"I met a girl from Venus, her insides were made of gold..." Oh, excuse me, this is actually supposed to be about the Venus mill, associated with the former Venus and Montana gold mines along the shore of lake Tutshi in Canada's British Columbia. Being on the route from Skagway to Dawson, I drove past here on a roadtrip in fall of 2004. I'd intended to go as far as Dawson and then on to Fairbanks, but forest fires made the trip divert a bit after Whitehorse. The Venus mine site had been on my list of things to investigate along the way, but time constraints meant I was only able to look at the old mill, and not the tunnels, 1980s concentration plant, ore bins, or the delicious Arsenic-laced blueberries which the Alaska Milepost made a point to mention.

Some info at the site, and at a museum in Carcross.

The mill and supporting buildings are slowly falling into the lake, or the lake level has risen since the time the mine was active. The mill was designed to offload it's products into steamboats bound for Carcross and the White Pass railroad, so there was originally a dock of some kind at the bottom.

The interior of the mine is pretty well preserved considering how old it is. The dry air and fresh water environment have helped keep it from rotting as fast as such a structure would in coastal Alaska.

The mine adit hither up the hill. There were several such tunnels on the mountains nearby, with trams leading up to them. While we explored the mill we saw some hikers up near the tunnel, but we didn't have time to climb up and explore.

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