A special day with family, chasing the hand drawn directions of my Grandad so that we might scatter his ashes on his favourite bluff.
Above Britannia's mining museum located in Howe Sound there lies a secret treasure. Decades ago the town of Mt. Shear was a thriving mining community. Accessed from sea level, members of the community would take a tram to the town site.
Brendan with a new work boot.
Today, if you look hard enough you can find the old swimming pool, foundations, the baseball diamond, a dam and a host of other wild looking industrial waste. Boots and bottles, Pelton wheels and rusty metal. What we were after was a trail that my Grandad used to walk from Mt. Shear to Petgill lake when he was 8 years old.
In passing, he had asked for his ashes to be scattered on a bluff that overlooked all of Howe Sound. Safe to say he threw down the gauntlet as nobodies been there in 75 years...
Bushwhacking a 4x4ing we ended up getting distracted and missioned up to Jane Basin, the actual mine itself. It's hard to give a sense of scale, but imagine a mine once the largest in the Commonwealth lying open to the sky, massive boulders hanging precipitously and a bunch of sweaty grandkids running around like the three musketeers looking for mine shafts...
The scale of mine was insane! Apparently thousands of tunnels and air shafts pierce the mountain.
We could just imagine Grandad watching us groaning with an all known laugh as the Pearson boys got side tracked on another adventure. Eventually, as the sun began to fall we decided to get back on task and headed for Petgill lake. Hours later, grandkids perched upon a bluff that Grandad had once walked to as a kid. The view was spectacular, and the moment genuine.
It felt good to be part of something that came full circle. Thanks for the mountains, the views and the adventure bug Grandad. You will be missed.
To view the whole day click: here