[4]: 243 In fall 1895, prospectors Thomas L. Sullins, T. McKay and Henry Buzzard discovered traces of copper, gold and silver on Mt.

That August, when a forest fire devastated the western face of the mountain, they abandoned the shaft being dug and fled.

Sicker and BC Development Co. To provide investment capital, Henry Croft, brother-in-law of James Dunsmuir, bought a majority shareholding in spring 1898.

[13] A townsite was laid out northwest of the mining tunnel, and by 1899, contained a general store, school, stable and home sites.

[9] The ore travelled by rail to Ladysmith, and by boat to the smelter at Vananda (now Van Anda) on Texada Island.

In spring 1897, Smith and Buzzard, also staked the Tyee claim, several hundred feet higher than Lenora.

In October 1902, the company opened a 5.3 kilometres (3.3 mi) aerial tramway to carry half-ton buckets of ore from the mine to a 200-ton capacity ore bin at its E&N siding[22] about 3.2 kilometres (2 mi) south of the Lenora mine one.

[11] Comprising the longest single section in the world, the tramway dropped 580 metres (1,900 ft), and had a 5,000-ton-monthly capacity.

[11] Higher and to the east of the Tyee, the Richard III mine conducted development work in late 1902, and in 1903.

This mine and the Tyee experienced flooding problems, which had required installing expensive drainage pipes and pumps.

[27] Many houses were salvaged and moved to other communities in the Cowichan Valley, but some remained as a ghost town until weather, vandalism, and finally logging erased visible traces.

The mountain offers good views of the Gulf Islands and Chemainus River valley.

Opened in 2000, the weather radar installation on the south face covered a 256 kilometres (159 mi) radius.

[29] After a 2017 hardware failure, the location became a decommissioned site of the Canadian weather radar network the next year.