A Rock Fell on the Moon

by Alicia Priest

  In our hearts and eyes, he was the same Dad—bantering, mocking and roughhousing during the day, and mesmerizing us in the evenings with tales of adventure and horror. One of his favourites was “The Monkey’s Paw,” a Gothic story about a mummified monkey paw that grants its owner three wishes. A curse in disguise, the wishes have gruesome consequences and serve up a harsh lesson about desiring more than destiny grants. As he unravelled the yarn, he’d hide his long, thin hand inside his shirt sleeve and then, when we were least prepared, fix a beady eye on us while jutting out his now limp and contorted hand and dangling it in our faces.

  One morning we woke to find him gone, back to the Yukon. That’s when Mom told us what we intuitively knew: that Dad was accused of stealing ore, which he had not done, but he would have to stand trial. She didn’t know when he’d return but promised he would. He’d left a note on the table: “Goodbye my dears. I love you all so much.” Vona grabbed it and wanted to put it under her pillow. I said we should put it in a picture frame on our bedside table where we could read it every night before sleep. That morning we called Omi and while waiting for her to arrive, we served Mom breakfast in bed.

  The next day Mom wrote Dad a letter, but never mailed it, hoping to deliver it in person. Years later, I found it stuffed in a shoebox along with some of the hundreds of his cards and letters she’d saved.

  My poor darling, how it hurts me to see you suffer so. Don’t worry one bit about us. We shall be all right even if the worst comes. Whatever you decide to do is right for me. You are a good man and no one can deny that, for what happened to you now could have happened to many others under the same circumstances.

  The girls talk about you so much and miss you. Their affection for you will never change. I’ll see to it that from now on, they only get the newspaper after I look it over.

  I love you and miss you oh so much. Someday the sun shall shine warm on us and we will walk hand in hand again.

  Helen

  A long time ago, Mom had accepted Dad’s desperate, near-frightening need for her unfaltering love and adoration. It was never more palpable than now. Her mission, she decided, was to be strong, brave and steadfast in her love, and thereby nurture the best of his complex and too often troubling nature.

  Meanwhile, back in Elsa, Pike was now seriously agitated. An anxious man by nature, his arrogant dismissal of geologist Al Archer’s advice to handle the super-rich ore like the treasure it was had set the stage for a record-setting silver heist. Leaving a fortune in the Bonanza Stope for months at a time was like hanging out a flashing “Help Yourself” sign. Now, it appeared, a few of his employees had done just that.

  When his bosses in Toronto learned the details—and they would—Pike would pay. But not yet. Right now there were more important things to attend to: discovering exactly what those 671 sacks contained, and punching that cocksure Gerald Priest’s cockamamie story full of holes. He’d hand-mined that ore on the Moon? Impossible. That ore belonged to UKHM, and Pike knew it.

  In the 1960s, Canadian mining companies were riding a corporate high, and Falconbridge, the parent company of UKHM, was among the leaders of the pack. The company’s Toronto headquarters put it within shouting distance of the nation’s biggest banking and legal firms, and many of the company’s senior executives had rock-solid connections with the federal government’s Department of Mines and Technical Surveys in Ottawa.

  Immediately after Pike relayed news of the suspicious shipment to his superiors, Falconbridge was on the phone to Roberts, Archibald, Seagram and Cole Barristers and Solicitors. Falconbridge’s lawyers had pull. An injunction was quickly granted, preventing the ore from being smelted. But as the legal team, the Mounties and the Crown soon learned, building their case around the physical contents of those hundreds of ore sacks would prove daunting. There was no DNA test for rock. And unlike chemistry and physics, geology is not an exact science.

  Nonetheless, much of the bagged ore was rigorously examined and painstakingly compared to other mine rock to see if a fragment of a match appeared. Even with ore microscopy, x-ray diffraction, chemical analysis and fire assay tests—performed by a team of scientists in the Mineral Sciences Division of the Department of Mines in Ottawa and by scientists at the University of British Columbia—no one could say with anything approaching certitude that the ore came from the UKHM mine.

