly, the rock walls changed to shining white quartz — the Twenty-seven Vein.

Mac splashed some water from a ditch beside the track on to the wall. We knelt and examined it.

“Notice the fine grains of pyrite, which contain gold,” he said. “Look at the dip angle of the quartz, about twenty-five degrees in the Twenty-seven Vein. We could follow this vein for about two-thousand feet, but this is typical.”

Following a detailed examination of the vein structure, we returned to the shaft station to examine the nearby Main Vein. This, in contrast to the 27, was a narrow, steeply dipping formation. Both veins were fault-filled structures and consequently narrow but continuous.

I returned to the surface in the cage with Mac, breathing a sigh of relief as I inhaled the fresh mountain air once more.

— The author, a retired mining engineer, resides in Vancouver, B.C.