The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
In what is believed to be the first event of its kind in North America and possibly the world, Thompson hosted an elegant dinner in its open pit mine this week. About 200 people gathered in the crater for Tuesday evening's "Picnic in the Pit," part of the 2004 Mid Canada Mining Corridor Conference. "When you hold conferences such as this, you want to expose the delegates to as much local history, industry and as many activities as possible," said conference chairman Garry Zamzow. "And what better way than to dine at the approximate spot of the diamond drill hole that led to the discovery of the Thompson ore body." Conference delegates met at the Thompson Recreation Centre, where a bus picked them up to drive them to the open pit. The Picnic in the Pit comes just over two years after Flin Flon hosted an equally unique banquet to cap off the 2002 installment of the conference. It was called "Dinner in the Dark," an underground banquet held in a spacious subterranean mechanical shop at the the Trout Lake mine. Complete with live music and hors d'oeuvres, the event attracted some 300 people, each required to don hard hats and safety glasses as they entered.
