Though I was born two years after the Gunnar Mine shut down, Gunnar has always been personal for me. My father’s first boss, Foster Irwin, was Gunnar’s last mine manager, and that connection, along with hearing stories about the town and meeting people who lived there, made it a familiar place when I was a child, almost like I’d lived there myself. In fact, since we would camp out in one of the houses in town from time to time, perhaps I can say I DID live there, if only for a few days and nights.
Maybe it was because I’d lived in Port Radium, way up on Great Bear Lake, when I was four or five years old. The two mines had much in common. Both had been founded by Canada’s ‘Father of Uranium’ Gilbert Labine, who also founded Eldorado Nuclear, the company that would go on to run the Beaverlodge Mine in Uranium City. In the ‘30s, Gilbert and his brother Charlie came to Great Bear looking not for uranium, then considered a waste rock, but radium, an incredibly precious mineral, at the time considered the only cure for cancer. This push North had been part of a mini-rush, foreshadowing the great rush for uranium north of Lake Athabasca two decades later. As vividly described in Ted White’s wonderful ‘Great Bear’, men slept on the edge of the frozen lake in canvas tents in 40 -50 below cold, spending their limited daylight hours prospecting the fjords around the lake for traces of the precious radium.
But only the Port Radium mine ever materialized, and by the early ‘40s, even Port Radium was faltering. By then, a new use for uranium had been found: the atomic bomb. The Canadian government took possession of both Eldorado and the mine and Port Radium uranium would be used first in the Manhattan Project, then in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thought Gilbert Labine remained on the Eldorado board, Eldorado was no longer his company, and by the ‘50s, he was in Uranium City, looking to cash in on the boom. He founded one mine, Nesbitt-Labine, not far from Beaverlodge, then moved south and founded what for a time was the richest uranium mine in the world: Gunnar Mines, which would last over a decade, before officially closing in early 1964.
By the time we arrived in Port Radium a few years later, the uranium was long since tapped out. A new company, Echo Bay Mines, was using the old uranium mill to mine silver from the tailings, leasing the townsite from Eldorado. Irwin Engineering, Foster Irwin’s company, was involved somehow, though I don’t remember Foster being around much. My mother worked as a nurse in the nursing station, and we lived in one of the bunkhouses in town. We stayed a year or so and though my memories of the town are diffuse, Port Radium made an impression nonetheless, so much so that when I went to Gunnar Mines a couple of years later, it seemed so familiar I felt like I was back on Great Bear Lake.
Looking back, it isn’t hard to see how I confused the two. Gunnar Mines had the same basic look: mine buildings with white (asbestos-lined) paneling and red-tiled roofs, 20 story mineheads towering over the shoreline. Even the topography around the towns was similar: though the fjords at Port Radium were a great deal taller – staircase with a hundred steps wound from the shoreline up to the town – the hills around Gunnar had a very similar barenness, smoothened by the glaciers, and stripped of soil and even lichen by the relentless advance and retreat of water and ice off the lake. Both places gave the same impression of having reached the end of the world, the point where life devolved into Primeval simplicity.
Gunnar was undoubtedly the wealthier of the two. With ore mostly near the surface, it ran for most of its life as an open pit mine, the ore trucks winding through hundreds of meters of bedrock, 3 shifts a day, 7 days a week. With no road connection to Uranium City, 40 km north, Gunnar management developed their own facilities – not just their own mill and electrical plant, but their own town. Unemployment in Canada was low in the ‘50s, and Gunnar management wanted a stable, family-orientated workforce, psychologically as well as physically removed from Uranium City, which in the early ‘50s was still a raw boomtown of mud roads, and rudimentary housing. Gunnar had its own shopping mall, North America’s first covered shopping mall, a curling rink, schoolhouse and dozens of fine ranch houses for the families, along with the bunkhouses for single miners and other staff. Management built their own airstrip behind the townsite, and bought their own DC-3, offering free flights to Edmonton for miners and their families. They even barged in sand from the sand dunes on the south shore, and carved out a small beach in front of the townsite.
Gunnar was also a dry town. Some years ago, I interviewed Chuck O’Reilly, who’d been a taxi driver in Uranium City in the ‘50s. One of this regular routes in winter had been out over the ice road to the Gunnar townsite, taking miners back from Uranium City saloons. He said he’d always be stopped at the Gunnar town limits by company men, who escorted the drunken miners back into town. Evidently, Gunnar management was taking no chances. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), Gunnar was, by the accounts I’ve heard of it, a good place to be if you could tolerate the cold and the isolation. A company town, where everyone knew everyone else, where you kept your keys in your boat and never locked your doors, where people were united by isolation and a common purpose – and where everyone from management on down was making a good living.
