“I went up to Zeballos for Christmas and stayed for seven years. It was a long Christmas! I went up there for a holiday and they recruited me to shovel snow off the tramway. Alec Lamoureaux came along and asked me if I wanted to go to work. That was my first job up there, shoveling snow off the tramway to get the ore down. I went into the crusher after that.

“There was one old mine horse left when I was up there - Dolly. She lived on the flats out by the mouth of the river. We would go feed her apples and visit with her.

“There was a big hopper that fed onto a conveyor that went up to a big ore pile, and there were three shakers called citrons that fed ore down onto a conveyor. The ore would go down into a chute to the cintron and the cintron would shake the ore down onto the conveyor and the conveyor moved it to the ship. The conveyor was actually in a tunnel like a big culvert you could walk in and it was maybe a hundred feet long. There were three cintrons positioned along the conveyor with chutes above. When you needed more ore you turned on the cintron, it would shake, and the ore would fall onto the conveyor. The chute just went up through the roof of the tunnel and a Cat would push the ore into a pile to make sure there was a supply up there all the time.

Henry Viher below Tramline
Dave's co-worker, Henry Viher, below tramline.

“Driving the trucks up the mountain got pretty hairy; lots of them, like the Oshkosh had to be backed up because you could not take the corners, and I mean it was straight down! In the wintertime coming down with the crew it was scary. Some guys would ride the ore cars down. It was pretty haywire; I went down it once, and that was enough for me! One of the guys I was riding with had a stroke on the way down, so at one of the stops I jumped off and ran back up the tram line to tell the operator to get the car to the bottom fast. I was only about twenty years old but it was still quite a climb! The guy recovered, but he did not come back to Zeballos.


The trophy Dave never one!
“I played ball when I was up there and have a picture of the trophy I did not win. I always played for the wrong team; if I played for Zeballos the other team Fleetwood won, and if I played for Fleetwood then Zeballos would win. I guess I was a jinx!
“I can not remember what the mining wages were, but when I was logging I earned $2.52 an hour, the same as the price of a case of beer, and gas was fifty-two cents a gallon!

“I worked at the mine for probably three years; after the mine shut down I worked for Fleetwood Logging, which was often called Little Zeballos, for about three or four years until they sold out to Canfor. Little Zeballos was only a couple of miles away by boat. After that I worked at Camp Vernon; at that time the road did not go through, so we drove a vehicle as far as we could on the Zeballos side and then walked through the bush where someone would meet us on the other side to take us the rest of the way to Camp Vernon. When we came out we would walk the first part and just hope someone would be there to meet us on the other side. I was only there for a few months and then I went to Westmin.

“I started at Westmin some time in 1971. When we were driving in the pit we could see the copper; it was a bright, colourful, peacock copper, all different colors - we were driving right over it. It was very rich. We used mostly Euclids and Haul Paks. When they opened that Lynx portal we hauled on Saturdays from the Lynx up to the crusher. If they put a full load on the back we could not make it up to the crusher because it was so heavy. The ore was so rich and heavy the truck couldn’t make it. I did not work inside the mine; I walked in there once and that was enough for me! After being off work for a while during a strike I continued my mining experience at the Utah Mine in Port Hardy.

“Both Dave Setso and I worked at Island Copper, it was Utah Mines then, but I did not enjoy it at all up there, so was not there very long. It did not feel like a part of the Island to me, maybe because it was before the highway went in and also our families were in Campbell River while we stayed up there. They had a big camp there; we did two weeks in and four days out. We were only there for about three months and that was the end of mining for me. Actually, Dave and I left at the same time.

“I’m a Heavy Duty Mechanic. I didn’t go to school for it; I was trained on the job beginning in the mining industry. I started in Zeballos in the shop, after I came out of the crusher. I also pulled wrenches up at Myra Falls. In 1973, after my short stay at Utah Mines, I went to MacMillan Bloedel at Menzies Bay and stayed there forever.”
Dave Baker, 2006