Anyox, the abandoned mining town in Northern BC. — The Coke Plant from Granby Bay

Most people are not aware of the ghost town of Anyox, but for those who recognize the name it immediately invokes a sense of awe and wonder. It’s a town that has been forgotten and left behind and rarely stumbled upon because of its remoteness. The land today is privately owned and access is minimal and controlled. Because of this, it remains uncorrupted by the vandals of our time, but absolutely decimated by the destructive forces of humans from a century ago and then slowly digested and reclaimed by nature between then and now. It’s the perfect recipe for a unique exploration opportunity of history, industry, and decay. That is a trilogy of perfection for my passionate photographic interest. On Observatory inlet, it is the last passage inland before Alaska. Steep mountains plunge into the icy water that is protected from the legendarily brutal chop of the Hecate Strait and is eerily still. Rising and falling with the tide, silently revealing the resilient creatures that survived or returned to the scorched earth after Anyox was deserted. The buildings that remain are like beautiful weathered headstones for the deceased mining town.

The abandoned and beautifully crumbling Powerhouse

From company town to ghost town, Anyox ignited into existence, burned hot, and burned out within a quarter of a century, leaving behind a haunting remnant of industry and damage. The structures were built to last and a century later, stand like an interactive archive in the dense vegetation.

The beautiful Benzol Building of the Coke Plant

Modern resource extraction operations employ camp trailer facilities for a group to roll in and roll out with maximum efficiency to mine and move on. Before that technology and accessibility, we had company towns. Anyox, being so remote, had the task of hauling up supplies by steamship and building everything the workers and their families needed. A rail system for hauling ore, the smelter plant, the many buildings of the coke plant, the dam and powerhouse to generate electricity, a general store, a hospital, houses, and roads were all built from scratch in a very short time. Great stone and timber architecture was erected and the smelter smoke began to choke out the vegetation until nothing would grow. The creeks ran toxic with cyanide and byproduct runoff, forest fires and man-made fires occasionally wiped out an area and took out the roads, which were milled timber planking. The Spanish flu arrived, and so did the war, taking out a great number of the citizens. Then the biggest nail in the coffin was driven in as the great depression brought the price of copper so low that the only thing that was sustaining this isolated micro settlement was gone. The surplus piled up until all hope of profit had been bled dry and the mine shut down. Much was left behind as the people packed themselves with what they could carry on the ship to seek existence elsewhere. Any remaining stragglers were chased away by one final massive forest fire until years later when the only returning souls were there to salvage and scrap. Once they took all they could, Anyox was left to nature to attempt to heal.

Visiting these days, it is inspiring to see how lush and verdant it has become. Some areas, however, show the long-lasting devastation.

The Poison Meadow was one such place and felt like walking on Mars. The ruddy soil is a dried tailing field in a valley down from the smelter where nothing grows apart from some ambitious mutated trees and carnivorous plants. I almost didn’t see the latter until I crouched down at the very end of the excursion to see what the dark red patches of colour were. They were unlike the perky green and red Sundew I have seen in acid bogs of the Pacific Northwest but were immediately recognizable up close. Perhaps they are also mutated like the stunted trees that grow around them in this alien landscape. Bright red and minuscule, clutching the rusty stained toxic earth, these resilient Sundews found a way to exist.

In a book I read about Anyox, a resident wrote about how the snow that fell was so contaminated with sulphur from the smelter smoke that you could light it on fire and if the air was still, the whole town had nosebleeds.

Nature and gravity have taken on a long-term art project with any remaining concrete buildings and they have made some stunning sculptures. The Auxiliary Steam Plant is currently displaying its most dynamic and dramatic display of decay. The skeletal rebar of the crumbling concrete clings to scraps of its own flesh, dangling them suspensefully. It’s a thrilling balance of rigid strength and vulnerable deterioration.

While some of the structures are showing their age and wear, others are proving that they were built to last. Trudging through the dense brush, it was absolutely jaw-dropping to suddenly come face to face with the cathedral-like brickwork of the coke ovens. Known for their superior brick skills, the company brought in a team from Chicago to build the very best facilities for refining the mining byproducts, and it shows.

I would say the most stunning and well-built piece in all of Anyox is the dam. Finished in 1924, I walked along the top and ventured deep inside on the 100th birthday of this engineering marvel.

