McSnowWriter's Pamphlet: 4.1 - underTERRAfirma

Your Flight Has Been Delayed

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:25:59 GMT

Your Flight Has Been Delayed

( Epilogue of under TERRA firma )

Terra Mines was behind me, both figuratively and literally. I was on board a single engine DeHaviland “Otter” flying south from the mining camp. The flight from the silver producing mine, located on the Camsell River just south of Great Bear Lake, to our destination of Yellowknife, N.W.T. was scheduled for approximately three hours. Our flight path would take us over the sub-Arctic taiga with it’s thousands of lakes and sloughs.

The past month had been “awkward” around Terra. The company was having financial difficulties that led to shortages of equipment, material and supplies; essential production equipment was not being replaced or repaired. As not to belabour the company’s problems, it is suffice to say that my decision to “leave” my job was reinforced when the Sheriff from Yellowknife arrived via floatplane and slapped a bailiff’s “Seizure” notice on the big scoop-tram that was being used to haul ore from “underground” to the “crusher” housed on a small rise above the mill.

We had taken off amidst a snow and rain squall on a grey, dull day in mid October; the thermometer was hovering right at the freezing point. The plane lumbered into the air after an unusually long take-off. I watched the pilot from my seat in the passenger compartment. He was busy adjusting the flaps and trim while occasionally re-setting the throttle.

I settled into my seat as we reached cruising altitude. I was hoping to get a little “shut-eye” before we landed. Touch down at the Wardair float-base in Old Town was in less than three hours now. Besides, a little snooze was appropriate as I anticipated an evening of carousing and debauchery since Terra was a “dry-camp” and had no women employed there. I had endured it there for more than four and a half months. The pilot was still fiddling with the controls as I shut my eyes.

I don’t know how long I had been dozing when I became aware of a change in the engine’s RPM. I opened my eyes and looked out the window. The ground, only a thousand feet below us, had recently received a light dusting of snow. It coated the rocks and trees thus giving the “higher” ground a frigid look. I turned my attention past the forward bulkhead opening into the cockpit and saw the pilot looking intently at his controls then out his windows searching for something. I glanced around giving a questioning look to the other four passengers and they just shrugged their shoulders in return. I looked at my watch and saw that it was 11:30 am. We were an hour into our flight, which by my calculations would have put us 120 to 150 miles south of Great Bear Lake.

Although the pilot was circumventing most of the bad weather, the plane was still flying through squalls of freezing rain; this was causing the plane to act “heavy” on the controls. I saw concern on his face as he increased the engine’s RPM to climb the aircraft while fiddling with the radio and speaking into the microphone. He seemed to be repeating himself; maybe trying to reach “base” radio in Yellowknife. We flew on.

The pilot put down the map he had been scrutinizing and with a deliberate movement banked the “Otter” and came around on a reciprocal course.

“I have to put the plane down”, the pilot shouted as he leaned through the doorway and spoke to the passengers, “there is a lake four miles back that looks OK for landing”.

We “all” had our faces up against the side windows by this time searching for the “OK” lake. We realized which one when the pilot circled a long narrow lake with what looked like a small beach at the south end. The lake was large enough and seemed “deep” as it was not yet frozen over; unlike numerous smaller ones that had a sheen of “inch thick” ice covering. We were reassured by the sight of small waves on it’s surface which acted like a wind gauge for the pilot.

After flying past the beach at the end of the lake the pilot banked the plane onto the “base leg”. He initiated his landing procedure by reducing the plane’s speed and applying flap. He then judged the angle to the end of the lake and banked the plane onto it’s “final approach” to the lake. He reduced his power and applied full flaps thus allowing the plane to glide down over the short stubby trees and muskeg, past the beach and finally over the water where he flared the aircraft into a perfect landing.

Swinging the plane around the pilot taxied in towards the shore. He was unsure of the water’s depth and what may lurk just below the surface so he cut the engine when we were still fifty yards from shore. He unbuckled himself from his seat and hurried past us to the rear of the plane where he dug out a paddle from a stowage compartment, opened the rear cargo door and stepped out onto the pontoon. I followed close behind to see if I could help in any way.