Then, in 1964, the mine abruptly closed. A profile in the long-defunct Canadian Mining Journal just the year before gives the impression that Gunnar had a good many years left, so the closure must have been a shock to the people who lived there. The minehead had begun operation in 1959 – then, just four years later, it was empty. A channel was cut through the narrow band of rock separating the open pit from Lake Athabasca and both the pit and the underground mine were flooded. The town was quickly abandoned and for years only a caretaker remained until the caretaker too was gone.
My father worked for Irwin Engineering for almost a decade. First he went out for summers in years before I was born when he and my mother lived in Montreal. Then, when I was eight months old, we relocated out West, first to Edmonton then to the MASL seaplane base just outside Uranium City. I was too young to have concise memories of that period, but what I remember most is traveling. Flying in particular – by seaplane, helicopter, freighter, even jetliner, to Edmonton and back to the disparate towns and bush camps of the North. Even now, when I hear helicopter rotors beating overhead, or the distant drone of seaplane taking off, I think instinctively of my childhood and traveling through the North country.
Foster had done well out of Gunnar. He bought a ranch house on the Edmonton outskirts with tall rooms with big wooden beams running across the ceilings, and a swimming pool with floor to ceiling windows on one side, and drove a white Chrysler Imperial with white-walled tires. My mother said he collected art, some of it surprisingly good. He’d come a long way, the penultimate self-made Western man. Years later, when I was staying at a lodge on the edge of what had been the Eldorado townsite, one of my neighbors was a retired farmer who’d grown up with Foster in rural Alberta. The farmer said they’d grown up poor, riding to their one-room schoolhouse on horseback (in winter, the first kid to make it to school had to get the fire going in the stove). In those days, Foster had been a brawler, showing up at town dances with his brother looking for a fight then gone overseas during World War II ( the man wasn’t sure if he’d seen combat) come back and gone to engineering school on his VA ticket, then headed North, to Uranium City.
Foster was a sort of distant uncle, one of number of people from Uranium City and beyond who flowed in and out of our lives, both in Edmonton and the North – the two intertwining so forcefully in my mind that even years later I was never sure where the one ended and the other began. Sam Christie, prospector, blacksmith, miner, who’d worked at Nesbitt –Labine, Gunnar and Port Radium. Tony Aria, the bush pilot. Even after we’d settled in Edmonton and I’d started going to school, still I went North
in the summers, and in turn these figures appeared at our house in Edmonton. Foster’s office in downtown Edmonton opened up onto the Muni airport where we caught a jet to Uranium City, or where my father appeared from the same. Foster even had an office building in downtown Uranium City, behind the Legion, called, appropriately ‘the Foster Iriwin building’. In the message thread below, one of this sons reminded me how I’d once got my head stuck in the railings on the stairway to the front door. A dim memory, but a memory all the same. But even in the mid-‘90s, going back to what little remained of our old neighborhood in Edmonton, the first thing I thought of was the North, and in particular the head frame at Gunnar Mines, as if all I had to do was open my arms like John Carter in ‘Princess of Mars’ to be transported back to the seaplane base, the bush camps, the Gunnar minehead, looming dramatically over the sweep of Lake Athabasca.
I remember one trip in particular. Perhaps it was on one of those occasions we stayed in one of the empty houses, camping out in the nearly empty townsite. Foster, my father and mother, and perhaps some other people as well. I remember the colossal mine buildings gleaming white in the sun, the lake surface shining beyond the islands like a limitless sea, the empty town where the houses, street signs and even the roads were more or less intact, as if they’d been abandoned just a few months before. The emptiness inside the lodge and the sound of our footsteps as we walked from one floor to the next, throwing up a fine layer of dust. And the debris – machine parts, entire engines, even a couple of ore trucks, as a small office building, abandoned by the flooded open pit, as if the owners had expected to come back and put it all to use again. And maybe they really had thought they’d be back.
In the day or two we stayed there, it was like having the whole place to ourselves, almost like we owned it, but I was to find out later, many people stayed in the town, just as we had, that the town was never totally uninhabited. A caretaker lived in town part of the year, and a fish plant continued operations down the shore, right until the Beaverlodge Mine closed, and the loss of regular barge traffic made to too expensive to ship the fish south. Years later, in the mid to late ’90s, when I was to go back to Gunnar with one or the other of the Augiers, I found out it had been their patriarch, Alex Augier, who had been a longtime caretaker.
A year or two after those trips, in the early ’70s, Foster lost his company. My father lost his job, then Foster passed away. I was seven or eight when it all happened. I wasn’t to see Gunnar or the North until we moved back nearly five years later.