  “It should be pointed out that in complex mineralogy of this kind, it is very difficult to arrive at positive quantitative findings and that conclusions must be based on a broad overall assessment of characteristics such as mineral assemblages, textures and mutual relationships of the minerals, intergrowths and modes of occurrence along with the presence or absence of comparatively rare or unusual minerals,” the government team reported in a technical paper pored over by Falconbridge’s lawyers, as well as by Crown and defense counsels. In other words, pinning the ore to the inside of the Elsa mine couldn’t be done.

  Pike’s diktat to leave the Bonanza motherlode lying on the mine tunnel floor was a gigantic miscue, as Falconbridge’s legal team was reminded over and over for the better part of the next two years. With a growing awareness of how difficult it was to prove the ore came from the mine, attention began to shift to Gerald Priest’s version of events. Just how credible was his story of hand-mining the ore from the Moon?

  Chapter 12

  Fool’s Silver

  Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there’s none of you too sane;It’s just a little matter of degree.

  It is late August 2011 and I am on a mission. Nearly fifty years after Dad went on his Easter ore-hauling “holiday” with his snowmobile, I plan to retrace his steps, as best I can. Luckily, I’ve found someone to take me to the Moon. My guide lives in Keno, has a vehicle and is willing to spend the better part of the day getting me to and from, as well as show me around the mineral claims Dad once owned. Matthias Bindig is my man. Tall, tanned, with fair brown hair, in his mid-thirties and handsome as a husky, Bindig is the kind of man they invented the word “strapping” for. Better yet, he’s a local history buff and is familiar—at least superficially—with Dad’s saga, as related by Aaro Aho in his book Hills of Silver. The only chapter, curiously, where Aho names no names, including his own, is titled “The Mysterious Ore Shipment.” A bonus is Bindig’s partner, who’ll join us—Lauren Blackburn is a gregarious, spirited, dark-haired woman who also happens to be a geologist.

  Originally from Germany, Matthias Bindig has lived in the Keno area for about twelve years, doing odd jobs, but now works mainly as a prospector and dogsledder. We meet at noon on a cool, brilliantly clear day at the Keno City Snack Shop, the heart of what’s left of Keno these days.

  While waiting for Bindig and Blackburn over a cup of coffee, I do a double take. A plaque on a wall memorializes, of all people, Martin Swizinski, who lived many years in Keno. It says simply: “Martin Swizinski 1926–Jan. 5, 2003. Shift boss, mine captain (UKHM), mine superintendent, mine manager (Canada Tungsten), owner/operator Springmount Operating Company Ltd., Keno City.”

  Everything has changed since Swizinski and Dad’s time in the Yukon. The day before, Jennika Bergren had graciously escorted me on a truck tour of what was left of Elsa. A perky twenty-something, Bergren exuded optimism and energy, about the opposite of how I felt. She worked for Alexco Resource Corp., the company that now owns the Elsa townsite and a whole lot more since UKHM went bust more than two decades ago. Committed to life in the north, Bergren hopes to have a daughter one day, and name her Elsa.

  Why, though, is beyond me. All that remains of my hometown is an Atco trailer camp surrounded by encroaching bush and the remains of a few forlorn buildings—including, remarkably, the school. Anyone seeing this sight would never guess that, in its day, the Elsa–Keno mines gave up more than 213 million ounces of silver, 710 million pounds of lead, and 436 million pounds of zinc. Or that for nearly seventy years, thousands of people worked hard, played ha
rd, raised children and forged eternal friendships here. Or that in 1985, Elsa became the first official hamlet in Yukon history.

  Only a few years later, UKHM’s owners decided the good times were gone. On January 9, 1989, the company operated its last shift and 170 people lost their jobs. United Keno Hill Mines was then the second-largest employer in the territory. Overnight the lights of Elsa went pfft. The town was rapidly abandoned. And after that, what was left fell into oblivion. In 1994 Elsa’s prized Panabodes were sold, disassembled and shipped off to points west and south. Tourists and collectors scavenged a few retro items they found but what remained was largely left to rot. In 2003, when silver prices rose to profitable levels, Alexco Resources Corp., a Vancouver-based junior mining company, became interested in the old UKHM mines. Three years later the territorial and federal governments—who rightly viewed the poisoned valley UKHM had left behind as a $65-million liability—sold the assets to Alexco for the bargain sum of $410,000. Included in the deal was a promise that Alexco would spend an estimated $50 million to reclaim the horror in the McQuesten River Valley, where more than four million tons of tailings had been dumped for more than half a century. All told, the government sold the entire Elsa townsite and surrounding land, plus thirty-five former UKHM mine sites, to Alexco—a total area of 23,350 hectares.