The wind was slowly pushing us towards the beach aiding the pilot as he used the paddle to steer us clear of any underwater obstacles. It was a relief to see that the beach was primarily small pebbles with sandy spots. The floats ground onto the beach fifteen feet short of the shoreline. It was “shoes off” time for anyone who wanted to go ashore.

The pilot climbed back into the plane and asked for our attention, even though he already had it for the last twenty minutes.

He explained that he had to get the plane on the “ground” quickly because we had been picking up “ice” and the plane was not handling properly; in essence it was forcing us down. He hoped that it was warmer down at ground level and that the ice would melt. He continued by saying he had a gallon of menthol hydrate on board that he would wipe over the wings and tail sections, but first he had to scrape and chip the ice off the floats. They were covered with a layer of ice that was weighing us down.

One of the passenger asked if we were going to spend the night here.

He answered that was a possibility and we needed to talk about. There was a “storm front” between us and Yellowknife and he wanted to make sure we are light enough to fly through the weather if we decided to go…..or, we could sit here and wait it out.

Another passenger pointed out that we were not equipped to overnight it here. The pilot said that he did have a small emergency kit with two sleeping bags, tarpaulin and a few C-rations.

It began to snow lightly at this time. We saw that it was just a squall that would pass quickly but it focused us on our little “predicament” of sitting on the shore of a small remote lake hundreds of miles from any settlement. The consensus of the passengers was to get the ice off the plane and get flying. The pilot, who’s name we learned was Frank, cautioned us that the storm front was still between us and home. However he was eager to get going also, since, even though he tried to contact his base while we were in the air, he had been unsuccessful in notifying his company of our unscheduled landing. If we didn’t show up in Yellowknife on or near our appointed time people would be getting concerned.

So, Frank’s plan was to sit “on the beach” for a few hours waiting for the storm to pass then make a dash for it. None of us wanted to be the focus of a “search and rescue” and Frank wanted to get close enough and high enough to make radio contact with his company to let them know what the situation was.

It was getting too cold in the plane so we decided to get a fire going on shore. I was wearing running shoes so I took them off, rolled up my pants and stepped through the cold, shallow water to the shore. The snow squall had past. The snow that made it to the ground melted immediately however it was sticking higher up in the hills.

We got the fire going the old fashioned “northern” way; paper from an old paperback novel, a pint of AV gas drained from the plane and a Zippo lighter. There was lots of dead wood lying around the area so we dragged enough to the fire where we looked around for the axe to cut it up. We spotted the axe in the hands of the pilot who was standing on one of the pontoons using the “blunt” side of the axe head to chip away at the layer of ice coating the pontoons. We all gawked at him and prayed he didn’t slip and fall, or worse still, punch a hole in the floats.

The fire was large enough for six people to sit around comfortably. It was warm and near “smokeless” as we didn’t have to keep the black-flies and mosquitoes away. It was too cold for them this time of year. We sat there staying warm and keeping one eye on the sky; there was a light breeze blowing in misty drizzle for brief spells.

The conversation, for obvious reasons, inevitably got around to the stories of missing aircraft and crashes. We speculated on Chuck McAvoy’s fate after disappearing on June 9, 1964 during a flight from Bristol Lake, near the Arctic Ocean, in his Fairchild 82. Did he and his passengers, Doug Thorpe and A. Kune, get blown up by the dynamite they were reputably carrying onboard? They were prospecting terrain south of Bathurst Inlet. Did he disappear to collect the insurance? Even though he hadn’t been found for these past several years the general consensus around the fire was that “they will find him someday”.

We speculated on Martin Hartwell’s odyssey. He was found alive with two broken legs after surviving 31 days in temperatures reaching –37 degrees Celsius. A pregnant Inuk woman and the attending government nurse, named Judy Hill, were killed instantly when the plane Hartwell was piloting crashed near Lake Hotah enroute from Cambridge Bay to Yellowknife on Nov. 8,1972. An Inuk boy suffering from appendicitis, David Kootook, survived the crash and helped Hartwell survive but finally succumbed to his illness the day before rescue. We sat around the fire and quietly discussed the “what if” scenarios associated with the rumours of cannibalism. What if…..it was you?

