Haileybury to open ‘rock garden’

The town of Haileybury, Ont., about 100 km northwest of North Bay, never promised the world a rose garden, but it will soon make good on its promise of a rock garden.

In mid-July, the Haileybury School of Mines (HSM), a satellite campus of the Timmins-based Northern College of Applied Arts and Technology, will open Rockwalk Park, an outdoor geological garden designed to commemorate the millennium and honour the Canadian mining industry.

The garden will feature an extensive collection of large rocks and ore specimens. There is a “mill rock” from the Kidd Creek mine, near Timmins, as well as a 6,000-lb. “Inukshuk” (an Inuit rock formation used to help people find their way in the Arctic), from the Nanasivik zinc-lead-silver mine on Baffin Island. The garden will also feature a series of rocks, some as large as 10 tons, visually explaining the prehistoric development of Canadian geography, as well as an interlocking brick pathway that will link all the exhibits, allowing visitors to tour the 6-acre park. The park will eventually house an amphitheatre.

The idea for the park originated in 1991, when a large rectangular iron formation from Dofasco’s defunct Sherman mine, in Temagami, was donated to HSM. Paul Bateman, a geology professor at the school, envisioned the formation as part of an exhibit in a giant rock garden. The garden remained in the conceptual stage until 1997, when a new president took over Northern College and formed a committee to help get the project off the ground.

The garden is designed to illustrate the relationship between geology and rocks and minerals, and is said to be unique.

“When we go to a place like the Royal Ontario Museum, we see some nice small samples, but the rock garden is much larger,” says Graham Gambles, who helps manage the park. “It would be similar to hugging trees, except that this is where you go to caress a rock.”

The original park design had a budget of more than $1 million, but limited fund-raising resulted in a downsized version. So far, most of the money has come from the town of Haileybury and the federal government. Donations can be made to Rockwalk Park, P.O. Box A, Haileybury, Ont. POJ 1K0. For more information, visit www.rockwalkpark.com