By the time we moved back, Gunnar had been abandoned 15 years, yet its presence was still felt, its memory still alive. Of the dozen or so mines that had surrounded Uranium City in the ‘50s, Gunnar had been the richest, the closest to a town in its own right, a rival to Uranium City. Many Gunnar people had moved to Uranium City, and its houses were brought one by one into town, dredged by tractor-trailer over the ice road. Gunnar houses were prized for their solid construction, their appealing design, with the red roofs and the little panes of glass in the windows.
One afternoon, in the middle of winter, I watched one such house being brought into town. It was an incredible sight, like watching an ocean liner being towed into harbour. The house sat on the back of a flatbed trailer, moving up the long slope of Uranium Road at such a crawl, it hardly seemed to be moving at all. The house was so wide it filled the whole street, and in the twilight of a late afternoon snowfall, its bright red roof and white walls contrasting sharply with the hazy grey background, it seemed to levitate at the bottom of the road. I think it took well over an hour for the truck to reach the top of the hill, a distance of only a few blocks.
We went back to Gunnar my first summer in town, my father taking us out on a Zodiac from the portage near Goldfields. As we rounded the corner into the bay, mine head and mill seemed to jump out of the surrounding bush, the sulfur piles next to the mill glowing yellow in the sun and the silver water tower overhead blaring ‘Gunnar Mines Limited’ over the lake – a sight both startling and instantly familiar. We tied up at the dock where the barges once pulled in, where a fish camp had operated for many years, side by side with the mine. The docks’ furthest reaches had begun to collapse and as we floated in I could look down and see the beams and posts descending into the water, the docks’ furthest reaches disappearing into the lake’s green depths.
The minehead loomed over the dock like the body of a cathedral, pale white in the sun, and behind it the other mine buildings were spread out around the elevated gravel plain. Beyond a few weeds and grasses growing up around the edges of the minehead, it appeared to be fully intact, and but for the lack of movement, you could imagine it was an active mine. We went into town, where a crew of geologists were staying in a couple of the houses, just as we’d stayed in town a half-decade before.
In town, the decay was a little more obvious. Weeds and small saplings pushed up along the sides of the road, and the street signs were starting to rust and tilt into the intersections. But the streets themselves were clear, the houses mostly intact, with only the odd smashed windowpane or swinging door. In the shopping centre, beams of light played through the skylight onto the dusty floors and cinder block walls of what had been the pedestrian mall. A row of counter stools with metal siding around the sides were lined up in front of the center of the cafeteria, the score of one last volleyball game still visible on the blackboard of the big gymnasium. In the bowling alley, we found a set of pins, still in place at the end of the lane. Yet back on the street, there was the stillness, the emptiness, that comes when the infrastructure of a town has been removed – the water mains run dry, electricity turned off – from a town that has been built around it. A street sign rattled in the breeze, waving the undergrowth back and forth; the windows of the houses gleamed in the sun like dormant eyes.
Inside, the houses were bright and spacious, with wood floors and whitewashed walls, and the windows were divided on the lower levels into little panes, maybe a foot wide. A lot of care had gone into the designing and building these houses, as a lot of care would go into designing and building the Eldorado houses that went up in the late ‘70s in Uranium City. All were empty. Even the geologists’ houses were empty except for piles of gear, sleeping bags and clothes, spaced out on the floors or pushed into the corners. The geologists had been there a month, and would be staying another couple of weeks. They were in their early 20s and seemed to like staying out in this empty town, having it more or less to themselves. They’d set up cooking stoves and a firepit in the back; they might have even had a generator going. I remember thinking it was the kind of place I’d like to spend my summers, roaming the empty houses and the mine, walking along the man-made beach – a serene and beautiful place that was not quite real, that existed somewhere between man and nature.
My father and I went back next winter. It must have been in February. It was very cold – you had to squeeze your fingers regularly to keep the circulation going. My father borrowed a couple of skidoos from work and we rode out to the mine, crossing the southern arm of Martin Lake through the valleys to Beaverlodge then Milliken, the trees becoming smaller and smaller as we neared the wastes of Lake Athabasca. Finally, we hit a long open strip like a section of highway cut through the middle of the bush. After a moment, I realized we were riding down the runway of the old airport. Small trees pushed up on either side of the runway, but the space down the middle was clear. As we roared down the runway, the minehead appeared over the treetops. I still remember the exhilaration of cruising down the airstrip, motor on full throttle, powdered snow flying past as the mine head’s peak came into view, rising over the treetops like a skyscraper from some distant city.
