Last Thursday the grade seven class from GLC went on a field trip to the Gold-corp mine to learn about the history of balmer lake and what they did to fix it.It all started when Mr. Gelderland came to red-lake in 1984 he worked in the mines and one day he seen the lake he said it was like a mud puddle it was so brown from all of the silt chemicals and much put in there. Eventually in 1988 the lake was declared void of life witch mean there was no fish water insects or any plant life living in the lake.This was a very upsetting moment for for Gold-corp and its workers. Eventually Gold-corp had an idea to fix the lake back to its natural state.When they started to clean the water after a couple months they seen minnows swimming in the water a new this was a good sign.Then after about a year they started to see Wight suckers in the lake but even thought hey were old the wouldn’t grow and no one knew why. After a few years of cleaning the water Gold-corp decided to do a test run of the lake.They took twenty wall-eye from another lake and put a tracker in them then put them in balmer lake. After four days four of the fish had died because the surgery was so dramatic but the other fish continued to live there lives. In 1998 they tried to net all of the fishes and when they looked at there bellies they seen that there fins and some scales were all worn from the bottom of the lake but this was a good sign that meant that the fish were breeding. IN 2000 Gold-carp hosted a catch and release fishing derby And the outcome was outstanding. The wall-eye were growing great and there were even northern pike in the lake that Gold-corp didn’t even introduce! All of the fish were huge but that was because the ecosystem hadn’t balanced out in the lake yet. In 2005 Gold-corp netted some of the fish and to there surprise they were skinny like the other lakes and this mean that balmer lake was declared a real fishery again although we cant fish in it right now doesn’t mean we wont be able to forever.
When our class was there we learnt many things about the history of balmer lake and how it came to be.We also seen many things like the large pulley that operates the hoist or the old fire truck from 1965.We seen were all of the headlamps were charged the lockers we got to see the conference room and even the metal shop.then we walked down to the lake were a film crew was waiting for us. We talked about why the lake was a reddish drown and all of the fish and much more! It was a great learning experience for my class and I, I hope we can do it again sometime.
seth2508 