“I started mining when I went to Island Copper in 1975; I was there for six months then came up to the Myra Falls operation. I am not a ‘tramp’ miner, not like a lot of men. I worked in the concentrator for many years and worked underground for five or six years, and then changed to work the warehouse and heavy equipment.

 “Concentrate is brought down from a mill up there but the rock that comes down does not come down in that form. There are minerals in the rock so we crush the rock and pulverize it into a very fine powder and then we do selective floatation to float the mineral off. We concentrate it because if we had to ship the mineral in rock form, our shipping costs would be astronomical.  It is not like coal, coal is a product out of the ground. They break it away from the schist, wash it and then they sort it into different grades of coal. In a hard rock mine we have to concentrate it; there are very few mines that can ship it straight out of the ground.  Pine Point is one of them, up in the Northwest Territories and they can do this because it is high-grade lead ore.

“The NVI Mine is about a half mile or more straight down. They are moving most of the ore underground on rail; there is as much rail underground in our mine as there is on all of Vancouver Island. Everything goes to twenty-four level, from where it was trammed to the underground crusher. Then it is dropped down to twenty-six level, is skipped up, from there it travels a kilometre on another conveyor to the storage facility. From there it is loaded onto concentrate trucks, taken to the Argonaut Wharf and unloaded for storage and shipping.

“To understand some of the terminology: a shaft goes up and down; a drift goes sideways; a raise goes at an angle between two drifts; and a decline angles down, instead of straight up and down like a shaft. In the shaft there is a series of ladders with rest areas every so many feet that a person climbs so they can rest. When they teach you to make an escape, they tell you to stop and rest at every one of these areas. If you are moving in a group someone will call out to rest and you must rest.

“When they get to the bottom of the shaft and start developing the mine they will run a drift for just so long. Then they will drill an opening so that there is a way to get air into the workings. They start at different stations in the shaft. Our escape route is attached between the Myra and the Lynx mines, so that if the shaft collapses there is still a way out. There always has to be a way out even if it is a ventilation raise. Most of the escape ways you will find these days are raises. 

“My favourite job in the mine was working underground but my dad hated it when I went underground. My mom hated it, too, but she does not like my driving truck on the icy roads any better than me going underground.  I laid my truck over last winter, on the road between the mine and Strathcona Lodge. I have pictures of the flopper, the accident on my fridge, that I look at every morning when I have my coffee.

“I was making about thirty dollars a day in bonuses when I was nipping. That is a good job; you nip here and there, pick something up over here and then take it over there. A nipper used to have his own little Loci, a locomotive, on the mine track with one or two small cars on it. Everything is done by manual labour, but of course, if you were outside you might be loaded with a machine. What you are doing is keeping the miner at the face; for every miner at the face you have eight guys keeping him there.

“The miner gets the big money since he is going into the rock without any guarantee of safety. Many times the miner is moving so fast his support people can not keep up with him. This is why they move the miners throughout the mine so that everyone can keep up and the mine is safe. At shift change the miners are always the first ones on and the last ones off. You generally have to hold the bus back for miners because they have showers.  You can only see the whites of their eyes when they are coming back because they are so filthy. Miners love their work and are hard workers, not afraid of hard work, they do not sit still, and it carries over into their homes. Most miners tend to pack a small lunch and something they can eat one handed while they work. There is only one way to learn to be a miner and that is to get out there and bust your butt."

Ray is currently driving the concentrate trucks and is shift counting to retirement as this website is being developed. By the time it is released his forty-eight shifts will be over and he will be retired.