A small ore skip is sitting on the mine rail it would have used. They were used in an incline winze or shaft. The wheels of the skip would roll on the track and the skip would be raised and lowered with a small hoist or tugger. Mine timber, dynamite and other mining tools would be lowered to the mine working or stope below. Some times the miners would stand in the skip and be lowered to their working areas. The hoist or tugger operator had to know what he was doing to prevent some one from getting hurt. Many times a bell or buzzer was installed between the top of the winze where hoist operator was and the workings below. The miners could signal via the bell when to raise the skip. When ore was brought up to the level where the hoist operator was, it was dumped into a mine car to be trammed to another shaft to be hoisted to the surface or trammed along the track to the mine portal. In early mines tramming was done with mules and some times if not too far would be pushed by the miners themselves. Miners lived with danger every minute and had to do a lot of physical work. All ore was loaded a shovel full at a time. The process of loading ore by a shovel was called "mucking." The shovel was often called a "muck stick." In later times mucking was done by a mucking machine that was operated by air. The mucker rolled on a track in the stope up to the "muck pile" and ran the mucker bucket into the muck and picked it up. The mucker was then backed up to a car and the mucker threw the muck over the top of mucker and into the car behind. The miner stood on a small platform on the side of the mucker while he operated it. He soon learned to keep his head out of the way as the mucker bucket came up over the mucker to throw the ore behind it. On the side of the muchers were 2 levers, one to control forward and reverse on the mucker and the other to raise the mucker bucket to discharge into car behind. In stopes where they couldn't use a mucker, a slusher was used. A slusher consisted of a double drumed winch that was powered by air pressure. The miner would drill a hole in the working face beyond the muckpile. A eye bolt with an expanding head would be put into the hole. A snatch block was then attached to the eye bolt and cable from the slusher run thru the snatch block. Cable was attached to the rear of slusher bucket. This cable went to one of the drums on the slusher. Another cable was attached to the front of the slusher bucket . By moving one of the handles on the slush to let the cable spoon off the drum at the same time as the other handle caused the other drum to take in cable. In this manner the slusher bucket could be pulled back to the face and on top of the muckpile. The slusher bucket was pulled from the front causing the cutting edge of bucket to dig in and load the bucket or scraper. The scraper then was pulled towards the slusher which was usually on the other side of a grizzly, which were parallel rails on top of a chute. The loose ore would fall thru the grizzly rails into the chute below. Any rocks that were too large to go thru the grizzly was broken with a sledge hammer.