We didn’t stay long. The wind off the lake was unrelenting and fierce. The mine still seemed eerily complete, like it had been abandoned just weeks before, but the extreme weather made it seem a little alien, like it had become part of the cold howling in off the lake, even as the mine head stood against the lake’s wastes like a fortress. We peered inside the mill. The great vats and drums soared 20 stories into the gloom like the pillars of some great cathedral, and the wind from the lake howled through gaps in the refinery roof, creating a steady whistling sound. Back in town, one of the shopping mall doors had been left open, and tendrils of snow reached into the gloom. We went in through the back hallway. In the bowling alley were the same half-dozen pins, knocked over now, whether by the elements or human hands we couldn’t tell. In town, snowdrifts covered the roads, the porches, reached inside the houses where the doors had been blown open. You couldn’t imagine anyone staying there now, generator or not. Exposed to the lake, the wind was intense, blinding us if we stayed too long in the open. The town with its still intact buildings felt not just ghostly, but almost forbidden, like some terrible plague had wiped out its inhabitants and no one but us had dared to return since.
We turned around and left so we could make it back to town before dark. Though it would haunt me in my dreams and memory for many years hence, I wouldn’t see Gunnar again until I returned as an adult in 1996.
Are you from Gunnar? Visited the town? Have a look at the facebook page: Gunnar Mines Rediscovered. You can also now purchase ex-Gunnar resident Patricia Sandberg’s book about Gunnar and its history at: Sun Dogs and Yellowcake
Great info bud!!! Cant wait to hear about UC. What about goldfields?
Hey JJ,
Great to hear from you – glad you liked it. I’ll probably tackle Eldorado next then circle on to UC. A lot to freakin’ write about!! I’m trying to get some articles from the Sask Archives to put up. How’s things going up North?
t.
Great writing. There is a lot I never knew about Gunnar. Thanks.
Andrea Fiss
Thanks Andrea, glad you enjoyed it. More to come . . .
t.
Very interesting story – thanks for posting.
A minor correction. The Gunnar Progress Video is from 1957, not 1962. Mining in the Gunnar pit was completed in 1961 and only underground mining was conducted after that. Underground mining did not begin until late in 1957 and it is not mentioned in the video at all.
Hi Terry – thanks for the comment. I’ll make the updates very soon. Not sure why I thought the video was ’62 – I just double-checked and don’t see the date on the video.
Did you live in Gunnar? Do you have any memories of the place? If you don’t know this already, there’s a Gunnar Mines facebook page:
Best,
Tim
I lived in Gunnar for almost 12 years….my first two children were born there…Kenneth and Karen.
Currently, Pat Sanberg is writing a book about Gunnar so I have been writing some memories and have some pictures for her. Pat left Gunnar at the age of 7, daughter of Jack and Barb Sanberg.
Hi Donna Lee,
Nice to hear from you, thanks for your message. Didn’t know Pat was writing a book, look forward to reading it. As is obvious from the article, I didn’t really know the place, just heard about it second hand so very curious to hear from people who actually lived there when the mine was going.
Best,
Tim
Hi Donna, I remember you and Tommy very well, went to school with Kenny (brother) was in Boy Scouts and took my first guitar lessons in your home. You were such a nice lady and Mom and Dad were great also. Have been talking to Pat, sure hope to read her book before I leave this old world but have had a great life and I hope you have too. Roger Carvell. I was there 1957-1960.
Made me extremely homesick, to have lived in U.C. for some 18 yrs and to not have that “Luxeruy”, is quite a sad thing!
To live ones youth during that time was to see what truth, beauty and life like very seldom seen.
It is something to be really thankful to my father for, in bringing our family there to grow up!
John W. Sorochan
Hi John,
thanks for your message. Yes, UC was (and remains in many ways) a magical place. Hopefully I can get more content up soon.
Btw, if you have any particular memories, photographs or whatnot you’d like to share, please feel free to send them on.
Best wishes,
Tim
I worked at the Gunnar mines site during the summer of 1956 , stayed at the mens quarters, worked in the shop , fueled 22 ton Uks , worked on the drills, was there when the Tug Clear Water sank & underground shaft was started & first fatality occurred during shaft digging, remembered the heart break hotel down by the dock…..
Hi George – thanks for your comment. Forgot about the Tug Clear Water sinking – must have heard about it somewhere growing up and it became a kind of legend. What was the Heartbreak Hotel? I remember hearing about that as well, but can’t remember what it was . . .
Best wishes,
Tim
Hi George. I lived next door to your mum and dad in the Gunnar townsite 1958 to 1960. Never thought then I would see the year 2015.
my name is GeorgeRoche. I was born in gunnar 1958. my parents were irish immigrants.my dad George was a mechanic with the mine..also my uncle pat Connolly,uncle mike Fagan ,uncle peter Meehan were there with there families.think we stayed from around 1957 to 61 is my best guess.have lots of photos from that time ..thought I,d mention this all incase anyone knew my family .
Hi George,
Thanks for the comment. Would love to see some of the photos and, with your permission, put them on the site. I remember a Roche in Uranium City many years later, but don’t know if they were related. Are you aware of the Gunnar facebook group? Close to 200 members now so you might find someone you used to know (or knew you). You can find it here:
Best,
Tim
Thanks..will check it out.
