Miner who died known as witty, talented

TROY, Mont. – Josh Peterson called him “Sunshine,” this mechanic friend of his, which was ironic considering how far underground, how very far from the daylight these two worked together and how, finally, “Sunshine” died.

“It’s hard, you know,” Peterson said. “Every time I close my eyes, I see what happened. I’m having a hard time sleeping. My stomach hurts, I can’t eat. It’s hard. Mike was a great man.”

Mike Ivins was “Sunshine,” a mechanic at Troy Mine, a hunter, a husband, a horseman, a huckleberry picker.

The mine in northwest Montana is owned and operated by Revett Minerals Inc., of Spokane Valley. On Monday, Ivins was killed a mile and a half into Troy’s tunnels, 600 dark feet below the surface, when the rock roof collapsed.

“It was crazy in there,” Peterson said. “Total panic. We were just trying to hold it together, trying to get him out.”

They were lucky, in the end, to get themselves out.

Peterson’s day started Monday with a note, left by the night shift for the incoming crew and explaining that the bolter needed hydraulic oil and a new hose. When Peterson read it, he called Ivins on the radio, asked him to drive down in and replace the hose.

Meanwhile, Peterson and his partner, Allen Layer, kept driving expanding bolts into the rock above. Those bolts, spaced five feet apart and with a plate on the head, keep the weight of the world from crashing down.

It wasn’t Peterson’s usual job. Usually, he drives the loader, but the regular bolt man’s wife had a baby last weekend, and so there he was “in the wrong place at the right time.”

“I had a little bit of rockfall around me,” Peterson remembered, which is not unusual when you’re driving big bolts into stone. “That drill rattles everything.”

When Ivins approached, “I warned him to stand away from that wall, because of the rockfall.”

They joked a bit, nagged one another while 55-year-old Ivins replaced the hose.

“That’s why I call him ‘Sunshine,’ ” Peterson said. “He was always ready with a joke, always smiling and happy. Mike was witty, you know? The guy always had a comeback.”

Earlier in the day, Peterson had asked Ivins why he was always working down in the mine instead of up in the mechanics shop.

“He said he liked the camaraderie of the crew,” Peterson said. “He liked being around us down there, and everyone liked him.”

When Ivins finished fixing the bolter, Peterson told him he might as well stick around, because the thing was sure to break down in another five minutes.

“Oh no,” Ivins said. “My warranty’s only good as long as I’m here, so I’m outta here.”

And that, Peterson said, was the last thing Sunshine ever said to him.

Ivins lived around Troy pretty much forever, people say. This is where he hunted elk, where he fished and camped and rode horses and volunteered to brush out backcountry trails. This is where he worked in the woods, in the mills, on the roads – where he worked, finally, in the Troy Mine.

This is where he kept his hands busy building and fixing.

“He was a great mechanic,” Peterson said. “The best we had.”

And this is where he met Tammy, and had a house full of kids with her. “They were his pride and joy,” Peterson said. “He fell in love with Tammy, and never fell back out.”

Peterson’s boss, Cole Anderson, was also in the tunnel when it came down Monday morning.

“Mike wasn’t on our crew,” Anderson said, “but he worked with us all the time. He’d been there a couple years, at least.”

Two years and 10 months, to be exact.

Before that, Anderson had worked with Ivins in the lumber mills, and he remembers “a really nice guy with a lot of humor. He never got upset. He just kept on working, no matter what.”

Ivins was not tall – 5-foot-8, maybe – “but he had a 7-foot personality,” Peterson said. “He was bigger than life. He was a very good person, and he cared a lot about people.”

Ivins suffered from multiple sclerosis, but not many people knew that. He didn’t complain.

When Peterson woke late for work and forgot his lunch, Ivins shared half of his.

“That’s just who he was,” Peterson said. “He had this aura about him. It was the sunshine. Not everybody has that charisma.”

He glowed in the dark, Peterson said.

Peterson and Layer were there driving the bolts that would hold the ceiling up. Ivins was fixing the machine. Anderson was just dropping by, to check on his 14-man crew.

Not one of them had a clue.

“There were four of us there,” Peterson said. “And the Lord said it was Mike’s time.”

Ivins had finished and walked back to his pickup for the long haul up out of the mine. “Then we heard this big crash,” Peterson said. “I wasn’t too worried – I’ve heard lots of rocks fall in there. But it was big. Cole went to check it out.”

The next thing Peterson knew, Anderson was shouting, flashing the lights on his truck, yelling for Peterson to get out. “More stuff started to fall. I could hear it everywhere.”

Peterson ran and tried to pile into the truck with Anderson and Layer.

“Then Mike’s truck got a huge blast. All you could see left was the front of the hood and the grill.”

Anderson’s truck took a sudden hit, lurched sideways, and hit Peterson “like a baseball bat and threw me 30 feet. Banged me up pretty good.”

By then, Peterson said, rocks were crashing down everywhere, and there was no hope of driving out. Anderson’s truck was bashed in, Ivins’ truck mostly buried.

“We were screaming at Mike, ‘Are you OK? Hang in there, man, we’ll get you out,’ ” Peterson said.

They wrangled a loader and tried to pull rocks off Ivins’ truck, even as more came down around their heads. The tunnels are big – 25 feet high and nearly 40 feet wide, in some places 70 feet high, supported by rock pillars – but the air was quickly filling with dust. The only feeble light came from Anderson’s pickup headlights and their miners’ hea