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 Cut from Raft Lake to Finlayson Lake |
Raft Lake Trip A couple of weeks ago, I got out to see the Raft Lake cuts with John Weins as driver and tour guide. And once again, I was struck by the enormity of the diversion project. Now, I am in the rather special position of having read the story and seen the plans and blueprints for these cuts, drawn by Syd Hancock, and now....having seen the actual canals cut through the massive rock. From text, blueprints to what is there today – this does interesting things in my brain. Especially when I continue to have considerable difficulty in grasping how in Heaven's name something so big could have been thought up in the first place. Visiting the actual cuts did very little to help me get my head around the size of the project. Seeing them, immense steel grey rocks with the water running between the vertical faces, just reinforced the magnitude of the story of the development of Steep Rock, and peripherally, that of Atikokan, so closely connected to the rise and fall of the mines. The day after visiting the cuts, I got out Syd Hancock's binder of the blueprints of the diversion project and found the blueprints for the "Raft Lake-Marmion Lake" and for the "Raft Lake-Finlayson Lake" canals. They were drawn in 1942. At that time, the rocks still stood whole and massive between the lakes. Here are a few figures from the blueprints:
That makes a total of almost 600,000 cubic yards of rock. So how much is that anyway? I had no clue, so being a good librarian-type and liking a challenge, I found someone who could give me something to compare that against. Thanks to some very helpful people at Moffatt Supply for this next bit. 600,000 cubic yards of rock is equal to about 6667 transport trucks or a cube of 2 city blocks on each side. That's big, huge...... And this is just a very small part of the entire project. This is exactly where I start having trouble again. If you look at a map, Raft Lake and the cuts occupy only a small portion, while Marmion, Steep Rock Lake, Finlayson Lake all cover a lot of landscape, with bunches of rocks, trees and water all around them. And this did not deter Fotheringham and the rest of the mine developers. Did they see this as a challenge? Or was it just "all in a day's work"? We all know that the country around here can be pretty unforgiving, in the cold of winter and the heat of summer. And yet they did this thing, and did it well. Everything still works much the same way they envisioned it would. The pits are filling now, but there is a part of me that thinks they wouldn't be unhappy with the way it looks now. If the mines can't be here, then having the pits go natural would not be too bad in their opinion, I think. These are men who lived in and loved the wilderness, brought it under their control for a while, and would be happy to see nature take it back again...at least I think they would. |
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 Retired Miner, John Wiens, looks at the cut from Raft Lake to Marmion Lake |
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 Autumn colours also made the trip memorable Return to Contents Page for more articles 
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