We could tell it was getting a little warmer as we were getting short rain squalls now, however the sky to the south did not look promising; it was still “socked” in. Two guys rigged the framework for a simple lean-to from our ample supply of dead trees. They draped the tarp over it and voila’, a wind-break and partial shelter to dry our damp clothes.

We stoked the fire and changed our conversation to the air search for Henry Busse and two others, Gunther Geortz and Vic Hudon, from Giant Mines. Busse, who had a photography business in Yellowknife, chartered Ken Stockhall’s Cessna 185 for a charter into the Nahanni Valley but didn’t return. That search lasted for two months but was unsuccessful. The plane was finally discovered in June 1963 in a valley near Cli Lake, over eight months later. Did they fly into a box canyon in bad weather and hit the steep walls while trying to turn? I can still see the time-lapse photograph of the midnight sun(s) over Great Bear Lake that Henry took. It showed 12 sun(s) dipping close to the horizon thus showing its trajectory in a 12 hour period.

The talk turned to Bob Gauchie. A frost-bitten Gauchie was found on April 1,1967 standing beside his aircraft. He lost his way in a storm, ran out of gas and was forced to land his Norseman, way off course, on the ice of a lake east of Great Bear Lake. His flight-plan had him going from Cambridge Bay to Yellowknife. He survived for 58 days, in arctic winter temperatures of “up to” minus 48 degrees, by eating his “cargo” of Arctic Char. The official search had been called off by the Military however many local pilots kept an “eye” out for him on their travels. Luckily, Ron Sheardowne and Glen Stevens had been flying a regular route to a base camp 45 miles south-west of Coppermine for 5 weeks. They may have been a little off-course themselves one day when they spotted Gauchie and his plane. Gauchie lost 70 pounds from his ordeal.

Others were not found. The wreckage of the plane or bodies of Frank Avery and Bob Markle were never found. They were on a local flight around Yellowknife and did not return. It is speculated that the plane went through the ice and is sitting wrecked on the bottom of some nameless lake. Mike DeMelt was never found. It is believed that he also crashed through the ice.

Some of us around the fire related how we were involved in these searches. The Air Force would fly their “Buffaloes” and “Hercs” into Yellowknife and “call” for volunteers to act as “spotters”. We would scrutinize the ground as the planes flew the pre-planned search grid. Local “bush” airways volunteered their time and effort for one of their own. I always dreamed of finding them.

Many other pilots have gone “missing” in the North over the years. They are part of the legend of the “bush" pilot created by their exploits while helping to develop northern Canada. Most of us around the fire were too young to talk about those exploits but we had all read and dreamed about them.

It was mid afternoon and our stomachs were telling us that we needed to be fed. We scoured the supplies to found the C-rations. Frank had also requested we go through our baggage and take out anything that we could “do without”. I took out my miner’s boots, oilers, hard-hat and an assortment of work clothes. All told, we came up with a small stack of items that were going to become a permanent fixture on the landscape. We estimated the stack weighed in at two hundred pounds. Better than leaving a warm body behind. Besides, Frank said the company would compensate us for our loss.

The weather seemed to be improving to the south even though we continued to see rain squalls in the distance. Frank was of the opinion that the “ceiling” was at 1500 feet and “lifting” and the sky was starting to look better, however, “it’s only 2:30 so let’s wait for another one or two hours before we try again”. If we waited as late as 5:00 pm we could still get to Yellowknife by 7:00.

We sat around the fire again. This time we talked about everything under the northern sun. Small talk. I reminisced about the time, as a youngster, going with Chuck McAvoy as he flew an amphibian Grumman “Goose” from his base in Old Town over to the YK airport where he was to drain water from the plane’s belly. The short flight was memorable since I sat in the co-pilot’s seat as the lake water streamed over the windshield obliterating our view until the plane gained enough speed to get on “step”. The other memorable part was that we were pointed toward shore and in my mind the “distance to the shore” wasn’t that far away. The others related their experiences but you could feel the apprehension in the group as we wanted to “get going” but knowing it was better to wait awhile longer.

