"Life Moves Pretty Fast. If you don't stop and look around once and a while, you could miss it.": Britannia, The Chief & Shannon Falls

For the last weekend in May, the weather was looking good, so we decided to head up the Sea to Sky highway and see some of the sites with the kids. First up was the Britannia Mine tour. The site has recently gone through a rehabilitation, and everything is clean and organized. The history of the mine is captivating... so many stories of a community knit together through success and tragedy. It was also very isolated up until the 1950's, when rail and roads were constructed from North Vancouver. Prior to this, the only way in was by boat. You can read more at http://www.bcmm.ca/

This truck was donated by a mine up in Kamloops, BC and is on display at the museum. These trucks are typically used in open pit mines. Britannia had some small pit mines, but the tunnels and terrain were too small/extreme for trucks, so they had to be creative in their use of rail cars and aerial trams to move materials.

While we see it every day, it still doesn't get old. The landscape scenes are really beautiful.

Here's Molly and I getting ready for the underground mine tour. Owen heard from some people coming out of the tour that they were going to turn out the lights to show how dark it was in the mine and he suddenly got very nervous about it. It was kindof funny though because he was walking up to everyone that was joining us in line and saying "Excuse me.... have you been on this tour and do you know when they will turn out the lights?"

Sporting our hardhats!

In the mine, they demonstrated several methods of drilling holes in the walls to place the explosive charges. All the tools were run off compressed air and the earliest hammer drills were SO loud. It wasn't uncommon for the mine workers to sustain high levels of hearing loss. The newer versions were quieter and easier to manage, but still deafening.

The gravity fed ore processing structure is simply massive. Currently you can only view from the ground level, but they are raising funds for a project to expand visitor access to the upper levels.

Owen & Molly checking out one of the train cars used to move men and materials in and out of the mine.

After leaving the museum, we drove further up the highway into Squamish. Just before the town, there is a massive granite dome called "The Chief". It rises 2300ft above sea level and is a very popular destination for rock climbers. To bring this into scale, I highlighted a red box, which is what is captured in the next picture.

And here I highlighted two climbers moving along the rock face.

After watching the climbers for some time, we headed back down the highway to visit Shannon Falls park. This is the third highest falls in the province reaching up just under 1100ft. The park grounds are beautiful and we had fun exploring around the trails. The trees are just massive in this region. Here's Owen on the stump of old growth that has a "new" tree growing out of it.

And the falls....

Owen, Molly and I at the base view area.

We hiked up to the higher outlook and here's Allison & Owen at the viewpoint.

Heading back down the stairs...

Me and my little monkey. Molly kept tickling the back of my neck and laughing hysterically while we were here. Unfortunately she also managed to lose her sunglasses on these trails somewhere.