Andrew Raven
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Oct 12/05) - A tarnished set of bowling pins, probably dating back a half-century, sit inside a cold, dark warehouse on the Ingraham Trail near Giant Mine.

A tattered pair of pink roller skates rest a few meters away, beside a handful of wooden phones and metal lunch boxes.

Salvaged from mines across the Northwest Territories, these pop-culture artifacts are among the last remaining links with an industrial past that is quickly fading away.

One Yellowknife group discussed plans this week to preserve the mementos and hundreds of other pieces of mining lore by creating a museum dedicated to the mineral-rich past of the Northwest Territories.

"The mines are in integral part of our history," said Walt Humphries, president of the 60-member NWT Mining Heritage Society. "People should be able to see the diversity of it all."

The three-year-old group operates on what Humphries called a "modest budget" fuelled by donations and small government grants.

Despite their financial limitations, the society plans to turn a city-owned gravel parking lot five kilometres up the Ingraham Trail into a hub of mining history. Just metres from the old Giant Mine town site - which was home to miners and their families for the last 55 years - the location is ideal for the society's collection of drills, ore cars and other heavy equipment, Humphries said.

The group plans to renovate the old Giant Mine recreation hall, a yellow building that dates to the early 1950s. Once renovations are complete, the society will move some of the trove from the nearby warehouse into the newly christened museum.

"We hope to have some displays in place this summer," said Humphries.

The first mine in the Northwest Territories opened on the shores of Great Bear Lake in 1930. It was called Eldorado and proved to be one of the most important mines in the world. Originally opened for its radium deposit, the uranium ore mined there during the Second World War was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mineral riches drew people to Yellowknife less than a decade later when - during the height of the Great Depression - prospectors discovered a seam of gold that stretched 15 kilometres, from the shoreline south of the capital to the start of the Ingraham Trail. The deposit, some of which is underwater, was later discovered over a 50 to 60-kilometre-long swath, Humphries said.

The Con and Giant mines opened a few years later, in 1938 and 1948 respectively. The lure of gold attracted people from across the country to the harsh Northern frontier and the two mines fuelled of the local economy for the next half-century. While Con and Giant are the most prominent mines in the Yellowknife area, more than a half-dozen dot the rocky landscape around the capital.

"The geography of the North is so unique," said Diane Baldwin, a geologist and member of the Mining Heritage Society. "While we want to preserve those artifacts, we also want to highlight the surrounding geology as well."

For now, the thousands of artifacts are stored in a warehouse quite literally on the Ingraham Trail. The rear corner of the building juts onto the two-lane highway, making in an accidental target for motorists barrelling along the winding road.

"Two or three cars crash into it every year," Baldwin said. "One winter, somebody took out the porch that used to be over there," she said pointing to the back of the warehouse.

While the three-billion year old bedrock around the capital is still rich with gold, mining the bounty has become uneconomical, Humphries said.

The network of underground tunnels at Con reaches 3,100 metres below the surface - a depth that makes extracting the gold a losing venture, despite a spike in prices over the last few years.

Con and Giant are closed and Baldwin believes they could fade into a distant memory without a museum full of their artifacts.

"It may not happen right away, but maybe in 10 years or so, people will forget," Baldwin said. "Especially if the mines are cleared away... and there is nothing left."

The Mining Heritage Society will hold an open house this weekend beginning at 1 p.m. at the Northern Frontier Visitor's Centre. The event will include a tour of the warehouse and the potential museum site, Humphries said.