Discovery, NWT

The first part of my story starts HERE

Discovery Mine, NWT was, at one time, the richest producing gold mine in North America.
It is located about 80km NNE of Yellowknife.

A prospector by the name of Alfred Giauque (pronounced Jay-Kway) discovered gold in this area in 1944.

Discovery and Giauque Lake

You can see how the land was scarred after the last ice age, leaving many holes that later became lakes.
Black bears, moose, caribou, foxes, wolves, ravens, seagulls, arctic terns(similar to gulls), ptarmigan, grouse, lemmings, and many other animals make the NWT their home. In the summer we had millions of mosquitoes, black flies, horseflies and other nasty insects. We also had some huge dragonflies (my favorite) that ate a lot of the other insects.

The lake where Discovery was situated was named after Giauque. It is a small lake about 7 miles long and almost as wide. The mine was located on the hill overlooking the lake.
The mine was in production from 1950 until 1969 and was finally demolished in 2005.
During its working life it produced 1,000,000 Troy ounces of gold from 1,000,000 tons of ore. When I lived there gold prices were only $32.00 per Troy ounce.
Being on the Precambrian shield it was a hard rock mine with a shaft going straight down to just over 4,000 feet deep.

You have never seen darkness until you have been a thousand feet under solid rock and turned your helmet light off. If you try touching your nose with your hand it will hit your nose before you realize it.

General construction of a hard rock mine.

Headframe - this sat over the mine shaft
Hoist Room - this was the control room for raising and lowering the cage and skip
Cage - this took men and equipment up and down
Skip - this brought the ore to the surface

On the surface by the Electrical shop we had two huge compressors that ran 24 hours a day.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They were loud! You could hear them miles from camp. It didn't take me long to get used to the sound and after I left I could still hear them in my head at night while laying in bed!
The compressors pumped air down into the mine for breathing and also to run the drilling equipment.
It was quite warm underground. The temperature used to raise about 1 degree Fahrenheit for every 300 feet you went down.
The ore was "skipped" up and then processed in the mill. The processing used some pretty toxic chemicals. Potassium or sodium cyanide and mercury being the two main culprits.
The rock went through a crusher to pulverize it and then was fed into a ball mill which was a big drum/cylinder that contained steel balls of varying weights. This crushed the rock even further into a powder and then it was sent to huge vats filled with water and a variety of chemicals including the cyanide. Zinc dust is also added to the process. What comes out is a gray slurry like a watery mud and this is further processed by filtering. Near the end of the processing mercury is added and this dissolves the gold and is a way of increasing yields. The semi finished product is send to the smelter where it is heated and the gold is poured into a gold brick. Once the brick has cooled it is stamped with a serial number and four small holes are drilled. The drillings are used for analysis and sent to the mint in Ottawa. No two gold bricks are identical and the drillings are used as an identification.

The 1,000th Gold Brick

Any slag, which looks like a glass material, is kept and re-smelted at a later date. You can actually see small bubbles of gold in the material.
The tailings was piped through a pipeline and this is what our airstrip was made of. A gray sandy material when it had dried.
Our airstrip was almost a mile long and small aircraft used it for bringing in supplies and personnel. Cessna, Beavers, and Otters had plenty of room for landings and take-offs. The largest plane to used the airstrip was a twin engine Bristol.

Here, you can see the Bristol being loaded/unloaded. In the background you can see the Headframe. If you look to the right of the wingtip you can see the house where we lived, just behind the carpenters shop. The Bristol had a nose that could open to allow for large machinery.

I have flown in this plane sitting up above the pilot and co-pilot in the navigators seat. Awesome ride!

Everything in Discovery was heated by steam. Because everything was solid rock all the water pipes, sewage pipes and steam pipes where in pipe boxes insulated with sawdust running around the camp. This kept it all from freezing in the winter. We used them like sidewalks.
The Boiler room had two large boilers that were fired by wood.

We had 6 or 7 large woodpiles that were burned throughout the winter. Here you can see a fox sitting on one of them.

Us kids would go to the boiler room after being outside and it was a great place to warm up.

My Mum was the nurse at Discovery. She had seven years of training. 5 to get her RN and 2 for her midwifery. This proved to be very handy as there was one baby she delivered while there just after New Years 1963.

When it was cold enough and the ice was thick enough a winter road was opened across the lakes and a lot of the supplies were trucked in from Yellowknife. Every year we used to order supplies (a grubstake as it was called). All the necessities to keep us going for the next year would arrive in November. It was an exciting time for us as we would get fresh supplies!
Sometime we would trade with the Indian trappers(first nations people) that would come through camp with their families and dog teams. We used to trade bread, flour, sugar and other things for caribou meat, which I always thought tasted a lot like beef only drier.
I had several different jobs while there just to earn some extra money. I spent one winter making fuses for the dynamite that was used underground. I would cut the fuses to the lengths they needed and attach a blasting cap to one end and a thermolite igniter to the other end. I got $20 a month for that gig! Child labor was not known at the time! Haha!

My mother died in February 1964 after losing her fight with cancer. It was the only time I saw my father cry.
In September of 1965 I left Discovery to attend High School in Yellowknife. My father left shortly after to work in the Yukon at a placer gold mine called Laforma My older brother Joseph was in Edmonton attending University and my brother Gerald was attending High school along with me. I never returned to Discovery and the mine finally closed in 1969.

Next article: The Great Discovery Gold Heist!