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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - It's 8 a.m. and a group is gathering at Braden Burry Expediting in Yellowknife, waiting to board the plane to BHP Billiton's Ekati diamond mine.

There are constellations of sweat beads forming around each of my ankles where the leg of my long johns and the neck of my wool socks and boots overlap.

While it is a balmy -6 C in Yellowknife and -25 C at the site, no one is allowed on the plane without full winter gear.

BHP is unwaveringly strict about safety. While we are at the mine, Alexander Legaree, communications specialist for corporate and community affairs, and Gary Tait, another communications specialist, constantly remind our group - this year's Rock and Ice Ultra winners and the international media covering them - to "keep three-point contact" when going up and down stairs, three steps or 20.

The mine has gone more than three months without a reportable accident - there are congratulatory posters pasted in the security lobby - and no vehicle, plane or bus, moves without every passenger having cinched their seat belt.We board the plane late.

Several people arrived in "inappropriate footwear," including a young Australian in obscenely white sneakers who is promptly sent back to his hotel for boots, all the while proclaiming "These are pretty warm."

The flight is captained by an Arctic Sunwest pilot, who will later pass back a hastily-scrawled note assuring everybody the banging sounds are normal.

Recently the charter company announced more than 20 job cuts, blaming the slowdown in Northern exploration. It is one of several flight companies to do so since January.And that's when it occurs to me, safely strapped into the Twin Otter, every part of my body vibrating with unprecedented zest and garish candy-like pink and yellow earplugs sticking from my ears. Few Yellowknifers have actually seen any of the three diamond mines north of the city. And, if the economic meltdown continues to do its work, essentially turning the mines into a cash cow with blocked udders, it's quite possible few ever will.

After an hour of white, the Ekati site is startling. The sheer enormity of the open pits doesn't sink in until the airplane swoops closer to the ground, and I realize I had mistaken a building for a box.

Since its Oct. 14, 1998 opening, Ekati has developed several kimberlite pipes for mining, with open-cut mining in the Fox and Beartooth pits and underground mining in the Panda and Koala pits. Natural reclamation has already started at one pit, Misery, which is filled with two years of water run-off, about 40 m deep.

"You can tell Australians named (some of) the pits," jokes Tait.

The first stop after we raid the five-foot long shelved wall of baked goods at the cafeteria is the safety room, where the group is outfitted with reflective vests, steel-toed boots, safety glasses, gloves and hardhats. We are to find out later there is barely anywhere we can go without donning these items.

In the room, we meet Shawn Stevens, Health, Safety, Environment and Community advisor for the emergency response team. He takes us into his domain, a room filled with emergency gear, including ambulances, fire trucks and dozens of cubbies filled with firefighting gear."We even have an underground ambulance," says Stevens, pointing to a white vehicle which looks like a regular ambulance crossed with a tank.

As the name implies, the underground ambulance is for emergencies that occur at Ekati's underground operations. For day-to-day travels to the underground pits - which are one km deep - employees use specially-designed, low-emission Toyota pickups.

By regulation underground vehicles must produce low amounts of toxic exhaust for the safety of employees.Stevens, who also works in a volunteer capacity showing workers things like how to safely handle chemicals, demonstrates how to properly use two different types of fire extinguishers. One of these must be pointed at a certain angle lest the metal piece on top fly off and mangle the holder's face, Stevens tells us. He has seen it happen.

"BHP Billiton considers our most important asset to be the people. It's always people and safety," says Legaree.

It's always "Safety and people before production anywhere. At the end of the day, without people you wouldn't have much of anything, would ya?" he adds.

Our tour bus putts slowly through Ekati after our safety session, as Julie Ellison, environment advisor with the compliance department, and her counterpart, Nancy MacDonald, a geotechnical engineer, explain the earth-conscious side of the mine. We pass by piles of black and discarded rock - stuff the mine doesn't want after the kimberlite is processed - sitting in what are called the "reject areas."

These are the barrenlands, says Ellison, gesturing to the site outside the frosted windows of our reclaimed yellow school bus. She's referring to the geographical location of the mine, which at 310 km northeast of Yellowknife is the furthest of the big three from the capital city.

"There are 800-year-old trees here that are only three feet high, they take so long to grow," Ellison says.The only months the site isn't frozen are July and August. Those summer months are also the only two where it's easy to see what's hidden under snow most of the year: one to three metres of crushed gravel, built up to get a flat surface at the site.

