The City of Flin Flon is a unique northern-urban community with a trading area. The City of Flin Flon can boast a wide array of amenities, such as The Flin Flon Tourist Park and Campground, Baker's Narrows Provincial Park, a number of fine restaurants, nightspots, scenic trails, boardwalk, golf course, lakes and so much more.
Flin Flon is a thriving northern community and vacationer’s dream destination nestled in the middle of nature's magnificence. Located north of the 54th parallel of latitude, the City of Flin Flon was built on old volcanic belt which gives the region a beautiful rocky landscape like no other.
This belt was formed millions of years ago by underwater volcanic eruptions, these intense eruptions and multiple episodes of glaciations left us the present unique landscape, and is the source of the vast mineral deposits in Flin Flon.
Flin Flon has approximately 5,000 people. There are approximately 200 people in Flin Flon, Saskatchewan making Flin Flon one of two border communities in Canada, the other being Lloydminster on the Saskatchewan/Alberta border.
Located at the western entrance to the Grass River Corridor, the city is quickly forging a page in the history books as one of Canada's most unique communities.
We share the same latitude as Belfast, Copenhagen, and Moscow, and are only 743 km northwest of Manitoba’s capital of Winnipeg (via Highway #10) and 547 km northeast of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (via highway #106 - the Hanson Lake Road).
Flin Flon is in close proximity to the Saskatchewan communities of Creighton and Denare Beach, all of which are located within a 20 km area.
Over 70 years old, Flin Flon continues to be a community with character, quality of life, and opportunity.
The History of Flin Flon
The emergence of Flin Flon can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century and is the product of prospecting and mining. The discovery of gold around Amisk Lake in 1910 led people from all over Canada into this area.
This was the first major discovery of gold west of the Ontario border since the Klondike gold rush.
In 1915, the pioneer prospectors, Tom Creighton and David Collins (as well as their associates), found the massive Flin Flon copper-zinc ore body, which in turn shifted the focus of prospecting from gold to base metals.
The year also saw the establishment of Mandy Mine, the prosperity of which eventually led to the emergence of the embryo of the area on either side of the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border known today as Flin Flon and Creighton.
The first mineral claims associated with the Flin Flon ore discovery were filed in September 1915; however, it was not until December 1927 that HBM&S was officially formed to operate the property. Development of the mine and construction of concentrator, zinc plant, copper smelter and a hydroelectric plant at Island Falls, Saskatchewan, started in 1928 - in the same year, the Canadian National Railroad was extended from The Pas, Manitoba to Flin Flon a distance of about 140 km. The operation of the mine commenced in the second half of 1930 - in the depth of the Great Depression.
In 1927, Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting Co. Ltd. (Hud Bay Minerals) started mining and exploration in this area. Open pit mining was the early major means of mining, which gradually was replaced by deep shafts. The period of 1930's and 1940's continued to witness the vigorous growth of this area.
Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting essentially built the community of Flin Flon. As part of their commitment to the community, the Company built a community within a community for their white collar workers, referred to as "the company cottages". The residential community was built in the 1930's. Their style, positioning of the lots, and type of fencing are unique features of architectural heritage. It is considered a prime example of neighborhood urban design in North America.
How Flin Flon Got Its Name
The story of how Flin Flon got its name combines fact and fiction. It can be traced back to the year 1914 when prospector Tom Creighton and his escort, local trapper David Collins, were exploring the northern frontiers of Manitoba in search of ore.
Creighton and his associates Dan and Jack Mosher, Isadore and Leon Dion and Dan Milligan were exploring in the vicinity of Amisk(Beaver) Lake, Saskatchewan when they were shown mineral-rich sulphides by Mr. Collins, who
had found the rocks in his hunting territory surrounding the north arm of Athapapuskow Lake.
Immediately recognizing the potential value of the resource, the prospectors asked Collins to show them the area where he found the strange-looking rocks. Upon being led to the small lake where Collins had found the rocks, near the location of present-day Flin Flon, the prospectors undertook further exploration work and staked a claim to the property.
How the peculiar name "Flin Flon" came to be is where fiction begins to outweigh fact. The unique name Flin Flon came from a fictitious character in a dime-store paperback novel entitled "The Sunless City" by J.E. Preston-Muddock.
A copy of this book was found on the trail by pioneer prospector Tom Creighton and his party prior to the discovery of the original ore body in the Flin Flon area.
The book told of how Josiah Flintbbatey Flonatin, a grocer turned explorer, journeyed in a submarine of his own design down a subterranean river which flowed from the bottom of Lake Avernus in the Rocky Mountains and into the centre of the earth in search of the unknown.
