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Getaway that's good as gold
by Susan Poizner, Special to the Sun, Sunday Sun, 9/11/2005
Timmins mine tour one of the most authentic in world
Outside, it was a balmy, bright 30 degrees. But 150 feet below the ground the chill can get right into your bones. Fully kitted out with a hard hat, lamp, belt, coveralls and boots, we were following in the footsteps that the miners of Northern Ontario had beat into the hard rock for more than half of a century.
Timmins Ontario is known as the hometown of Shania Twain but just behind the Canadian diva’s museum, where you can see the singer’s clothes, trophies, and handwritten lyrics, is a real goldmine for tourists. It’s the Hollinger mine, now converted into The Timmins Underground Gold Mine Tour, and it is one of the most authentic mining tours in the world.
The first step on this journey into history is to arrive wearing warm clothes and socks. You’ll get the rest of the gear you need in the miners’ changing rooms – also known as “The Dry”. A miner’s suit your size will be lowered from the ceiling where it would be left to dry overnight. There are boots and hardhats in children’s and adults sizes. Then prepare to follow your guide – most are retired miners - into the bowels of the earth.
Gold was first discovered here in 1909 and in and around the mine there is operational equipment like ore cars and mucking machines that are half a century old. Luckily, the small, rickety old cage that hulky miners squeezed into to descend into the lower levels is no longer used…Today’s visitors slowly walk down a mine shaft or ride in a buggy as they learn about the process of extracting gold from underground rock.
On the way down, our guide introduces us to “Oscar”. This little skeleton (don’t worry, he’s made of plastic) is locked into a room full of now inert explosives. Here we learn what Amex powder – a potent mix of fertiliser and diesel fuel - looks like. After blowing the powder into holes in the rock, miners would light a fuse and keep well out of the way while the explosives would blow out an area the size of a small room.
During the tour, the guide explains how the rock is then crushed into gravel, put through a milling process, and sent through a mixture of lead acetate and arsenic to separate the gold from the rock. Once above ground you’ll also see how the “mud” (the gold mixture after it has been separated) is melted in a old fashioned furnace at a temperature of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit and turned into 99.9 percent pure gold brick.
Above ground there’s lots more to see, including the sluice area, where visitors are invited to pan for gold…and they’re allowed to keep any gold nuggets they find. This was once one of the top producing goldmines in the world. During the depression of the 1930s, unemployed lawyers, bankers, and others flocked to this area for work. In later decades, immigrants from Italy, Croatia and Finland found jobs in the mines.
But what’s clear from the tour is that the gold produced also came at a steep cost. Between 1909 and the 1980s, when the mine was closed, many miners were wounded or killed in this often risky job. And so the over 400 million of dollars worth of gold produced here over the years sometimes came at a high human cost.
Susan Poizner is a freelance journalist and the producer of the travel/heritage TV series “Mother Tongue”. For more information visit www.mothertongue.ca.
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This series of educational videos was made possible with funding from
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Mother Tongue: A woman's history of ethnic Canada is a 13-part TV series that documents Canada's multicultural history from a female perspective. Each program tells the story of a notable woman in one of Canada's communities, including a Black fugitive slave, an Acadian mail order bride, and an Icelandic suffragette.
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