Travels in Cascadia: Howe Sound and the Challenge of Living (and Mining) in Vertical Places, Part 2

Howe Sound, the southernmost glacial fjord in western North America, is a fascinating place to explore. We've already looked at the journey by ferry that we used to get there, we've looked at one of the toughest hikes I've ever taken for a bird's eye view of the sound, and a look at some of the engineering required to live in a vertical place.

Today's post is about resource extraction. That mountains have formed here at Howe Sound suggests that huge forces have acted in the interior of the Earth, and the tectonic activity is very often accompanied by mineralization. The rocks here include ancient marine sediments and volcanic rocks that have since been metamorphosed. Hydrothermal activity leached out metallic ores over a wide region and concentrated them in spring deposits on the ocean floor. The ores included iron, zinc, gold, silver, and arsenic, but most of all, they included copper. The ores were discovered in 1888, but it was sixteen years before the ores could be mined and processed because of the remoteness of the region and the difficult terrain. In 1904, the Britannia Mine began production, ultimately becoming the biggest copper mine in the British Empire.

There were extraordinary challenges in developing the mines, not the least of which was the steep terrain, and the lack of access. Landslides and flash floods were constant hazards, and two events were notable: in 1915 a slide demolished one of the mine camps, killing 56 people, and in 1921 a flash flood killed 37 individuals. The mines themselves were dangerous (as they always are) with 98 fatal accidents over the 70 year history of the mine.

The mine was certainly productive, however. During the 70 years the mines operated, ore totals included 650,000 tons of copper, 137,000 tons of zinc, 17,000 tons of lead, 500 tons of cadmium, 188 tons of silver, and 15.6 tons of gold. The gold alone would be worth $750 million at current prices. My rough calculation of the price of the copper the mine produced is $3.4 billion.

The closure of the mine in 1974 was devastating to the local community. Not only were the jobs suddenly gone, but the 130 miles of underground tunnels exposed sulfide minerals to the atmosphere, and acidic waters laced with heavy metals were draining down the hillsides and into the otherwise pristine waters of Howe Sound. The mine was one of the worst point sources of pollution in all of Canada. Mitigation efforts have been ongoing for years, with water being treated to remove the metals, leaving a toxic sludge that is put back into the old mine tunnels.

The community that remained faced the future of many mining boom towns: loss of population, despoiled water and massive scarring of the landscape from mining activity. Instead of dying away, the community hit on the idea of creating a museum out the remnants of the mining complex. One of the biggest problems was the concentration mill, the 20-story-tall factory just above the coast, and visible from the highway (see the first picture in this post). It was dilapidated and falling apart, but funds were secured to replace the windows and the siding in the early 2000s. With the arrival of the Winter Olympics in 2010, much of the museum complex was in place.

Our tour was well-done. They recommissioned an ore delivery tunnel near the concentration mill to serve as a model of the underground workings that are actually found mostly in the mountainsides upstream. The drilling equipment was reconditioned into working order, along with the mucking machinery. The drilling demonstration was LOUD (we were warned specifically to cover our ears), but it really brought home the kinds of conditions the miners had to work in. I have little doubt that many of them had serious hearing problems later in life. I don't know what Canada's version of OSHA is called, but they would never allow the miners to work without ear protection today.

They also demonstrated the carbide lamps that were used for lighting in the mines for many decades (above). Better than candles, certainly, but I would want some bright flashlights, and a bunch of them. Being lost in a totally dark mine (or cavern) is one of my serious phobias.

I deeply appreciated one aspect of the tour that most people might not...they preserved untouched one of the core shacks from the mine. I've seen only a few of these, and the ones I've seen were much smaller. One might wonder how the miners knew which direction to build their tunnels to reach the richest ores. They drilled thousands of cores into the mountain to sample the rocks so they could map out the ore bodies. The core shack preserved tens of thousands of these cores.

The interpretive signs even helped a bit in allowing students and tourists to look for the desired minerals in the cores (below).

The last part of the tour was apparently debuted not long ago. They used a multimedia presentation showing how the ores were treated in the concentration mill. "Presentation" sounds kind of droll and boring, but it wasn't. There was some surprising humor, for one. I won't spoil all the surprises, but one incredible bit was how they played the sounds of the mill at the volume it would have been in real life. I was struck once again about how the miners would have suffered hearing loss whether they were employed underground or working in the concentration mill.

The concentration mill is big from the outside, but it actually felt even more immense from the inside. The effort that it took to separate the metal from the mineral ores is astounding. One comes away with an appreciation for the many ways that technology has made our collective lives easier. And it will make it harder for me to ever throw away a recyclable metal object.

They allowed us to wander a little bit around the ground floor of the mill, and I was able to pick out something sort of unique. In the wet environment, copper carbonate stalactites have formed on some of the girders!