It was 4:30 and it hadn’t rained for over an hour. We finally disassembled the lean-to and buried our trash. We loaded our bags and ourselves onto the plane. I and another passenger volunteered to push the plane off the beach and keep us facing the wind. The water was freezing; kind of like swimming in Yellowknife Bay in front of Giant Mines before all the ice melted from the bay.

The floats were just clear of the bottom as the pilot cranked over the big Pratt & Whitney engine with a whir of the battery. The radial engine caught with a loud deep throated roar and a puff of black smoke from its exhaust pipes. We gave a final push and hopped on the pontoon. My partner headed straight in through the door while I used the paddle to keep us off the bottom. I looked at the cockpit to see Frank lean out the door and give me the “nod” to get aboard. I had just shut the rear cargo door when I heard the engine noise increase knowing that we were taxiing away from the beach. I regained my original seat in time for Frank to hurry past me to double check the cargo door. He was back in the cockpit in less than twenty seconds.

We were airborne in less than a minute after a short warm-up. Frank banked the Otter into a climbing turn to the south and leveled off just under the base of the menacing clouds. The rain squalls could still be seen in the distance, but more importantly, the base of the solid mass of grey clouds was getting pretty close to the top of some of the higher hills in our flight path. We crossed our fingers hoping the clouds did not close ”in”, and the pilot could find a route under the clouds. I could see him talking on the plane’s radio.

He finally poked his head and yelled over the sound of the engine that he had been in contact with his Base. The weather was not that good but there was still room to fly. The cloud ceiling at Yellowknife airport was 1100 feet above ground level, not the best for VFR flying. He went on to say the ceiling was ”lifting” in the Gordon Lake area; meaning that it was clearing up to the northeast and if we had to, we could swing eastward before heading south to Yellowknife. At least we had choices as long as we had enough fuel.

The cargo area of the plane once again became nice and warm. We were able to discard our wet and damp outer clothes and relax in our seats. I was too hyped up to take a snooze so I watched the ground below us to see if I could spot any landmarks that I could get my bearings.

I knew that we had to pass near the old Rayrock Mine with it’s derelict buildings and mine roads. One road and power-line wound their way over to the “powerhouse” on the Snare River. This powerhouse also supplied Yellowknife with most of it’s power so the “right of way” shouldn’t be too hard to spot from the air. If our track was farther east I might be able to see the old North Inca Gold Mine on Indin Lake.

I could see a solid mass of clouds directly ahead of us however it seemed better to the east as Frank had said. He was slowly changing his bearing to a spot where the base of the clouds was the highest from the ground. We flew on.

I finally spotted something man-made. It took me a few moments to realize where we were. It was the Bluefish Dam and Powerhouse on the north end of Prosperous Lake. This was where Con Mines got their power. We had flown north of Yellowknife to circumvent the bad weather. I felt the plane bank southward from the Dam and knew we would be flying over the lake itself, then Yellowknife River, then Yellowknife Bay past the distinctive head-frame of Giant Yellowknife Gold Mines and finally into Back Bay where the Floatplane base of Wardair was located.

We landed at 6:30 pm, 5 hours behind schedule but in time for the beers.

Nothing is for sure in the North. Although insignificant, this little incident made me aware that things could have been quite different. What if the ice seized the plane’s controls, what if we punctured a pontoon when we landed, what if we had to overnight, what if………

underTERRAfirma

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:59:46 GMT

underTERRAfirma

The Canada Employment Centre counselor smiled at me as she pushed the employment contract across her desk and said, “Sign on the dotted line please.” This signing was to seal my fate for a six month contract as a hard-rock miner at Terra Mines - a high grade silver mine located on the Camsell River, just a few miles from the southern shore of Great Bear Lake. I didn’t hesitate “to sign”; it was time to get back to work and pay for my habit of having a good time.

Three days later I and three other new employees were passengers onboard a single engine DeHaviland “Otter” aircraft winging northward to the isolated silver mine after a watery take off from the Wardair float-plane base located at the ”Rock” in Old Town, Yellowknife N.W.T.

