Rule, Brittania!

After breakfast Sunday morning we loaded up our rental car and reluctantly bid adieu to Kitsilano Suites.  Having your own well-appointed apartment in a quiet neighborhood near a vibrant shopping and restaurant street made us feel like we were becoming "locals."

The relatively heavy overnight rain storm had all but petered out when we crossed the Lions' Gate Bridge and left downtown Vancouver in our wake as we headed north along Howe Sound, up-bound for Whistler on the "Sea-to-Sky Highway" as this stretch of Canada Route 99 is known.  The low clouds, tree-covered islands, and steep cliffs diving down from above us and into the sea were reminiscent of our "summer" trip to Southeast Alaska two years earlier.  But unlike the Panhandle of the 49th U.S. State, here roads connect cities and towns and are full of traffic.

After a quick lunch of hot-dogs and fries at the A&W (which still makes great root-beer) in Squamish, we drove a few miles back south to the mining museum at Brittannia Beach.  In its heyday it was the largest copper mine in the British Commonwealth and also produced a smattering of gold, silver, lead and zinc. It operated from 1904-1974.  One to two thousand miners and family members lived in the company town higher up the mountain, but until 1958 when the highway was built, neither they nor the ore produced by the mine could make it to the outside world by means other than boat.

We browsed around the museum's exhibits, then donned hardhats, climbed aboard a mine tram, and rode into the mountain's labyrinth of tunnels on an hour-plus tour.  Our guide showed us how the miners drilled holes in the rock that would hold sticks of dynamite used to enlarge the tunnels, a process that made many of them deaf, and killed others in as little in six months when the silica dust from the blasts destroyed their lungs.

Just about anyone could get a job as a miner in those days, but before you could pick up a drill, you had to spend a month performing a disgusting job ---- pushing a rolling "toilet" to where the miners were working, then dumping its contents out before starting your "porta pottie" rounds all over again.

We ended the tour at the bottom of the mine's 20-story high milling building and learned how the ore-bearing rocks were crushed, pulverized, and processed to produce the fine power that would be hauled by ships to smelters where it would be refined into pure copper.

After spending most of the afternoon at the mining museum, we hopped back in the car and drove north to Whistler, passing the huge monolith at Squamish known as "The Chief" and stopping briefly to walk to the foot of  1,000 foot Shannon Falls.  Both of these natural features would look at home in Yosemite Valley.