Greenwood Stack in Greenwood, British Columbia

Located partly up a small mountain right next to Canada's smallest city, the Greenwood Stack is a relic and a monument of the city of Greenwood's early days as a copper mining town.

From the late 1890s to the early 1900s, Greenwood's prosperity in copper mining made it one of the busiest towns in the province of British Columbia during that period. The mines around Greenwood were so prosperous that it necessitated the construction of their own copper smelting facility to serve the surrounding area in 1901, so that raw ore could be processed quicker.

As the story goes with so many other mining towns, eventually Greenwood's boom of prosperity ended. A combination of the price of copper falling and a lack of demand after World War I led to the closure of the smelting site in 1918.

Today, much of the smelting facility is a crumbling ruin with the exception of the smelter's smokestack, which is remarkably intact and towers over the city today, just as it did over 100 years ago when it was operational.