  In January 2011, Alexco began operating one Keno Hill mine and built their mill and crusher within the Keno community even though the original mill had been in Elsa. The move divided Keno’s residents into two camps: those who see their town primarily as a tourist destination—the end of the Silver Trail—and others who view it as a mine site above all. A few managed to sell their homes and leave, shrinking the already tiny permanent population to a mere handful. Some just walked away from their homes. In 2012, the Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Board gave Alexco permission to further industrialize Keno. The company now has the green light to develop the Lucky Queen and Onek mines, both located near Keno. However, the way of the world may not allow that. Due to low silver prices, Alexco closed its one and only operating mine, Bellekeno, in September 2013. The company said it would reopen the mine someday, but only if silver prices improved.

  In Elsa, Alexco dismantled and destroyed many buildings that remained, including the Catholic church, the market and the coffee shop. They saved the school to be used as a geological office. What once was a community with a capital C is now a dry workstation where employees fly in for two-week shifts of twelve-hour days from across Canada. And with that, Elsa has joined a ghostly assortment of Canadian mining towns that exist in memory only.

  As I look out the café window at the empty dirt streets, it seems inevitable to me that Keno will one day join them. I mourn the loss of my hometown and realize that I can never show my family the special places of my childhood. Shortly, Matthias and Lauren arrive and we head off for the Moon, boarding an open-cab red Polaris six-wheel ATV. Besides extra jackets, the rig’s loaded with water, snacks, mosquito repellent, a chainsaw and an assortment of picks, axes, shovels and other prospecting tools. I cling to the passenger seat beside Matthias. Lauren jumps on. Matthias turns the key. We rumble and bump uphill on a dirt road pointing northeast. The Moon claims, now called the Try Again claims, beckon about 8 miles away.

  As we skirt the eastern edge of Minto Hill, the road narrows to become a stone-scattered track. Minto’s summit is 5,026 feet in elevation and by now we are flirting with the treeline. We pass what’s left of the old townsite, where Dad took us overnight camping so long ago. A haphazard collection of rotting boards, rusted hulks of machinery and coiled wire, one leaning shack and the skeleton of an old tramline bakes in the thin August air. Matthias and Lauren say they are urging the Yukon government to declare the area a heritage site and to honour Livingston Wernecke as the Yukon mining legend he was. Now at over 4,000 feet in elevation, we look down at the glimmer of Hanson Lakes and Ladue Lake at the base of the McQuesten River. Deep valleys encroach on three sides. In winter the McQuesten Valley becomes a sheet of ice and snow, making the Moon claims more accessible by snowmobile, as Dad knew. Still, whatever the season, the claims are over yonder—in the hinterland of the hinterland.

  We turn northeast toward Faro Gulch on a washed-out mining road called the Silver Basin Trail and enter an alpine jungle of dense, overgrown willow and aspen as thick as the forest surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Above the roar of the Polaris, I ask Matthias if there really was a trail beneath us. I see no evidence that man, machine or beast ever trespassed here. He assures me there was a trail some years ago. For the next hour and a half, I keep my head down, clutching the windshield while Matthias and Lauren swing their machetes, axes, arms and legs, hacking, chopping, pushing and shoving at the aggressive scrub blocking our path. The Polaris jerks forward, stops, starts only to stop, stuck in mud, and start again. At one point a ricocheting sapling whacks Lauren out of the vehicle. Luckily, we’re only going about 2 miles an hour and she hops back in, rubbing her shoulder. Around another bend Matthias points at an outhouse perched precariously on the edge of a precipice. The facility’s back half is gone but the seat and front frame are hanging by a sliver. “Anyone need to go?” he asks.

