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Page last updated April 12, 2024
© Michael Kluckner
| Sketches from 2003. Few places in the world combine
nature beauty and industrial despoilation as effectively as Howe
Sound. Britannia Beach's copper concentrator and compact company
town attract tourists and the filmmakers of Hollywood North. The
site has become a major tourist attraction. The bottommost sketch
was from the wharf where the Union Steamships once connected the
town with the outside world (the Sea to Sky Highway, as it's now
called, wasn't completed until the 1950s), and looks across to the
pulp mill at Woodfibre, a scene recalling politician Phil
Gaglardi's quip that 'pollution is the smell of money.' Woodfibre
has since closed and Squamish, at the head of Howe Sound, is
increasingly a bedroom community for Vancouver and Whistler rather
than the gritty industrial town it once was. From Arlo Giardini-Blum aka Mephisto Cat, 2024: I’ll be rucking above Britannia Mine townsite on Sunday . I’m hoping to get to the massive sluices they used to dump crushed ore gravels into 5 plus KM’s above the concentration building . They used to mine the top peak of the mountain , I was up there 10 years ago in my Suzuki Sidekick bush 4x4 (no access anymore or I would drive up). And then, this photo and… |
Not much left, the logging company has started bulldozing dirt
into the old sluices
They are about 300 feet long, and 3’ deep X 4’ wide . The sluice
channels terminate in big deep reservoirs .
