Leduc Glacier Avalanche demolished Granduc Mine site, British Columbia, 1965

The Leduc Glacier near Stewart, BC was covered with fresh snow. Underneath the glacier, a tunnel was being created by the Granduc mining company, one that would reach a lode of copper to be sold on world markets. On the morning of February 18, 1965, a crew was excavating in the tunnel, inching 11 miles into to the icy rock. The night crew members were tucked into their beds in the Portal Camp bunkhouses after completing their hard labours on the midnight shift.

It was a cold, blizzarding day, usual for the northern British Columbia area near tip of the Alaska Panhandle. The only thing unusual was the depth of the snowfall – 16 feet in the one February week, according to Murray Lundberg on ExploreNorth.

Snow, Ice and Thick Mud

At about quarter after 10 in the morning, a loud, gripping roar broke the routine. The heavy snow was too much weight for the ice surface of the glacier. Snow, ice and thick mud avalanched down through the camp. The bunk houses were buried. The tunnel became jammed with the glacial debris, the entrance sealed. As the slide started, the radio operator at the camp airstrip began to sent out an SOS message. The transmission was cut off but enough was received by rescue stations to begin a rush of help from Ketchikan, Alaska, and Prince Rupert, further down the Canadian coast, and from the nearby town of Stewart.

Buried under snow, mud, and misery, people struggled to rescue workers at Portal Camp, Granduc Mine, February 1965. Clipping by Newspapers.com/Find-A-Grave.

As workers began the desperate task of shovelling out their colleagues, the blizzard prevented a full-scale immediate rescue. The violent wind was blowing at up to sixty miles per hour and prevented helicopters bearing doctors and supplies from getting close to the Granduc Camp, noted Stu Beitler on GenDisasters. An American Coast Guard cutter set course for the camp, used as a hospital ship for the injured.

Men Buried under the Slide

The bunkhouses were gone, buried under the avalanche. Forty men were trapped in the cabins. Several more were trapped in the tunnel. The slide had split into two arms, said Lundberg, and some men were able to dig themselves out of the ice. When help was finally able to arrive, the rescues were delayed by the intense winter storm and bone-chilling temperature, battering the aid workers, icing up the helicopters.

Over a week’s time, most of the miners were located and dug out from under the heavy avalanche. One man was found “very close to the leading edge of the avalanche, unbeknownst to the rescuers… trapped under the snow in an air pocket, as helicopters landed just several feet away,” said This Day in History 1965. “Finally, on February 21, a bulldozer accidentally uncovered him.” Frostbitten and dehydrated, he was alive. Unfortunately, seven bodies were not recovered until spring.

Granduc Mine reopened after the disaster, but closed after a few years of operation. Image from 2008 by J and R Klotz MD/Wikimedia Commons.

Granduc Mine Rebuilt

Twenty-six men were killed in the devastating slide that wiped out Portal Camp. Granduc reopened at camp at Tide Lake with great hopes of extracting profitable copper from the ore. The town of Stewart grew and prospered in the early 1970s, but only for a short time. The slump in copper prices in the 1980s made copper mining no longer feasible. The Granduc Mine closed permanently.