Sometime in the late 60’s I went exploring with some friends up at our cottage at Battle Lake, near Perkins-Sur-Le-Lac, Quebec. We took our boats through the narrow channel connecting our lake to the much larger Lac Rheaume and then went to a small bay where we had previously noticed something that looked like an old path through the wilderness. We hiked along that old path, using branches to chase away the vicious horseflies that kept trying to bite us.
After a while we came upon a very tiny but beautiful lake with the bluest water I’d ever seen. Completely untouched, it was quite a sight. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have taken a photo of the lake — probably because I was only shooting black and white film.
Exploring further, we found what we quickly realized was a long-abandoned mica mine! The site consisted of a collapsed wooden shack containing some old rusty equipment. One piece looked a bit like a tractor but seemed like it maybe was an air compressor of some sort, presumably to power drills or other mining equipment. There was lots of mica all around the ground. (Mica is a unique mineral that separates into thin, almost transparent amber-colored sheets. It was used as insulation for many years, especially around WWII when it was in great demand.)
I found a few photos that I took of the shed and equipment. Wish i had taken more!
POSTSCRIPT: I just looked up Gardner-Denver (the name on the abandoned equipment.) They still exist, and are in fact specialists in air compression equipment, so my guess at the time was correct!
Doing a bit more research, I found an amazing paper written in 1997 that describes the entire Perkins-Sur-Le-Lac area from a mining perspective. For those of us who remember Lac Batteille (Battle Lake) and Rheaume, this makes for fascinating reading!
A brief article I found online…
Here is a satellite photo of the area, including the two lakes mentioned…
The following are the photos I took of the abandoned mine shack and equipment…