  Eventually we reach a high open vista, where a sparsely treed burnt orange and dark green wetland spreads below while above, ridge upon ridge of purple—the Yukon Plateau—rolls northwest forever. I take a breath, and a rush of spicy, cool air fills my lungs. Down we motor onto a genuine trail that emerges and flattens out. We’ve landed on the Moon. It’s taken more than two hours to travel 8 miles.

  Relatively even expanses of land, the Moon claims are four 1,500-foot × 1,500-foot adjoining squares of ground partially cleared of bush and boulders. According to the Yukon Geological Survey, the claims contain deposits of lead, silver, gold and zinc. After slathering on mosquito repellent, we amble over a small rise and into a bowl-shaped clearing. It’s like entering some archaic arena. Signs of humans are everywhere, but except for sporadic birdsong, silence reigns. There’s been no real mining here for about a decade and nature has wasted no time in re-staking her claim. On one rock wall a collapsed adit gapes, its blackness half obscured by rotting wooden boards. Years ago a prospector’s brother was crushed and killed in this same tunnel when the roof collapsed. Opposite the adit, a small, stagnant pool shimmers below rusted fuel drums and discarded beer cans. Bulldozer ruts trail off into the bush, ending in a push-pile of jumbled, irregular-shaped rubble. Matthias says the push-pile is a good place to look for ore. We let him go at it while Lauren and I hunt for traces of the cabin Dad stayed in. Scraping aside the moss, buckbrush (dwarf birch) and young aspen covering one flattish area, we find the cabin’s worn foundation—long wooden boards shallowly embedded in the ground and marking a small rectangle. Not far below, the earth is permanently frozen. How many winter nights had Dad brooded, dreamed and schemed here, and what “hand-mining” had he actually done?

  While Matthias believes the claims contain valued ore, he dismisses Dad’s story of a massive boulder rolling down from Keno Summit and onto the Moon. “A 60-ton boulder?” he says. “That’s huge, like Ayers Rock!” He’s exaggerating, of course, but I get his point.

  Lauren and I return to the rock pile, above and to the right of the adit where Matthias is chipping chunks off loose rock with the blunt end of his pick.“There’s amazing quality here,” he says. Giving me a quick and dirty geology refresher, Lauren reminds me that the earth produces three kinds of basic rock: sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous. The host rock found here, she continues, is an “igneous intrusion” largely made of fine-grained aplite, consisting of quartz and other rock. These rocks may hold minerals like zinc, lead and silver, but in such minute form they require smelting to be released.

  Matthias continues picking up rocks and breaking them into fist-sized hunks. He calls me over, and with one precise smack cracks one open like an egg. I gasp. A galaxy of silver sparkle spills out from be
tween two rusty crusts. Who knew? It’s like opening a kiwi for the first time. Before I get too excited, Matthias cautions me that all that glitters isn’t silver. We saw shiny galena, and the sample could contain variable amounts of different minerals including lead, zinc, antimony, arsenic or silver. But only a rigorous assay can reveal what and how much. Often, Matthias explains, dull interiors hold more promise. He retrieves another rock and chips it as well. No celestial fireworks here, just a thick strip of flat grey-yellow. It could be pyrite, also known as fool’s gold, Matthias says. “There’s the exposed quartz vein here,” he adds, pointing at a stripe in the rock wall above us, “but is it dead or alive?” Meaning does it hold valuable minerals or not.

  Suddenly we notice a chill in the air and lowering light. We need to hit the road—another rough and rocky 8 miles. And another two hours. This time we tramp up a short ridge toward the Polaris, the ground littered with scraps of wood, plastic and metal detritus.

  “This is one of the most distant claims from Keno,” Matthias says. “In terms of access, it’s damn far.”

  Via the southern route, Dad had allegedly made up to seven round trips a day on his newfangled snow machine, pulling hundreds of pounds of ore behind him on a tow toboggan. “Totally ridiculous” was how Strathdee had characterized Dad’s story. I get his point but desperados have accomplished far more foolish feats in their pursuit of fortune. And as I leave the Moon after my first and only visit, I realize that fifty years ago, Dad had indeed become a desperate man.

  Back in Keno, we stop in front of the Keno City Mining Museum as evening begins to blush. Before I get into my own rented vehicle, Matthias allows me to choose from his selection of samples. I select four Moon rocks—two shiny and two dull.