Qualla: Tsolum River

Tsolum River: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kodemizer, CC0. In 1984, biologists counting coho salmon in the Tsolum River found fourteen. Not fourteen thousand. Fourteen fish, in a river that had once carried an estimated 15,000 of them up out of the Strait of Georgia every autumn. Nothing had been built across the river, no dam blocked it, no city sat on it. The cause was a copper mine on the shoulder of Mount Washington that had operated for three years, gone bankrupt, and walked away. It left 940,000 tonnes of broken rock exposed to Vancouver Island rain, and that rock spent the next four decades quietly manufacturing sulphuric acid and washing dissolved copper down into the salmon.

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Image: Kodemizer | CC0

Tsolum River: A Name That Took Seventy Years to Settle

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DrRandomFactor, CC BY-SA 3.0. The river had trouble being called anything consistently. Admiralty charts labelled it River Courtenay. Dr. Robert Brown of the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition wrote it down as Courtney River. One early reference dismisses it entirely as the slough known as Tsalum. The spel...

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Image: DrRandomFactor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tsolum River: Three Years of Work, Forty of Consequences

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The Mount Washington Copper Mining Company moved into the headwaters in 1964 and started a small open pit. By 1967 it was finished and gone, its Japanese backers bankrupt after less than three money-losing years of operation. Mining had lasted barely two full seasons, but the ari...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Tsolum River: Two Hundred Neighbours

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kodemizer, CC0. In 1997, more than two hundred residents of the Comox Valley formed the Tsolum River Task Force. They were farmers, anglers, retired biologists, and people who had simply grown up swimming in the thing. The company that caused the problem no longer existed, so there was nobody to...

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Image: Kodemizer | CC0

Tsolum River: A Roof Over the Mountain

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kodemizer, CC0. The answer, funded with $4.5 million the province's Treasury Board approved, was almost absurdly simple in concept and difficult in execution. If rain and oxygen make the acid, keep rain and oxygen out. Starting in 2009, crews sealed the waste rock under a waterproof membrane of ...

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Image: Kodemizer | CC0

Tsolum River: What the River Costs

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kodemizer, CC0. The Tsolum is now one of the more encouraging environmental stories on Vancouver Island, and also one of the more sobering. Three years of extraction produced more than forty years of damage and a cleanup bill carried by taxpayers rather than by anyone who profited. The fish are ...

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Image: Kodemizer | CC0