My 'Staycation' Includes the BC Mining Museum

As part of my current 'staycation', a term I am becoming more familiar with, I rode out on my Triumph Tiger 800 to the BC Mining Museum located about 50 kms up the coast north of Vancouver at Britannia Beach.

For years I have driven past this unique piece of Canadian history and gave it little attention. Opened around 1904, much of Canada's copper was mined here right up until it closed in 1970. During that time, it employed thousands. Mining was, and to a lesser extent still is, hard, dirty, dangerous work in those early days. You cannot really appreciate how much without touring these facilities. 

The museum was impressive. The tour included a brief ride into the mine, drill and muck machine demonstrations, a short video and we got to handle some raw rock with copper in it and freely explore the grounds after the guided tour ended. For the $27 entrance fee, it would have been better to bring it all to life with some period costumed actors and more demonstrations. As it was, the Museum seemed more like a ghost town haunted by tourists.
To my knowledge, there was no memorial to the hundreds of men that must have died from working in the mine over the years handling explosives, crushed by cave-ins and mortally injured in accidents of all sorts as well as lung disease due to exposure to the silica dust created while dry rock drilling. It's as if the Mining industry only wants us to see a 'clean' face of mining, with it's multi-million dollar renovated museum and reminder that we copper consumers are an integral part of the industry, too. I left asking myself if the colour of copper was more red than brown and what was the real cost of extracting these metals in the way that we did back then and if we do still.