Two channels. One life in wild country.
More than 500 films and counting — BC most of all, with expeditions to the USA, Mexico, Australia and the Antarctic.
UNDERMINE — Phoenix, Anyox, and the mines they left behind
Two towns the century abandoned — and the man who went back down. Watch it now →
Probably Mental
“A lot of people think there’s nothing down there. They just assume everything’s all wiped out.” It isn’t. Watch it now →
“First of all: you should never go into a mine.” That is Frank’s own first rule, and he means it. He has spent more than a decade underground — trained, equipped, and working with people who know what they are doing — and he is still at risk every time he goes in. Nothing you see in his films is safe. It is survivable, on a good day, by a man who has spent years learning how.
What Frank does is extremely dangerous. Abandoned mines kill: bad air that gives no warning, rotten timber, hidden shafts under loose ground, rock that fails without a sound. His rule of threes underground — three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food, and three months without hope. Alone down there, no one finds you in time. The films exist so that no one else ever has to go.
And one rule as firm as the first: these places, and everything left in them, are history. Take nothing, damage nothing, leave every site exactly as you found it. What truly must come out before the mountain takes it is museum work — documented, and kept in public trust at the Yankee Boy Mine Museum. History belongs in a museum, not on a souvenir shelf.
Exploring Abandoned Mines
The underground, filmed before it disappears — all over BC, plus Canada’s north, the USA, Mexico, Australia and the Antarctic. The workings, the machinery, the geology, and the people who knew how it all worked.
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Frank Schlichting
The flying, the backcountry rides, the ghost towns and the long ways home. Everything that does not fit down a mineshaft.
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“…so future generations can look at a video and say: this is what Phoenix looked like. We’d like to document these things while we still can.”
Ways into the archive
Workings being sealed, collapsed or reclaimed — filmed once, properly, before the door closes for good.
The men who worked BC’s underground, on the record. Their stories, in their words, while there’s time.
Short films about the objects still lying where working men set them down — the boots, the boxes, the lunch tins.
Winter films from the museum: one object, one story, one pair of hands that knows what it was for.
Every British Columbia
mine gets its record.
The story, the numbers, the photographs, and the government’s own pages — made to be printed and kept. Phoenix is No. 1 in the series.
That’s the whole deal. Frank picks one photograph out of the archive, tells you the story of the day it was taken, and signs off until next month. A short P.S. points to whatever’s new — films, mine pages, the museum — and that’s it.
Leave anytime.