"Construction of the mine site was difficult because of all the boulders ... To process ore, we need a flat surface," explains Ellison.

Ekati can only build up so much to flatten and fill out the uneven terrain. By regulation, the mine must ensure it doesn't adversely affect caribou migration, during which up to 10,000 caribou can pass through the site. Currently, there are only a handful of staff on site for the compliance department, but during the warmer months the number boosts to 30 people all watching and analyzing the wildlife. The mine also brings in individuals with traditional knowledge for short periods of time, usually a week, to work with staff at the site.

"Basically, if it moves, we're monitoring it," says Ellison.

Ekati is expected to close mining operations by 2021 and return the site back to its natural state. Back at the Yellowknife office, staff is already working on a closure plan - and have been for years. As with the Misery pit, the plan is to turn the pits into lakes.

Standing on the lookout point and following the dizzying spiral path down to the bottom of Beartooth, where the two pieces of construction equipment at the bottom look like Hot Wheels and the worker a confetti piece, it is hard to imagine the mine simply disappearing.

The mine will have "some impact, we can't get away from that," says Ellison. "Our challenge is to minimize that impact."

Under the current closure plan, the company expects to be completely finished with site cleanup in five years, says Legaree.

"The experience in the North right now with mining - I'm not talking about present day, I'm talking about the 1930s through the 1970s - was come in and leave, as quickly as the resource was gone, leaving absolutely nothing behind but a mess," he says.

"We don't want to do that. We want to be here for a while," he adds. "We want to have people 50 years after we're gone still going 'wow they did such a great job,' so if we end up coming back for another reason ... they remember what good stuff we did and how good we were the people, the environment, the communities in which we operate."

The processing plant is sauna-hot and loud - so loud it is near impossible to catch every word Wayne LeBlanc, process plant operations team leader, shouts as he explains how it all works.

Here, more than any other place at Ekati, it becomes clear a diamond is really just a rock in the ground - but one that takes huge amounts of effort to find. The processing plant is a vast interconnected system, with conveyor belts sporting kimberlite zig-zagging from one side of the plant to the other. Processing activities are run around the clock at the mine.

In the plant, the mined ore is crushed, scrubbed and ground to release diamonds from the kimberlite. The diamonds are then separated from the non-diamond material with high-intensity magnetic separators, wet and dry particle X-ray sorters and a dryer and grease table.

The plant has the capacity to move 440 tonnes of material per hour. Over the past two years the mine has produced, on average, about 3.5 million carats annually. Annual sales from Ekati account for three per cent of the world rough diamond supply by weight and six per cent by value.Later, in the control room, where the processing plant is monitored on several flat screen TVs, LeBlanc will hold up an empty canister of Nabob coffee, to demonstrate the diamond-to-kimberlite ratio. Each day the plant produces two kilos of diamonds, or one canister full.

"There's about one carat (of diamond) per tonne of kimberlite," says Legaree.By the end of the day, I see only a handful of Ekati's 800 employees - and 700 contractors - on the job, a slice of Ekati's mammoth operations.

Legaree says Ekati does not plan to cut any jobs during the times ahead: "That's not something we're discussing right now."

"We've had some very, very successful cost-saving initiatives," he adds.

Two years ago, Ekati began looking at ways to get its production costs down to $50/tonne from $100/tonne in 2005 - not because the mine had a crystal ball the NWT's other two diamond mines did not, but because the company wanted to see if it could extend the life of the mine. The mine is currently down to production costs of $70/tonne and is looking, through its business excellence unit, to hit the $50 mark fast.

"We're ahead of the curve right now because we started (cost reductions) two years ago," says Legaree.

Ekati has been able to curb costs so drastically by streamlining all its operations and encouraging departments to reduce costs wherever possible. Legaree's own department will save tens of thousands soon just by changing the way it distributes its newsletter, he says.

The company has also saved money by reducing down time built into certain jobs and by changing the way items and parts are shipped and stored, so as Legaree puts it, items aren't "sitting in the warehouse collecting dust and costing us millions of dollars, potentially, a year."

"We've all been encouraged to look for those little changes in the company," he says. "If everybody plays that part, we're going to see just amazing increase in efficiency in our business.

"When this economic downturn goes the other way and we continue with (cost-savings), we'll become even more profitable," he adds.

It's all like having on full winter gear and a cinched seatbelt in a 5,000 km-high crash.