The flight took three hours. I watched the Precambrian Shield pass below me to fill in the time. The characteristic rock outcrops were surrounded by valleys of muskeg and stubby trees; or by water that made up the thousands of lakes and sloughs dotting the northern landscape. It was mid May and the ice was off the small sloughs and was just coming off the bigger lakes. I could see two white dots on many of the open lakes. A closer look showed that they were paired up swans and geese settling down for a summer of rearing goslings.

I knew we were getting close to Terra when I heard the pitch of the engine change. I watched the pilot through the open cockpit doorway as he made preparations to land the plane. I looked out the window and was rewarded with the sight of the mine site. The mill was sitting near the shore of Ho Hum Lake, its shiny white ore bin and covered conveyor belt structures rising above the metal roof. Just north of the mill sat a three-story building which housed the main offices and the mine “dry”. Three other large structures sat a hundred yards east of this building. One was the cookhouse and recreation complex and the other two were bunkhouses that consisted of two groups of four “Atco” triple wide trailers sitting parallel to each other. Big fuel tanks sat farther north of these buildings. Minor sheds and buildings dotted the remainder of the camp. I could make out the mine portal a quarter of a mile from the camp.

We watched the landing through the cockpit door opening. The pilot pushed the large yolk forward and the plane nosed down in a steep dive to the water and at the last moment he pulled the yolk back to level off and make a smooth landing on the tops of the waves. He taxied to the dock where ground crews secured the plane to the dock’s cleats. We grabbed our bags and threw them into the back of a battered up crew-cab truck. We were shuttled from the floatplane dock to the main office where we were signed in officially and assigned rooms. We were then taken to the bunkhouses and shown to our rooms.

They were your typical “Atco” trailer type room. There were two single sized beds on each side of the fifteen foot by fifteen-foot room. Two small desks with drawers faced the far wall with its one window. A small shelf was fastened to the wall over each bed. Two closets were located to the left of the doorway. Two flimsy chairs made up the remainder of the furniture in the room. Home sweet home.

I saw the personal belongings of my roommate taking up one side of the room so I threw my duffle bag onto the other bed. I presumed he was working since it was early afternoon. I decided to scout out the bunkhouse unit. There were eight rooms in this building, each sleeping two people. The showers and toilets were situated in the middle of the unit.

I returned to the room and unpacked. Clothes in the closet, shaving kit on the shelf over the bed and books and magazines in the desk drawer. I would dismantle the magazines and place their pictures on the wall beside my bed at a later date.

I was exploring the mine-site at 4:00 PM when I saw the underground crews walking from the mine’s underground portal to the mine’s “dry”. They were in a hurry to wash up and change into their street clothes. They would hang their wet work clothes and boots on hooks attached to a small basket and hoist the ensemble to the ceiling via a rope slung through a pulley attached to the ceiling. The clothes dried in the warm air circulated from large heater fans.

I continued my exploring for another hour. I intended to get to supper around 5:00 PM. I walked into the recreation room that adjoined the dining room just before supper. The room was forty feet by forty feet at most. It was your typical recreation room with armchairs, card tables, dartboards, and a pool-table.

What wasn’t typical was a grown man doing the “two step” on top of the pool-table. I watched with amusement as another man, laughing, egged him on by clapping his hands together in time with the dance. Suddenly two other men ran into the room and grabbed the dancer from the pool-table and shuffled him outside with his arms flailing in the air. His admirer followed close behind. The dancer was obviously drunk. He must have had a bottle of alcohol smuggled into camp via the plane that I had arrived on.

Terra was considered a “dry” camp, no alcohol permitted, even though management made the exception on Wednesday nights. A strictly controlled bar, set up in the Rec room, was open between 7:00 and 9:00 PM. Personnel were allowed to purchase up to four bottles of beer. The bottles were opened at the bar and had to be consumed in the Rec room, with no exceptions. Consuming alcohol at any other time or place was “Cause for Dismissal”.

I ate my supper and returned to my room to see if my roommate was there. He wasn’t. As I looked around I noticed that my shaving kit on the shelf was open. Somebody had been poking through my belongings. I quickly opened the closet to check my clothes, then the drawers to the contents. Nothing had been taken. I then took my shaving kit off the shelf and discovered that my aftershave lotion was gone.