I have many pictures of Gunnar from1956 to 1962 that i could share. Rudy worked in the acid plant and I nursed at the hospital. Our 2 oldest children were born there. Love reading about Gunnar and sad to see it being demolished but………
Hi Allison,
Thanks so much for your message. Would love to see your photos, and put them on the site. I need to create a collage of Gunnar photos and put them up. Are you aware of the Gunnar facebook page? It has two hundred members and many photos. The woman who runs it, Patricia Sandberg (an ex-Gunnar resident), is putting a book together about Gunnar. I’m sure they would love to see your photos as well.
Best wishes,
Tim
Hi Allison,
Sorry, thought I replied – I might have sent you an email, which possibly didn’t go through. anyway, would love to see your Gunnar photos and put them on the site – I need to collect a bunch of photos together and put them up. In the email I mentioned Patricia Sandberg, who is putting together a book about Gunnar. She also has a facebook page: Gunnar Mines, Rediscovered
Hi Allison,
We lived there at that time.. do you remember Jim and Norma Chamberlain, they had 4 sons and a daughter.. I think my dad was the radio operator at the airport..I was the only daughter born jan 1960 over in Uranium City..
Thanks for the great pictures and history . My dad , brothers and I live up at Gunnar mine site from May until October . We have a construction camp where the school once stood looking over the lake . Seeing the pictures gives me a great respect for the area . I’ve explored the area in depth and could stay for life .
Hi Jon,
Thanks for your message. I envy you being able to live up at Gunnar mines for the summer (and fall), such a beautiful spot. Though I do remember the bugs could be pretty bad if there wasn’t a breeze off the lake. What are you doing up there? Helping with the decommissioning? I have to write a second part about going back to Gunnar in the ’90s, and the decommissioning, hopefully I can get that up soon.
You might want to look at the Gunnar fb page, many more stories and photos there as well. Patricia Sandberg, who started the page, is writing a book on Gunnar history. Gunnar Mines, Rediscovered
Tim
I spent the summer of 1957 (one or two either way, memory being what it is) in Gunnar. My Uncle lived in one of the houses with his wife and youngest daughter. My dad lived there and worked there for several years as a mechanic in the shop. Work, at he the time, was a bit scarce. I stayed with my Uncle and Aunt. It was a dandy experience for a young guy having been nowhere. Made a great impression on me. I had the first milk shake I’d ever had in the mall there. Funny what the mind remembers. We made one trip by boat to Uranium City while was there. I remember that Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” was playing at the theater. It struck me that maybe we weren’t that far from civilization after all.
I started with PWA in 1966. I did many, many trips to Uranium City in DC-6, DC-4, Convair 640 and Boeing 737s for a lot of years after that. I never missed a chance to fly over Gunnar coming to or leaving
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for the message. A lot of people seem to remember Gunnar fondly, the Gunnar Facebook page currently has somewhere around 400 members, which is sort of incredible for a town that effectively closed 50 years ago. Certainly, when I was a kid it had a kind of mythical places in our imaginations, hopefully related in the above piece.
I wonder if you were ever a pilot on one of the flights we took to UC. A good chance of it, since we went back and forth quite a bit. On one memorable trip in ’77 – moving back to UC after a few years in and around Edmonton – the pilot invited me up to the cockpit for the last half of the flight. Talk about memorable experiences! I was maybe 11 years old, dazzled by all the instruments in the cockpit, the plane roaring over the white of the lake below (I believe it was mid-March), the north shore approaching then over UC and into the airport. What a dramatic contrast to going back in ’96, for the first time since we left in 1980, on a twin engine Piper, the flight taking longer from Fort MacMurray than the 737 had from Edmonton. We did fly over Gunnar though, and seeing it from air, after being away 16 years, was an unforgettable sight, those dramatic buildings rising up from the land, as still and silent as if they were part of the land itself.
Best,
Tim
My dad worked in the Uranium Mines back in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Mike Smerchynski was his name. I was only 6 years old when we left but I remember a lot about that place. It was beautiful scenery and the fishing was unreal. A real relaxing place to live. We walked a lot everywhere. I remember even walking to kindergarten ontop of the wooden encases pipeline into town. The wild life was beautiful as well
Hi Glenn,
Sorry for the delay in responding and thanks for the comment. So many people have fond memories of living at Gunnar. The wooden cases with the pipelines were still there last time I was in Gunnar in 2000! There’s actually a Gunnar facebook page, run by a lady who lived there in the ’50s. She’s writing a book about Gunnar history. You can find the page at: Gunnar Mines Rediscovered
Best,
Tim
There is now a Port Radium Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/PortRadium/
Hi Craig,
Wow, that’s amazing, thanks for the link. Look forward to seeing all the photos, have such vague memories of the place.
