Bears ready to reclaim Eskay Creek mine

Barrick's Eskay Creek mine in British Columbia isn't a bad place to work underground. The miners are well paid and happy to be doing their jobs alone, without a boss looking over their shoulder all the time. They consider the search for gold an adventure. And compared with being above ground, where grizzly bears prowl around in summer and up to 60 feet of snow falls in winter, the mine's dark tunnels begin to look like rather a comfortable environment.

The sharp-angled roofs of the mine buildings weren't enough to protect one of them from collapse recently due to the weight of the precipitation on it. If there is an emergency at the mine, employees can't wait around for help to arrive from the nearest large town, Smithers, 300 kilometers away. Eskay Creek has its own emergency response team, who were 2006 provincial champions in a mine rescue contest. They have a "handshake agreement" to assist other mining projects too; in Alaska such assistance would be obligatory.

A group from the Alaska Miners Association visited Eskay Creek in early August during a tour of mining projects in northwestern British Columbia. Eskay Creek is one of only two operating gold mines in the area (the other being Northgate Exploration's Kemess South), and many of the explorers near here are anxious to find "another Eskay Creek," especially as this mine scheduled for closure within about two years.

Access to Eskay Creek is via a 58-kilometer road from the Stewart-Cassiar Highway. The mine is located at an elevation of 800 meters. Over half of the 300 or so personnel here are contractors, including the underground miners themselves, who work for Procon Mining and Tunnelling. About 34 percent of the workforce at Eskay Creek is from the Tahltan First Nation, and all entry-level jobs are reserved for the Tahltan.

High-grade ore has already been mined

Eskay Creek was owned by Homestake Canada when it began operations in 1994. Barrick acquired Homestake in 2002, one of the major milestones on Barrick's road to becoming the world's number-one gold producer that the company is today. All the high-grade ore from Eskay Creek has been mined already, using a drift-and-fill method, and last year the mine produced 172,000 ounces of gold from the resources that initially totaled an estimated 3.2 million ounces. The relatively small ore body also contained about 149 million ounces of silver.

Waste food at the mine has to be incinerated so that nuisance bears don't have to be put down; at least five grizzly bears make their home in the vicinity of the mine. On the short drive from the mine site to the helicopter landing pad, the Alaska Miners Association group saw four of them wandering by the side of the road, undisturbed by the passing vehicle. At closure, the plan is to flood the mine and return this habitat to its original inhabitants. By the looks of them, they are well prepared to take over.