CR2011: Atlas Coal Mine

Our next two nights were spent in Drumheller, Alberta. After leaving Brooks, we spent much of the transit day at the Atlas Coal Mine, a National Historic Site. Blessed with an abundance of easily reached sub-bituminous (heating) coal, the Drumheller valley saw 139 mines registered between 1911 and 1979. Demand for this coal declined and then disappeared after the discovery of oil and natural gas in Alberta in 1948.

The mine and museum are immediately next to the Red Deer River, just on the other side from the highway to Drumheller itself.

View Larger Map
This picture is of a bridge across the Red Deer near Dorothy, shortly before reaching the Atlas. We took a short side drive across it to a viewpoint higher up, and saw a white pelican on the riverbank as a bonus.

The museum offered three different tours, and we bought tickets for all three. (A fourth, the ghost tour, was in the evening.) With any tour, you gain admission to the modest collection of buildings that would have been found near the mines; that is, residences and such.

Miners the world over and of all eras lived in cramped conditions.

The compact information center had some introductory information. (I should note that the museum is run almost entirely through donations and by volunteers.)

A model of the tipple at the Atlas Mine gave an idea of how it might have looked when new.

Next, we inspected the mining machinery out in the yard. These are pieces that somehow escaped being treated as scrap iron; they fill an area that can't be captured in a single photo.

An occasional plaque describes some of the equipment.

The battery powered locomotive, in person.

We were tickled to notice the prominent role of a once dominant Columbus firm, Jeffrey Manufacturing.

For our first guided tour, we walked past the tipple ...

to the lamp/shower house, where the miners would begin and end their working day. In this photo, our guide is demonstrating the proper technique for lighting a carbide lamp.

Later in the history of the mines, battery-powered lamps replaced the open flame of carbide. The miners resisted the change for a long time, because a carbide lamp could be recharged with calcium carbide and water in the dark of the mine, but if a battery died, then what?

From the lamp room we walked to the conveyor tunnel, which carried coal from the mine's mouth to the tipple. Here is an exterior shot of the tunnel.

On the inside, our guide walked us though the conveyor's operation and the tunnel's history. 

Originally the miners were forbidden to walk through the conveyor tunnel to reach the mine, regardless of the weather. The slope of the hill was treacherous, but the mine ownership wasn't interested in spending money on a stairway. Injuries ensued. The manager ridiculed the miners' concerns until the day he decided to show them how safe the hill route was. After falling several times, he allowed the miners to use the conveyor tunnel.

A closeup of the conveyor mechanism.

At the bottom, the conveyor dumped the coal lumps into the tipple mechanism.

 The motors driving the belts were at the top.

We emerged from the conveyor tunnel to an overview of the museum grounds and the river.

Our next tour was a coal car ride from the equipment yard down to the lamp house.

At the lamp house for the second time, on the next tour, the emphasis was different. Here we see where the miners would change from their "street" clothes into their work clothes; the street clothes would then be raised up to avoid dirtying them with coal dust when the miners returned.

One wall was covered in a sketch depicting a populated changing room.

Next to the changing room was the shower room. Normally just for miners, on Sundays the families could come for a hot shower -- for a small fee. Matrons would stand guard when the women showered.

Then it was time to climb up into the tipple and see how the coal was sorted and loaded into trucks. After being dumped from the conveyor the coal would pass over shaking grates with openings of increasing size. Coal that would pass through the smallest holes would burn very quickly, and brought a lower price. Who wants to stoke their oven or furnace every few minutes? Conversely, "right-sized" coal fetched a higher price.

The sorting mechanism needed constant human attention, to ensure proper operation, and to weed out any rocks mixed in with the coal. The operators stood on a narrow wooden platform next to the shaking, clanging grates.

Mining for heating coal was seasonal work. In a cold winter, the mines would be working continuously. In a mild winter, the miners might have work only a few days a week. For six months of the year, the miners were on their own to find whatever employment they could scrounge up, such as farm labor. In any case, working in an unheated tipple in subzero weather was difficult. One solution was to bring heated bricks to stand on, not enough to stay warm, but enough to ward off frostbite.

The seasonal nature of the work may have also caused a fire that burned down the original tipple sometime in the 1930s. The story told is that some of the miners calculated that if the tipple burned at the end of the season, they would have employment rebuilding the tipple. In any case, the tipple did burn down once, and only once.

In the next photo you are looking straight down at the curving slide that carried the sorted coal down to the next level.

Later in the history of the mine, a new marketing technique took hold: to distinguish Atlas coal that of other mines, in a last step it was sprayed with paint. The output from the Atlas mine was daubed orange, and branded as "Wildfire Coal." Competitors quickly followed suit, with alternate brand names and colors.

Finally the coal was ready for delivery.

After a long stay at Atlas, in the bottom right on this map, we continued up the road towards Drumheller (click on the map to enlarge).

 We stopped at the official, protected site for viewing hoodoos.

Nearby was a plaque about another one of the 139 mines in the area, and the labor problems in the valley.

Our next stop was the Last Chance Saloon. I didn't take any photos there, but we had an ice cream at the adjacent grocery. Then we moseyed on to the suspension bridge in Rosedale.

It was definitely a see-through deck.

The difference between the lower, developed shore and the bluffs was striking. The precarious availability of water dominates everything out here; the annual precipitation in Drumheller is about 14½ inches. Here in Columbus, Ohio it's about three times that.

Here's an overview of the entire bridge.

Afterwards it was on to grab some information at the visitor center in Drumheller, check into our motel, and dine at the Athens Restaurant. Tomorrow we would drive a scenic loop and spend time at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.