I’ll post it, hopefully next week. Did you share the link on the Eldorado/Gunnar/UC FB pages?
Best,
Tim
april 26 2017 to wohm it may concern , i was at gunnar Mine in july
1954 , operating a Drag line ,building the Airport ( A LORAIN ) 194…….
I was working for Mc namara cy (toronto ) then i was transfered for
Gunnar , my machine became a Clamp , and a Crane , i put up the
first H BEAM on the Mill , when i read your article , you brouth me
a lot of memories many THANKS .
Hi Rosaire,
thanks for your kind comment, glad I could bring back some memories for you. There is a book out now, about Gunnar with a lot of stories from ex-Gunnar resident (the author, Patricia Sandberg, is herself a former resident): Sun Dogs and Yellowcake. She also has a facebook page – over 500 members!
Best wishes,
Tim
I am very interested in the role played by various people who worked for the DNR at Goldfields, Beaver Lodge and eventually Uranium City. What are you finding for information about those people at the Saskatchewan Archives? The job of moving buildings is a very special part of this story.
Bern Will Brown’s book “Arctic Journal” also mentions a one room school at Goldfields, which is of interest from a northern education perspective.
Hi Les,
Sorry for the long delay in getting back. I live in the US so don’t have direct access to the Archives, except online which I find is a bit limited (or at the very least I can’t figure out how to use the site properly). I read Bern Will Brown’s book quite a long time ago so can’t recall any exact details except for the ones I mention in the Goldfields piece on this site. Yes, I can picture the buildings being moved out one by one, until only the foundations remain. There’s a message on the Goldfields piece by someone who described going to Goldfields in the late ’50s and finding many buildings intact (along with a ‘thousand or so’ empty whiskey bottles piled up in the waters below the dock).
I need to make to make a call to the Archives, just been somewhat daunted by licensing fees and costs of getting the photos printed and shipped on (they have hundreds of beautiful black and white photos, mostly taken in the ’50s). But you’ve spurred me, I’ll try and call them tomorrow.
Best,
Tim
Hi: I am interested in locating Vemban Lake near Gunnar- actually it is more a nostalgic visit to locate the lake named after my father-in-law Mr N A VEMBAN who spent a year in 1956-57 and had the lake named after him. Me and wife at present living in Singapore have a grand plan of going there this summer. Could you enlighten if Gunnar the nearest town? Lake Vemban : Lat59,4004 Long -108.8348
Thanks and regards
Hi – Sorry for the delay in responding. I entered those co-ordinates and Venban Lake is indeed just a few kilometers as the crow flies from the old Gunnar minesite. However, not much is left there – the mine was finally decommissioned a few years ago (after standing essentially untouched for fifty years), and the few remaining buildings in town torn down. It seems, according to Google Maps, that there is a sports fishing lodge at nearby Yugo Bay on Lake Athabasca. Your best be would to fly into Uranium City then hire someone in town to take you out on Lake Athabasca. I believe there are private houses you can rent in Uranium City – there’s a change I may be there myself (I live in New York City right now).
There is a small settlement at Gunnar Mine, but I believe this will just be for workers with the mine cleanup.
If your father-in-law worked at Gunnar Mines, I’d highly recommend Patricia Sandberg’s “Sand Dogs and Yellowcakes”, her memoir of growing up in Gunnar and the history of the Gunnar Mines and area. I’d also recommend writing her – she lives in Vancouver. She might even have visited Venbam Lake when she was a girl. I’ll have to forward your message to her. If you’re on Facebook, there are two groups that you might find interesting:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/4168822363/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/752454294796177/
Best wishes, Tim
Dear Tim:
Sorry for almost a year long delay to responding to your message. My apologies. I lost track of the link and today could track it.
Thanks for the detailed response.
Self and wife are planning a Canada visit this year and see if we can have a glimpse of the lake – as it would be memorable for the family.
I had penned a mail to Patricia also around the time I wrote to you. Maybe it is lost in plethora of mail she gets .
Would be gratefuk if you could forward my message to Patricia please – my mail id is ntrjnb@gmail.com and I can see if I get any further clue as to how one can go from Uranuium city area
I am on facebook and would definitely join the groups. Also God willing maybe meet a person like you if I am there this summer- late June. I will be in US – East and then plan to tour Canada.
Best regards BN
Hi
My father Joe Crawford was the caretaker for the Gunnar Mine from 1967-1970. I was 12 yrs old when I got there, and look back on those yrs of Mom,Dad and me alone with great nostalgia. At the time I was pretty aggravated being stuck in isolation. Uranium City was still mining and we flew in by M.A.S.L {charter plane service} every couple weeks for food and mail. Thank you for the trip down memory lane.
