Iqaluit (Sep 27/04) - The granite in the hills surrounding Iqaluit is not going to waste. After all, the reddish and sometimes green stone has been used in everything from flooring to tables in Iqaluit's buildings.

Led by Nunavut Chamber of Mines vice-president Michael Hine, seven participants in an urban rock walk learned about the territory's rocks and how they have been utilized in some of Iqaluit's buildings.

Held as part of Mining Week, the walk began at the Government of Canada building and wound its way through the legislative assembly and the Royal Bank building.

In the Government of Canada building, granite -- most of which was found by the dump or in the area between the Brown building and Inuksuk high school -- was used not only in the floors, but to build much of the front desk at reception.

Even the front walkway to the building was made from an unfinished slab of the stuff. And just to make sure nearby communities were not left out, the front windows are lined with Kimmirut marble.

"Each piece of marble is cut in a unique shape and size," Hine said, noting the architect wanted an iglu effect. For this reason, the stones were cut thicker at the bottom than the top.

Even though the marble is more than half an inch thick, the sun still shines through.

After a short, but blustery one-minute walk through a small dust storm, rock walkers got an up close look at stone-use in the legislative assembly.

"It's about 2.5 billion years old and I expect it will be good for another 2.5 billion years," Hine said, knocking on the assembly's granite-topped reception desk.

Inside the assembly, at the foot of the speakers' chair, sit a pair of nearly two foot high statues.

Slab not delivered

The rock underneath the statues was supposed to be white marble from Kimmirut, but three days before everything was to be set up, the slab had not been delivered. So Hine took matters into his own hands while out driving near the Arctic Winter Games Complex on the Road to Apex.

"I saw the piece of rock. It had some cracks around it. It looked pretty good, so I grabbed it," he says.

Participants seemed generally surprised at some of the things they were learning about.