Flintabbatey's journey took him through the Petrified Forest, the Hall of Jewels and the Sea of Earthquakes before he landed in the Valley of Gold where he discovered a new civilization of central earth inhabitants. Exactly how the bottom of a bottomless lake was reached is beyond explanation.
This story impressed and reminded the Creighton party of how the lake near the mineral discovery appeared bottomless that when it came time to record the name of the new orebody, the nickname of the hero in the novel came to mind.
A more factual account was related to the year 1929 when the C.N.R. was requesting a list of place names for sites along the rail line leading north out of The Pas. The diary of Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Co, Limited's radio operator notes the following, "They say they will call it Flin Flon if they don't hear from us."
Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting never responded to the C.N.R. request and as a result, The City of Flin Flon remains the only city in the world to be named after a science-fiction character.
The statue of Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, which stands at the Tourist Park and Campground at the entrance to the City of Flin Flon, was designed by the late Al Capp, a renowned cartoonist, and creator of the comic strip 'Lil Abner.
Geography and Geology of Flin Flon
Missi Formation Conglomerate
Made up of a variety of well-rounded pebbles in a dark gray, fine-grained matrix. This sedimentary rock, a conglomerate, was deposited between 1850 and 1840 million years ago by a river that originated in a large mountain range to the North.
This range formed, in part, as a result of the collision of two relatively small continents. The mountains were gradually eroded and rock fragments were carried by streams to their present resting place.
If you look at this type you can see some of the rock types that made up the mountain range as pebbles in the conglomerate; white quartz, dark and lighter coloured volcanic rocks and granitic pebbles.
As the mountain building processes continued, the conglomeratic sediments were buried, turned into rock (lithified), squeezed and deformed. The pebbles show the effects of these tremendous forces; they are no longer round but are commonly flattened and show an elongated shape.
Red River Formation
This rock is much different from most of those that occur in the Flin Flon area. It is horizontally layered and is composed of a mineral called dolomite (calcium magnesium carbonate). A tropical sea covered this region 500 – 440 million years ago, and carbonate rocks, including limestone and dolostone, were deposited as sediments in it.
At one time these carbonates extended much farther north than they do now; the Village of Cranberry Portage is located at the edge of the Canadian Shield which is defined by the northern limit of these "young” rocks. To the south, these carbonates then create a flat-lying veneer over the much older and intensely deformed Precambrian rocks.
Erosion following the deposition of these rocks reduced their areal extent. The last continental glaciation, which ended about 10,000 years ago, eroded the limestone back to the present location. Isolated areas of carbonate rocks, called outliers, can be found on the Shield beyond the northern edge of the main foundation.
Erratic
Large boulders, called erratics, consist of a rock type that is not found in the Flin Flon area. How did they get here?
From about 25,000 to 10,000 years ago this area was covered by a 2 km thick ice sheet. The source area for the ice was to the northeast, probably in the Hudson Bay basin, and it moved to the southwest.
As the glacier moved over the land, it eroded its surface and incorporated loose pieces of rock into the ice. This debris was then moved, sometimes hundreds of km, from its source area.
Eventually, the ice stopped advancing and melted, leaving these boulders scattered across the landscape.
Basalt
The City of Flin Flon is built with a volcano that was active between 1925 and 1886 million years ago and is underlain by a sequence of volcanic rocks. The basalt is the most common volcanic rock in the area. It is a fine-grained, dark-coloured rock that was deposited underwater.
The deposition of lava at approximately 1200 ◦C into the water at 2◦C produced some features in the basalt that can still be observed today. The surface of the lava flow that was in direct contact with seawater solidified into a glass. Because of the thermal shock due to the large temperature difference between the lava and water the solidification process at the surface of the flow produced a layer of glass shards, called hyaloclastite.
Depending on the rate of advance of the lava from the volcanic edifice, the front of the flow developed as a series of individual bulbous entities, called pillows. The pillows are defined by a fine-grained margin that represents the frozen exterior margin that was in contact with the seawater.
Continued advance gradually built up the flow as a series of pillows. Areas of hyaloclastite are common between the pillows. In some areas, the pillowed flow front was overrun by the liquid lava, and the solidified rock mass was reincorporated into the advancing lava flow.
These chunks of once-frozen rocks were softened by the enclosing liquid rock but were not completely reabsorbed, producing ameba-like masses in the basalt. This is called an amoeboid pillow breccia. If you look carefully at the pillows, especially around the margins, you can see spherical features a few millimetres in diameter.
These are usually filled with a mineral such as quartz or calcite. These represent gas bubbles called vesicles, and their mineral fillings are called amygdules.
HBMS Headframe (2001)