The Myra Falls mine is located in a provincial park in central Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The mine is linked by an asphalt road to the port of Campbell River, which is 90 kilometers away.
There have been over 100 years of mineral exploration activity in central Vancouver Island and over three decades of active mining at Myra Falls.
Active mining has been carried out at Myra Falls since 1966 starting with the Lynx open pit and underground operations, followed in 1969 with the Myra mine. In 1979, the H-W massive sulphide deposit was discovered prompting the installation of new infrastructure and an expansion of the milling facilities to 2,700 tonnes per day. This was later increased to 3,650 tonnes per day. In 1991, the Battle and Gap deposits were discovered. The Lynx underground mine closed in 1993. In 1995, the Marshall deposit was discovered. In 1996, mining in the Battle-Gap zone commenced.
Boliden Limited acquired the Myra Falls operation in January 1998. In July 2004, Breakwater Resources Ltd. purchased all the outstanding shares of Boliden Westmin (Canada) Limited from Boliden Limited.
Although primarily a copper/zinc operation employing selective flotation as the main recovery
process, the ores at Myra Falls also contain minor amounts of gold and silver. In 1990 metallurgical staff at Myra Falls began to look at ways to increase gold recovery, which historically was under than 50%.
After extensive laboratory sample analysis, pilot scale testing and a full plant scale trial, Myra Falls was convinced that the addition of several Knelson Concentrators could significantly increase their gold recovery. There was however, one small problem. The Knelson Concentrator as it existed at the time, was a manually operated unit that required significant "hands-on" operator attention. This posed a problem for the management team at Myra Falls in that several years prior, they had installed a plant wide automated control system that enabled them to monitor and control the entire milling and recovery process from a central control room.
Their edict to Knelson was, "if we can't control your units automatically from our control room, we will not install them ." The gauntlet had been dropped and, within 8 months, Knelson had developed, designed and manufactured a fully automated concentrator that could be integrated into the centralized control system at Myra Falls. Shortly thereafter in early 1992, Myra Falls placed an order for the first two fully automated KC-XD30 Knelson Concentrators that were produced.
Earlier this month after more than 15 years of service, these two machines will finally be retired from active duty and will be replaced by the two KC-XD30 units.
Since 1992 Knelson has manufactured over 1000 similar automated concentrators right here in Langley, BC many of which have been exported to gold producing regions around the globe.