All in all, a great experience. If you are ever in Howe Sound, consider the tour at the Britannia Mine. Information can be found at https://www.britanniaminemuseum.ca/.

The Sequoia Underground: An Exploration of Crystal Cave

It's true that Crystal Cave in Sequoia National Park can hardly be described as a wild cave. Since its discovery in 1918 and its development as a park attraction in 1940, the cave has been visited by more than a million people. Dynamite was used by workers to widen passageways, and besides the lighting and pathways, there was a generator, and underground bathrooms. And yet there is still something wild about the cavern. Because it was discovered by park personnel and protected from vandalism from the beginning, the cave presents some wonderful examples of speleothems (cave decorations). The cave has a total of 2.42 miles of passageways (the third largest in California), but only a fraction ever receives visitors. The rest remains an underground wilderness.

The cave is an integral part of our field studies course on the geology of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. We paid a visit this last weekend and made the cave our first stop. Our tour began with an orientation on White-nose Syndrome (a fungus that kills bats), and sterilized our shoes. We then started down the half mile trail to the cave entrance.

The trail itself is a pleasure, and a good introduction to the local geology. The rocks are part of the Kings Terrane, a group of metamorphic rocks that formed in a shallow marine setting in Triassic and Jurassic time (around 200-150 million years ago) with some parts possibly older. The rocks formed in the Pacific Ocean and were accreted to the western edge of the North American continent as the mass of continental crust entered into the vast subduction zone that was consuming the ocean crust. The collision and subsequent invasion of the rock by molten granite caused the silt, sand and lime mud to become schist, quartzite and marble. It is in the marble that we find the caverns forming.

The trail provides a nice view of the marble cliffs. Permanent springs cause Cascade Creek to flow year round, providing a cool stretch of trail on a hot day and some beautiful small waterfalls.

Soon we reached the entrance to the cave and met our guide. The cave is administered by the Sequoia Natural History Association and is generally open for tours from the early spring to late fall.

A cool breeze was blowing out of the cave. The temperature is controlled by the average year-round climate, so the cave is relatively cooler in summer, and warmer in winter. Although the darkness of the cave provides little in the way of food, a number of animals do live in the cave, including a number of species of bat, and small arthropods like spiders, isopods and pseudoscorpions.

Entry into the cave is controlled by the famous spider-web gateway. I remember vividly seeing that gate when I visited the park for the first time as a child in the 1960s, and I remember the gate (and the underground bathrooms) the best.

Given the number of visitors, it's amazing that any cave decorations are left. It's to the credit of the park service and history association workers that so little damage has been done, although plenty of bad things have happened (the park service actually allowed self-guided tours for a brief time with disastrous results). The improvements to the pathway have actually meant that some of the stalactites and stalagmites have begun healing from previous damage, as evidenced by the pure white calcite on some surfaces. Dust from tramping feet and smoke from torches left many features a dingy yellow or brown color.

We passed some beautiful stalagmites on the floor of the cave, and then moved into the Junction Room, which was filled with the sound of babbling little brook. The cave is still very active, as it diverts a nearby creek underground. There are several levels to the cave, developed as the local canyons outside have gotten deeper, causing the rivers inside the cave to erode downward. There are numerous benches and terraces attesting to the former presence of higher level streams.

We moved through the Curtain Room, where a profusion of cave curtains and draperies hang from the walls and ceiling of the cave. They are out of reach of vandals and are thus largely unbroken.

The Dome Room contains one of the cavern's most famous features, the Fairy Pools. The rimstone pools and soda straws are actively forming (and recovering slowly from vandalism).

A zoom onto the soda straws (below) shows the water droplets on the ends. In these conditions, soda straws can grow at maybe an inch per century.

The unbroken draperies show an intricate structure.

The Marble Room is the largest in the cave, extending for more than 100 feet, with the ceiling 30 feet above. It is an amazing sight. It's also where they turn out the lights and let explorers get a feel for total darkness. Some people really don't like the sensation.

There are nearly 300 known caverns in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Boyden Cave, another developed cave, is just outside the park boundary). The caverns include Lilburn Cave, which at 28 miles of passageways is in the top twenty of the largest caves in the nation. Most of the wild caves are remote, and their locations are kept secret for obvious reasons. Clough Cave was known a century ago as a beautiful cave festooned with thousands of stalactites. When the cave was publicized, the speleothems started to disappear, and today Clough Cave is pretty much a featureless hole in the ground. Several vandals were caught by park rangers in 1997 stealing some of the last artifacts in the cave. What a crying shame.

In the meantime, if you ever visit Sequoia or Kings Canyon, be sure to give the cavern a look. You won't regret it!

Where are the Ten Most Incredible Places You've Ever Stood? My Number 4: What is it like to be the first person ever to see a cavern?