Hi Beatrice – sorry for the long delay in getting back – distracted by the holiday season. How amazing you lived in Gunnar for a couple of years AFTER the mine closed. The isolation must have been intense (can’t imagine how it was in winter) but must have been amazing to have this whole town to yourself. Years ago I was hanging out with Dolores Augier – her father worked in the mine, and her grandfather was a caretaker for a number of years as well. She described all the kids running around the rec center, going bowling, sitting at the cafe counter. What fun that must have been.
Funny how Gunnar Mines stays in our memories so intensely after all these years.
Best wishes for the New Year.
Tim
Dear Tim:
Sorry for almost a year long delay to responding to your message. My apologies. I lost track of the link and today could track it.
Thanks for the detailed response.
Self and wife are planning a Canada visit this year and see if we can have a glimpse of the lake – as it would be memorable for the family.
I had penned a mail to Patricia also around the time I wrote to you. Maybe it is lost in plethora of mail she gets .
Would be grateful if you could forward my message to Patricia please – and I can see if I get any further clue as to how one can go from Uranium city area
I am on Facebook and would definitely go to the links. I will be in East Coast of USA this summer- late June. and then plan to tour Canada. will also try to meet you if you are there then.
Best regards BN
PS- Would you require my email or contact please for referring to Patricia
Hi,
Nice to hear from you. Just to be clear Patricia lives in Vancouver Island – don’t think she’s been back to the area since Gunnar closed in the ’60s. We email periodically but haven’t heard from her in a year or two. You can contact her through her website: https://patriciasandberg.com/contact/. Or just go through facebook, at her page’Gunnar Mines Rediscovered’. I should write her soon anyway to say hi so I’ll mention your comment.
I’m actually on the east coast of the US myself (NYC) so am a little out of touch with Uranium City present. I should collect some proper travel info and put it on the site – flights, where to stay etc. I know there is one B&B up there, run by Dean Classen and his wife Gisele (I knew the family growing up). Please visit the Gunnar Mines Rediscovered links and say hi to Patricia there, I’m sure she would love to hear from you.
Best,
Tim
What fun to see that video! In fact, I think it may be me feeding the chipmunk! Have to watch again to see if that is indeed my mother, Edna grant. We had a lovely garden, and looming, smooth rocks rising next to our house where we would have picnics and soak up the sun. I was four years old at the time of that video and we moved away that following year.
Your writing is truly beautiful. You capture the haunting warmth of an isolated spot, now abandoned, which lives forever in the memories of its fortunate inhabitants!
Oops! Hadn’t realized there was sound with the video! So yes, that is indeed my mother and me! And I recognize a few others at the little party….what fun!! I live in Fairbanks, Alaska now and am often struck by the similarities to Gunnar, bounteous gardens and icy phenomena like light pillars and sun dogs being some of the best!
Wow – how amazing. Patricia would definitely love to hear from you I think. This is the FB page link again: Gunnar Mines, Rediscovered. 525 members – pretty good for a town that shut down over 50 years ago (and before I was even born)!
Never been to Alaska, will have to visit at some point and see how it compares with the Canadian North.
Hey Tim, I’m James, one of Foster & Eileen’s eight children, born in Gunnar ’62 (as were elder siblings previous yrs). You used play with us (siblings Neil & Tara) as kids. Wasn’t that you, got your head stuck in the rail spindles at the Legion, across the street from dad’s office? Great writing, kept me very absorbed, even sparked an interest to go there which I confess have never had due to just wrapped up in trying to survive in our racket and over the years odd stories of former residents falling victim to illness. Foster’s brother Don was given the job to cut the channel from the lake to the mine by our gov’t where he said’no’ it’ll contaminate the lake. They said ‘do it’. 30 yrs later gov’t files suit against Gunnar for contaminating the lake, from their own order. Keep up good job.
James!
So nice to hear from you. I’ve been in touch with Barry a little bit via Facebook but otherwise . . . it’s been awhile. I remember your family very well, especially that beautiful ranch house you had on the Edmonton and that indoor swimming pool. Didn’t we jump off a second floor balcony into the water? I don’t remember getting stuck in the legion rail spindles . . . though if I think hard about it I seem to recall being told about it much later on.
That’s amazing about Don cutting the channel and trying to warn the government it would pollute the lake. He was right: pollute the lake it did. Did you read Patricia Sandberg’s book ‘Sundogs and Yellowcake’? One disappointment was there was very little about your Dad in there. I remember your Dad well, and his passing had a big effect on our family. We went through some tough years after that, until we moved back North in early ’77.
