and
Mount Proctor, as seen from central Fernie While the slopes of the mountains are the present focus of economic activity, until comparatively recently residents of the area were more interested in the mountains' innards. The vast Crowsnest Coal Field lies just to the east of the city, and Fernie owes its origins to nineteenth-century prospector William Fernie, who established the
coal industry that continues to exist to this day. Acting on pioneer Michael Phillips' twin discoveries of coal and the
Crowsnest Pass a few years earlier, Fernie founded the Crows Nest Pass Coal Company in 1897 and established a temporary encampment near
Coal Creek. The
Canadian Pacific Railway arrived in the valley the following year, and a townsite emerged parallel to the railway line slightly north of the initial encampment, or "Old Town." On May 23, 1902, a coal mine explosion killed 109 miners at the Crow's Nest Coal Mining Company. The disaster, one of the worst mining accidents in Canadian history, is largely forgotten in Fernie and overlooked by local historians after more than a century. During World War One, an
internment camp for prisoners of war was set up at rented premises in Fernie from June 1915 to October 1918. Underground coal
mines were dug away from the townsite in the narrow
Coal Creek valley and until 1960 a small satellite community was known as
Coal Creek stood adjacent to them. A variety of other mines were sunk into the coal fields in a radius in the following two decades. No mining was ever carried out in Fernie proper;
coking of Coal Creek coal was carried out at the townsite, but otherwise, the town developed into an administrative and commercial centre for the burgeoning industry.
Forestry played a smaller role in the local economy and a local
brewery produced
Fernie Beer from Brewery Creek (mountain spring water). Like most single-industry towns, Fernie endured several boom-and-bust cycles throughout the twentieth century, generally tied to the global price of coal. The mines at
Coal Creek closed permanently by 1960 and the focus of mining activity shifted to Michel and
Natal about upriver, which sat on a more productive portion of the Crowsnest Coal Field. Kaiser Resources opened immense
open-pit mines there in the 1970s to meet new
metallurgical coal contracts for the Asian industrial market, predominantly for use in
blast furnaces. Fernie would remain an important residential base for mine labour, along with the new communities of
Sparwood and
Elkford that sprang up much closer to these new mines. Today,
Glencore operates four open-pit mines, shipping out in 152 car unit trains along the
Canadian Pacific Railway through Fernie to the Pacific Coast, where the coal is loaded onto freighters at
Roberts Bank Superport in
Delta.
Flathead Valley avalanches The Flathead Valley avalanches were two
avalanches that buried 11
snowmobilers near Fernie on December 28, 2008. The avalanches ultimately claimed the lives of eight of the riders. ==Architectural heritage==