Then it came to me. The “two step” dancer of the pool-table had sneaked into the room and stole the aftershave for its alcohol content. I’m sure that he checked the rooms of the other newcomers and stole their aftershave lotion also. It gave him a cheap drunk.

The days went by fast. I got into a rhythm of working, eating and sleeping. My spare time was spent reading or chewing the fat with others in the Rec-room. My roommate turned out to be a mill worker who worked on a different shift than me. He was a bookworm who always carried a World Almanac tucked under his arm. There was no bull-shitting him.

There was no formal entertainment other than one movie a week. The rented 16 mm film reels were brought in via the supply plane. The trouble was - the plane did not always arrive as scheduled. TV was not available in remote northern Canada and VCR’s were not yet invented.

Terra Mines was on the verge of bankruptcy when I was there. The underground crew transporter truck needed a new engine, however none came, therefore we had to walk up and down the “incline” from the portal each day. Going down was not too bad but coming up was a chore when you were decked out in all your mining gear, hardhat with lamp and battery strapped to your belt, steel toed boots and carrying tools or equipment which needed to be repaired.

It was customary for everyone to meet at an underground assemble point at the end of each shift to count heads. This was to ensure that nobody was left underground. Then we would walk up the long 15-degree incline. It was equivalent in height to a sixty-story building. The muscles of my legs would be burning as I reached the portal. What made it worse, everybody wanted to reach the top first, in order to avoid waiting in line to get showered and changed, so it always became a race. The company never did repair the engine while I worked there.

One of the main air compressors broke down a month and a half after I got to Terra and was not repaired. That meant that there was not enough air to run all the rock drills underground at the same time so being “junior” I became a timber-man building bulkheads and chutes.

One day Jim, Frank and I, the temporary timber crew, set out to build a bulkhead in one of the caverns called a “stope” on the 375-foot Level. To get there we had to walk down the incline to the 575 foot level, walk along the eight foot by eight foot main tunnel called a “drift” until we came to a “raise” being used as a man-way, climb the raise to the “sub-drift” at the 375 foot level and then walk the last two hundred yards to the stope. This raise was a five foot by eight foot tunnel blasted out of the solid rock at a sixty-degree angle that would join the two levels.

The man-way built in this raise consisted of wood ladders stacked end to end and extending the full length from level to level. Each ladder was fastened to the sloped floor of the raise using “raise pins” drilled into the rock floor. A wood deck was laid across the remainder of the floor and also extended the full distance of 200 feet to the 375-foot level. An eighteen inch high handrail separated the ladders of the man-way from the decking. Timbers wedged between the roof and floor, every sixteen feet up the raise, supported the handrails. The decking became a ramp for the material bucket that would slide along as it was pulled up and down the raise by an air operated winch called a “tugger”. The cable from the drum of the tugger was played out to the top of the raise at the 375-foot level through a pulley and back down to the top of the material “bucket”. The bucket was six feet long, two feet wide and one foot deep. The front of the bucket was open except for the bottom one foot that was closed and acted like a bucket. The sides were closed in but tapered as they got near the top. The top was fully open. The back was fully closed and acted as the runner that ran on the decking

On this particular day we stood at the bottom of the man-way with our lamp’s light stabbing into the surrounding darkness and illuminating our immediate area. We flipped a coin to see who was going to operate the tugger. Jim lost so he had to stay behind to operate the noisy air operated tugger as Frank and I squeezed onto the bucket for our free ride up the raise. Jim would have to climb up the man-way after he deposited us at the top.

I got on first. I could fit entirely in the bucket. Frank then got on by placing his feet on the lip of the front of the bucket. He then placed his hands on the sides of the bucket for support. The sixty-degree angle of the raise meant he was half standing and half leaning on the bucket. He nodded with his light to Jim to start. We could carry on a conversation even though he was standing one foot higher than me.

