Copper Mountain Mine, Hwy 3
From 1920 to 1957, the Copper Mountain Mine shipped 35 million tons of ore containing 600 million pounds of copper to the concentrator at Allenby. The tortuous railroad grade still clings precariously to the wall of the Similkameen River Canyon. Exhaustion of the known orebody forced closure of the mine, but exploration continues in search of the other ore in the region.
Copper Mountain ore was discovered in the 1880s by a father & son team named Jameson. They told R.A. Brown, a fur buyer, of their find and he was the first to stake a claim in 1895. Little work was done there until 1905 when the BC Copper Co. started drilling on a few claims. The results were disappointing in that the ore contained a high percentage of alumina which presented smelting difficulties by the method used at that time.
A few years later, the smelting problems were solved by the discovery of a new process and, in 1913, BC Copper set up two mining camps. The cost of these new mines and equipment resulted in the formation of a new company, Canada Copper, which undertook construction of a mill between Princeton and the mine. The first ore was shipped from the mine in late 1920, but the price of copper dropped tand the operation closed after only two months.
Allenby Copper Co., a subsidiary of the Granby Consolidated Mining & Smelting Co., was incorporated on May 17, 1923, and reopened the mine. Over the next 30 years, productivity from the mine fluctuated with the price of copper. Finally, low metal prices and expensive railway freight rates caused the mine to close down again.
Newmont Mining Corporation of Canada (Newmont) purchased Granby's entire mining interest in the district and began mining again in 1972. In 1979 a new primary crusher and conveyer system was installed. In 1988 Cassiar Mining Corporation (later to become Princeton Mining Corp.) purchased Similco Mines Ltd. which owned the property. Production continued mining from Pits 3 and 1 until the mine closed down in late 1993 and stayed on a "care and maintenance" basis until copper prices improved in mid 1994. Mining was sporadic until the operation closed once more in 1996. In 2008 the Copper Mountain Mining Company anounced that it planned to re-open the mine in 2010, based on a feasibility study which estimated its production life was 15 years. The company's plan was idesigned to produce about 100-million pounds a year of copper, in a copper concentrate with gold and silver credits.
Resources:
Copper Mountain Mining Corp.
» www.cumtn.com/site/project/history.html
