The man behind the headlamp

Frank Schlichting has spent his life going where the road ends and then a fair way past it. He developed and ranched thousands of acres of northern British Columbia, learned to fly, and rode motorcycles across the country. It was a Harley that first took him up to Sandon as a young man, where a day spent in the Noble Five mine planted something that never quite let go.

Years later he moved to Grand Forks for the flying — and it was from his plane that he spotted the great pit at Phoenix, riddled with tunnels “like Swiss cheese.” Everyone in town said there was nothing left up there. He went and looked. In 2014 he started filming what he found, and Exploring Abandoned Mines was born — a weekly show that grew into the largest film archive of BC’s underground in existence.

More than 400 films later, that archive spans workings that no longer exist: sealed, collapsed, or reclaimed. Much of what Frank has filmed can never be filmed again — by anyone. And it ranges far past BC now: Canada’s north, Mexico, Australia, the Antarctic — wherever there’s a door in the rock worth opening. Alongside the films grew a museum of rescued machinery, tools, lamps and records, carried down the mountains piece by piece and kept against the day somebody asks how it all worked.

This is not nostalgia dressed up for the camera. It’s a working archive of places, skills and lives that can disappear in a single cave-in — and over a decade of argument that they shouldn’t go unrecorded.

Frank lives in Grand Forks, British Columbia — Boundary Country — with a plane on his mind, a Pan America in the shed, and a province still full of doors worth opening.