I hope you make it back at some point. UC and area is still a magical place, even though the state of the town can be shocking. If you’ve followed the news, you’ll know that Gunnar, alas, is no more. I went back three times from ’96 through 2000, each time with a member of the Augier family, many of whom, like you, were born there. The last time, the fall of 2000, I went with James Augier. By that point, most of the town had been dismantled, first the houses then the lumber and roofs hauled off to neighboring communities. Even the old lodge was missing its roof. I had intended to interview James at Gunnar, since he’d worked at the mine, knew Foster, and met his wife at Gunnar, but the weather changed and we had to race back. By that evening a huge snowstorm had blown in – if we’d waited, another couple of hours and we’d have been camping at Gunnar Mines for a couple of days. I’ll have to write about these trips soon.
I’ll shoot you an email to say hi.
Tim
Hi James,
So sorry didn’t respond earlier – been a helluva year. Helluva couple of years!! I remember you guys very well, mostly from later times, when your Dad had that beautiful ranch-house down in Edmonton. Just had an image of that glassed-in swimming pool. Was it me got my head stuck in the spindles across from your Dad’s office (someone reminded me a couple of years ago that there was actually a building across from, or behind, the Legion, called ‘the Foster Irwin building’)? It’s possible – I would have been pretty young at the time I think.
Have you read Patricia Sandberg’s ‘Sun Dogs and Yellowcake’? (Excerpt here). About her time growing up in Gunnar, interviewing dozens of people who lived there, including your brother Barry. She mentions that channel – didn’t know Don had resisted and the government pushed back. Gunnar, alas, is gone now – everything torn down, returned to nature, the tailings ‘remediated’. Or rather, in the process of being remediated, since it’s ongoing.
Have to get my day started but more anon. If you’re on FB look me – also two FB groups, one for Uranium City, the other for Gunnar Mines (I think ‘Gunnar Mines Rediscovered’).
Hi Tim, my name is Noel Fagan, just wanted to thank you for this amazing, wonderful footage of life and work at the Gunnar mines, my father Michael Fagan worked at these mines in the 50s, he’s still alive and well at 85, but as a kids, we were always fascinated with his stories of life and work, and the photos he took, he loved life there, made a lot of good friends,talked about the different seasons, particularly the winter, when the temperature could drop to -40/50, loved the fishing, he was only 19 when he immigrated to Canada from Ireland, he eventually moved back to Ireland, but as my mother use to say, he still has a love and passion for Canada and the happy memories it gave him as a young man, anyway ,were pretty sure we spotted our aunt eitna and our cousin Tony at the start of the video and the back of my father’s head!I’ve just sent the reel via what’s app to him,I’m sure he’s going to thoroughly going to enjoy it.Thank you again.
Hi Noel,
Sorry it took me so long to get back! Thanks for the comment, glad you enjoyed the old video and hopefully your Dad enjoyed it too – must be kind of amazing to be 85 and look back at a place you lived so far away in your 20s. If you go to this page:
http://uraniumcity-history.com/places/sun-dogs-yellowcake-extract-chapter-8/
You’ll see there’s an entire book about Gunnar Mines, written by Patricia Sandberg, a lady who was born and grew up at Gunnar Mines. As she notes at the end, Gunnar Mines is no more – not just abandoned but after almost a half century of the mine and most of the town buildings standing in that dramatic spot in Lake Athabasca, the government finally acted to decommission both and return the site to nature. Somewhat a shame to see a place go that I had such happy memories of but, sadly, it was steadily polluting Lake Athbasca and the other lakes in the area. Book’s a great read, Patricia spent a couple of years collecting stories (I’m in there somewhere): https://patriciasandberg.com/books/book-title-goes/
Best, Tim
Hi Tim, Noel Fagan here again ,just spotted a comment from my cousin George c Roche,dated 2015,who was born at Gunnar, he mentioned my father Michael Fagan and other members of the family who worked there between 57 to 61.
Hi Noel,
I commented on your last comment but wanted to add here, if you’re on FB, Patricia put up a Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/752454294796177
over 500 members! Not bad for a town that never had more than a 1000 souls – and closed more than a half-century ago . . .
Tim
Dear Tim, many thanks for your reply, and my apologies for my late response,my father Michael Fagan who worked at the Gunnar mines between 57/61 was delighted and I might add a bit overwhelmed when I sent him the video reels of life there, I think seeing his family and buddies he worked with and the back of his own head, really brought it all back, thank you again Tim for the info on Patricia Sandberg’s book, I know my cousin George Roche in Canada, acquired a copy of this particular book, and we are in the process of doing the same, this book will make a wonderful gift for my dad, I can’t thank you enough tim for the video and all the info you have given us, as kids as I mentioned before, we always enjoyed dad telling us about life at the mines and the people and his love for Canada, to have it on video is an amazing bonus, from us the fagan family, scattered across 7 countries, Canada, United States, UK, Ireland, France, Australia and Spain, Thank you so much Tim and everybody involved.Best wishes, stay well, stay safe.