Next Week's Chronicles...

You could say that today’s story began at the foot of my driveway last week.

That’s when, while returning from my daily walk along the old CNR Tidewater Line by my house, I saw a man standing by my mailbox. As I approached it became apparent that he was waiting for me.

Henry van Hell (“It’s spelled just like it sounds,” he said with a grin), who lives at Cowichan Station and has passed me many times as I walked along Koksilah Road, began with the familiar question, “Are you T.W. Paterson?”

A longtime fan of the Chronicles when they appeared in the Cowichan Valley Citizen, he wanted to tell me about an old mine in the Cowichan Lake area. His brother Walter, a retired professional forester, had found it in 1995 and had taken Henry to see it a month before.

Henry found it to be so intriguing that he wanted to tell me about it. To make his point, he showed me several photos on his smartphone. Instantly, I, too, was hooked.

The equipment on the ground, two boilers, a rock drill and a winch, looked as if they’d been placed there yesterday. Yes, they were rusty, but they looked great despite who knows how many years’ exposure to the weather in our Island rain forest.

What Henry wanted to know was, which mine is it and what were the miners after?

He promised to email me copies of his photos and to take me and Jennifer there. In turn, I told him I’d dig into my mining archives and see if I could identify the mine—I, too, wanted to know the who, the when and the why.

Within a week Henry and Walter very graciously fulfilled Henry’s promise to visit the mine and I was able to take several photos of my own. Since then I’ve researched its brief history and I’m going to tell you more about it next week in Cowichan Chronicles.

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