Can you imagine flashing a light in a dark corner of a cavern, knowing that you are the first human being ever to lay eyes on the formations? I haven't had that privilege in my life, but I have found two or three places where I can imagine what the experience was like. Most of the caverns that are accessible to amateur spelunkers like myself have been long known and rather completely explored. Unfortunately, most of them have been severely vandalized, and the early use of torches for light left soot deposits on the formations. It is a rare treasure to see a cave where damage has not yet happened. Such caves in my experience include California Caverns near San Andreas, California,  Black Chasm Cavern near Jackson, California, and the subject of today's post, Kartchner Caverns near Benson, Arizona.

Many of the speleothems are still active; there are water droplets on many of the soda straws

The "Ten Most Incredible Places I've Ever Stood" series has been a series of hard choices. This one made the list because of the shock and the awe, the way the cavern made my jaw drop as I stepped in. It is an experience unlike any other that I've had while underground. There is a difference between even a well-protected cave, and one in which whole areas have never been touched by a human being. The floor of one of the large rooms was covered with mud, and it was clear from the trackway above that only one trail through it was ever made, in order to put in a light source. The rest of the room remains as it was discovered.

How incredible is it that some of the soda straws that fell are still standing in the mud?

The discovery and visitation of any cave causes irreversible changes. Kartchner Caverns were discovered on private lands in 1974 and the people who found them were concerned about preserving the original cave environment. The cave was at nearly 100% humidity, and opening it to the desert environment would have dried it out. Such changes in humidity can adversely affect life in the cave and stunt the growth and development of speleothems (cave decorations like stalactites and stalagmites). And yet the caves were spectacular. Was there some way of preserving the caves while making them accessible to the public?

The discoverers hit on an audacious solution. Through a series of delicate and secret negotiations, the owners of the land agreed to sell the lands containing the cave to the state of Arizona to be developed as a show cave, but to be developed in such a way as to preserve both the features and the climate inside the cave (many of the legislators didn't know what or where the park was when they voted for it). They preserved the humidity of the cave using a series of unique airlocks. Pathways were constructed with a minimum of disruptions to the original configuration of the cave. It took 25 years from the time of discovery to the opening of the park to the public in 1999.

There was one catch. Nothing goes into the cave with the visitors. No food, no water, no backpacks...and no cameras. As you might expect, I live for photography and this for me was a hard restriction. In 2005, though, I got the opportunity of a lifetime: as part of a fund-raiser for the park's foundation, they had a photography day, and the National Association of Geoscience Teachers made arrangements for us to take part. I was going to be given access to the cavern to photograph to my heart's content. To be sure, I had to sign a waiver of commercial rights, and the images that you see in this post today are protected and cannot be sold or used in any way.

Perhaps the most incredible stalagmite/column I've ever seen

What a wonder it was to step into a cave that appeared the same as it was on the day of discovery! The airlock closed behind me and although the temperature was only 78 degrees, it felt much hotter because of the intense humidity. The passageways were dimly lit and it took some time to develop my night vision. But moment by moment the cavern came into focus. It was simply stunning.

I wandered from passage to passage lost in the moment. It was nice not having a guide (staff were stationed throughout the cave to answer questions and keep an eye on things), but it was also nice to be exploring a pristine cave knowing I wasn't doing major damage just by being there. Exploring a newly discovered cave means leaving muddy footprints and accidentally destroying delicate formations underfoot, or leaving trails in the mud. I remember thinking that the experience was something like being in a museum, but I thought that in a good way: the resource was being protected, and yet hundreds of thousands of people could see and enjoy it. 

Some marvelous "helictites", otherwise known as stalactites on LSD.

Although I can't be mistaken for a professional photographer, I learned long ago that photography in a cave is always tricky. There is no "natural" look to a cave except total darkness, but a camera flash steals perspective and washes out delicate differences in color and shading. I used the ambient lighting to maintain some depth to the photos. That meant standing very still for longer than usual exposure times (tripods weren't allowed at the time). 

Flowstone refers to speleothems that result from water seeping out of cracks in the walls of a cavern. Over time gigantic mounds build up that resemble ice cream sundaes. Kartchner is full of spectacular examples.

I'm not sure what to make of the features below. There are some nice soda straws, which are so delicate that they are the first to be broken off in unprotected caves. The spiky things are the beginnings of helictites, which tend to ignore gravity, growing instead under the influence of water pressure from the interior of the "confused" stalagmites.

Below, one can see a spectacular column in the foreground, and some marvelous draperies in the upper left background. None of the features were broken off, and none were vandalized. I can barely describe what it is like being in such a place. Every minute in the cave was precious. I know there is an argument about worrying over technology in situations like this, and that one needs to live in the moment, reveling in the experience of being, but I actually find caves disorienting. Despite all my orienteering skills on the Earth's surface (and people tell me they are formidable) I get lost in caves. I can't remember one room or one decoration from another. Photographs keep me centered, and keep the memories of the moment alive. And I can share them!