We had traveled more than half way up the raise when Frank exclaimed suddenly “lights above.” Frank’s job while riding on the bucket was to watch for any lights above us on the 375-foot level. If he saw any it could only be the shift-boss. We would have to jump off. Without another word he swung his left leg from the moving bucket over the handrail onto the ladder beside the ramp and then instantly swung the rest of his body over the rail.

Riding the bucket was ‘OK’ as long as you didn’t get caught by the shift-boss. Everybody did it even though there was a mine regulation prohibiting the riding on the material buckets. You would get a serious reprimand if caught.

I shifted around in the bucket and waited for the next timber post to pass. I then swung my left leg over the handrail onto the ladder. As I shifted my weight to the ladder my right boot got wedged in the bucket. There I was, one foot on the ladder and one in the bucket with the bucket still traveling upwards. I could feel myself lose my balance as my legs were being pulled apart. My left foot was dragged off the rung of the ladder while I still straddled the handrail. It felt as if I was being ripped apart at the groin. The next timber post slammed into my torso and crotch forcing my body and leg to jerk back over the handrail. I had lost control and was now hanging upside down underneath the bucket. Everything went black. I could feel myself being dragged on my back up the ramp.

After what seemed an eternity the bucket and my dangling body stopped. Fearing that it may start up again I lunged for and grabbed the handrail. I pulled myself hand over hand until I was upright on the bucket. I reached down and grabbed the chord of my lamp and swung it around my neck. The light was still shining. My glasses and hardhat were gone.

I cleared my right foot from the bucket, then gingerly swung myself over the handrail onto the ladder. I half sat and half lay there regaining my composure and allowing my heart to slow down. I wasn’t scared but I’m sure that I was in shock. The vision of me being ripped apart by my legs sent shivers down my spine.

I heard, then saw Frank as he reached my level from below. “What happened?” he asked.

“I lost my glasses,” I replied nursing my aching crotch muscles and bruised torso.

Frank sensed something was wrong but didn’t say anything. We lit a couple of cigarettes and had a smoke break. We then climbed the remaining sixty feet to the 375-foot level. Nobody was up there. If the shift-boss had been there he must have continued on to check on the other workers along his route.

Twenty minutes later Jim’s head popped up from the raise. Attached to his belt was my hardhat.

“You guys scared the hell out of me,” Jim blurted, “I was looking at the ramp and all of a sudden I saw your hardhat come bouncing down”

“Then came your glasses,” he continued “I didn’t know what was happening so I stopped the tugger.”

“I’m glad you did,” I said, as I reached over and retrieved my hat and glasses.

I explained what happened as Frank and Jim sat there with shocked looks on their faces. After voicing their concerns over me we carried on to the stope. Needless to say I didn’t do much work for the rest of the day. And I was really dragging my ass when we emerged from the portal at the end of the shift.

More time past. It was mid summer. The sun would barely scrape across the horizon at sunset before it rose again. I spent a-lot of time hiking around the hills in the evenings with a work buddy. He worked for the Exploration department and would bring a pick-hammer to chip at the rock outcrops we passed over. We never found a silver mine but we did get to see many spectacular northern sunsets since this was the land of the Midnight Sun.

One day I received a note from Jim Albers in Yellowknife stating that our buddies, Daren Cranna and Leo Lachowski had shipped out to a small mine development on the Camsell River. They were driving a drift into the side of a hill to get at the silver ore. When I checked around I found out the property was twenty miles down the river from Terra.

I couldn’t miss the opportunity to surprise them. I talked to my exploration buddy and he arranged that I could borrow the Exploration department’s boat as long as I had it back by next morning. The boat was a fourteen-foot aluminum “Lund”. It was powered by a ten horsepower “kicker” built by “Mercruiser”.

So, on a long summer evening, after work, I filled up two – five gallon tanks with gas and placed them in the boat along with my wind-breaker and off I went.

I had to be back with the boat before morning. It belonged to the Exploration department and they needed it first thing to go stake some claims around Terra.

I did surprise my two friends, Daren and Leo. We spent a couple of hours swapping stories of our different adventures over a bottle of scotch that one of them produced from his kit.

Then I had to go back to Terra. That is when the river surprised me………the weather had changed…….