The Anyox dam was the tallest dam in Canada when it was built, and had a unique challenge that dictated the design. Having to haul supplies to a place this remote would have been a logistical nightmare in 1924, so engineer John S Eastwood had to design a strong structure using minimal materials that would withstand extreme forces of nature and be the dependable life support for the area. He did a dam good job.

A century later, it is still functional and fabulous and there are talks of firing it all back up to feed the hungry BC power grid. I felt very grateful to see and experience this place as it sits, knowing now that there may be big changes to the area if they reanimate the dam.

A relief hole blasted with dynamite from the inside

The excellent timing allowed for a trek deep into the bowels of the dam. Walking through the wall of mist on a narrow mossy catwalk above violent water launching through dynamite-blasted holes was the proper amount of terrifying.

The structure is solid, but the crumbling details would have you questioning the integrity. My eyes were drawn to the safety handrail that was hanging on by a thread over the business side of the dam.

The salvage operation after the town shut down hauled away all that was profitable, and I couldn’t be more thankful that some pieces were a little too hard to get and were left behind. Even in the humid marsh, it is going to take a very long time to break down such an iron beast. May she rust in peace for many years so majestically.

At some point in the work day, so long ago, there was a derailment and some of the ore cars fell deep into the valley. It’s nice and protected and corrosion on these bad boys is pretty minimal, given their age. The trees that have integrated them into their grove did not shy away from accepting them fully into their community landscape.

The Powerhouse and Falls Creek waterfall

It’s not just the juxtaposition of industry and nature that makes Anyox so special, but the integration of both throughout the ages that built its history. While it may have been a bit of an abusive relationship, the industry relied on the natural world and tried to work within its demands. The powerhouse that was once a dynamic series of gears and generators driven by the perpetual flow of falling water now sits silently beside the brilliantly cascading steps of fresh mountain water.

Moss takes over in the shade of what is left of the brick walls and under the skeletonized ceiling. Mist from the waterfall settles on the precision-cut gears and wheels.

It is hard to picture the Anyox of today as it used to be. Luckily a wealth of photographs, maps, and records survived the years and ended up in the right hands. It was no easy task, but the people who visit, maintain, and escort visitors to this unique place have spent an incredible amount of time mapping out where things are through the dense overgrowth. Finding a fire hydrant was a major anchor point. They unironically survived all the fires that raged through the town and now look so confusingly immaculate and out of place in the trees.

A lot of my research source material was written around the nineteen-seventies and through a nostalgic perspective from past residents. My favorite part of reading Fifty-year-old Nostalgia was the outdated language. They liked to refer to the mining entrance as the Glory Hole, and I could almost picture them blushing as they described “dancing all night with the Hoors”, aka visiting the brothel. I won’t mention the name of the theatre group but I will tell you they were all in blackface. It was an interesting peek into a very different time. All that is left of the “red light district” that was just on the other side of the company town border, was some metal bed frames and this striking cash register. The things one would expect from a brothel, and the real nuts and bolts of the industry.

Cemeteries are always an enlightening stop at a historic location, like an archive of information written in stone, and always artful in the ways people have honored their loved ones. The Anyox Cemetery could not have done better to summarize the history of the town in this way. What started as an ornate and elaborate resting place was uprooted in a salvage mission, if I may be so crude. The resident relocated and left the place in shambles, only to have it take on the further and beautiful deterioration of nature making this mossy masterpiece.

Most of the interred here are younger than I am and lived a challenging existence in the mines, on the battlefield, or just in the toxic air and acid rain. The causes of death are lung trouble, long bout of sickness, fell into a crusher, Spanish flu, mining explosion, and a lot of head injuries and falls.

Breathtaking and uncorrupted abandoned architecture

Visiting Anyox was a truly unique experience and felt like stepping into a time capsule. Decaying industry is probably my favorite thing in the world to photograph and experience. Of the places I have been, some well off the beaten path and hard to get to, almost all of them have been visited by others who take more than photographs and leave more than just footprints. I don’t quite understand the urge to vandalize and I guess it’s laziness that leads to littering, but it can be a real buzzkill for future admirers of the roads less traveled. Anyox was a breath of fresh air for me. And for a town that was once known for the toxic smelter smoke, it’s all a testament to regeneration in this beautiful world we share.

A massive thank you to Rob, Simone, and Nutter for facilitating the visit and for their absolute tireless effort in maintaining and preserving this stunning piece of history. Rob, of Northern BC Jet Boat Tours out of Terrace, has gone above and beyond to make and keep Anyox accessible to weirdos like me, and keep it looking natural.