I passed a stunning wall of draperies. Time was beginning to run short and I would be needing to leave this fantastical world for the surface before long. I was sweating, dehydrated, hungry and tired. It wasn't difficult getting around, but the humidity gets to you eventually, draining your energy. I started to head for the exit chamber and the airlock to the outer world.

There was one last close-up of a moist, almost glowing surface of some flowstone, and then I was out the door to the world of light and fresh air. The contrast was shocking. Caverns are incredible places, but they aren't really a human environment. I can understand how the first explorations of caverns could awaken our ancestors to the ideas of shadow-worlds with their demons and nightmares. Hell was presented as an underworld of fiery pits and eternal torment. But in a different context, caverns have been a place where dreams come alive. I think of the spiritual awakening of an initiate in a deep cave thousands of years ago encountering the drawn images of animals and people on a cavern wall seeming to run and play in the flickering light of a burning torch. Wandering through a pristine cave in the present day brings us face to face with a fascinating world that is not completely apart from us. The deep hidden parts of caves may not be a human environment, but much of our early spiritual and cultural development derived from living and exploring the outer edges of the underground environment. Caves are places where magic seems possible.

What To Do on a Rainy Day? Explore the Mother Lode Underground!

So what does one do when an atmospheric river storm is barreling towards your region, with an expected 10"-20" of rain in some places? If you are among the intrepid members of the Geology Club at our school, you go caving! It's not that they planned on doing a field trip during one of the heaviest storms of the year, but this was scheduled two months ago. They looked at the weather radar and decided to go anyway. In the end we caught a bit of breathing space between two major storm systems. It was mostly drizzling and misting on us as we hiked the mile or so down the hill to the cave entrances.

California is not exactly known for her cavern systems, but the state does in fact have around a thousand known caves, and some are world class; one has nearly thirty miles of passageways. Seven or eight of them are operated as tourist attractions (Black Chasm, California, Mercer, Moaning, Boyden, Crystal, and Shasta are the ones that come to mind). Many are on public land and plenty more are on private land (how cool would it be to have your own cave?) but their locations are not widely publicized, because a well-known unprotected cave is quickly dismantled by vandals, and the damage to caverns is permanent. You can't grow stalactites in a human lifetime.

We explore a couple of wild caves in the hills around Columbia. They occur in pods of marble that originated as carbonate reefs and shelf deposits in the Pacific Ocean in late Paleozoic time which were accreted to the edge of the North American plate by the process of subduction. The suite of exotic rocks are called the Calaveras Complex.

We had to pay obeisance to the mystic black cows that guard the cave entrances (well maybe anyway; they certainly like to hang out on the grass-covered plateau where the caves are located).

There were two caves that we explored today. The first was a smaller "practice" cave that provided a few crawling and climbing opportunities and some nice speleothems in a small gallery. The cave had three entrances and several small rooms that angled away from the central area.

Caves are explored these days with flashlights and headlamps, but it hasn't always been that way. The miners used candles, and the native Americans would have used torches. The caverns have a completely different aspect by candlelight. There is literally a primal mystery hidden in the shadows. I developed a greater appreciation for the cave paintings done by our distant ancestors in Europe. Can you imagine being led into the depths, and then have the torchlight suddenly play on paintings of animals and people in the darkest parts of the cavern?

The other cave is a bit more of a challenge. One must first climb down some slippery boulders into the collapsed sinkhole, and then push up through a very narrow passage that is a pretty tight  squeeze...especially for late middle-aged fat professors. But what a payoff! The 150 foot-long main room is festooned with hundreds of unbroken stalactites and columns. The ceiling was high enough to prevent vandals from reaching and breaking them off. And frankly, most vandals are lazy bastards; it's a tough hike and fairly difficult to find unless you know exactly where to look (on my fourth trip to the caves many years ago I got lost in the fog and wandered aimlessly for an hour or so).

If you wonder about cave life, there are certainly creatures living in the darkness. There are usually two or three bats hanging on the highest ceiling (although there is no light, I suspect there is a vertical entrance to the cave somewhere, because I can't imagine bats negotiating the narrow hole we climb through, but maybe they can).

On this particular day we saw half a dozen 5-inch-long millipedes. I'm told they are mainly scavengers and don't bite, but I didn't experiment with the possibility today.

I didn't see any of them today, but a couple of years back we saw a beautiful orange newt deep in the cave (I think it is a Sierra Newt, but as in all things biological I am open to correction).

Wow, Thanksgiving is over and Christmas is coming, but I'm already out of shape and overweight. The climb up out of the cave and the long mud slog back to our vehicle was tougher than it should have been. But what a nice day it turned out to be...