A hillside mill, an acid creek, and the salmon returning
A copper mine on the Sea-to-Sky Highway 55 kilometres north of Vancouver, whose townsite and workings grew together from about 1900 and whose history is a run of shared disasters, rockslide, fire and flood, because the housing and the mine were built into the same mountain. For a while in the 1920s it was the largest copper producer in the British Empire. It left behind one of the most polluted creeks in North America, acid drainage running straight into Howe Sound, which a water treatment plant has since largely fixed and the salmon have come back. The concentrator, a huge stepped mill built down the hillside, is a National Historic Site of Canada, and the Britannia Mine Museum runs an underground train into the tunnels.
British Columbia, Canada
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Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
