A mine. In a National Park. Inside a mountain. Not what you would expect but for over sixty years, lead and sinc where mined from within Mount Stephen and Mount Field in Yoho National Park. These mines were the only successful metal mines in the Canadian Rockies.
Railway construction workers chanced upon lead-zinc ore in the talus of Mount Stephen, one of the hiking destinations of the foundation. Tom Wilson, a railway worker and a local legend, was the first to stake the ground of this uneconomic deposit in 1882. Another deposit was identified in 1917 and was only 250 m away from the original deposit but located on a then-inaccessible cliff face. A crude tramway was constructed on the cliff and full-scale mining began at the East and West Monarch mines in 1928. Mining was active from 1935 until 1952.
In spite of all of this activity, miners made only a few small openings (adits) in the cliff faces. The Monarch Mine portals on Mount Stephen are on a ledge separating darker limestones below from light-coloured dolomite above, near the base of the Cathedral Formation. You can still see the openings and some other mine workings, such as ladders.
No new mining permits have been issued since 1952. Today, the value of Yoho National Park lies in its conservation.
The former town site for the mines are now where the Parks Canada Kicking Horse and Monarch campgrounds are.
Revised for web format from “A Geoscience Guide to the Burgess Shale” by Murray Coppold and Wayne Powell, a Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation publication. To purchase this book, please go to: the Yoho National Park Visitors Centre, Alpine Book Peddlers, Amazon.ca, or Amazon.com.lead