April 25, 2012 - New Lakelse Lake webcam just added! This third camera now allows us to do panorama views of the lake. Check out the Lake Panorama page (or the slightly smaller version for tablets!)
March 12, 2012 - The Picture of the Week is back! Watch for a new picture and story about mining, fliying, living in the north, or just something we find interesting here first thing every Monday morning!
December 1, 2011 - The Streaming Camera page has been updated to reflect the change from a "mining cam" to a "Bird cam". Enjoy!
August 14, 2011 - Part 3 of The Holloway Bar Gold Miners is now online! After a disappointing first cleanup, the miners regroup and keep digging for gold in the gravels of McDame Creek. Will they find some gold?
August 1, 2011 - Part 2 of The Holloway Bar Gold Miners has just been released! In a continuation of part 1, Scott and Christina move to the gold mine to start another placer gold mining season...
June 24, 2011 - New Video - The Holloway Bar Gold Miners - just released! In episode 1, Scott and Christina make the first trip of the season to Holloway Bar after a long, hard winter...
June 9, 2011 - The Mine Camerashave been "revamped" along with a network update- check the webcam pages out today! Now with NEW enhanced Streaming Camera page...
Friday Flashback - Did you ever wonder what lies under a moving glacier? We go "behind the scenes" of a diamond drilling project through the Foremore Glacier in Northern BC...
April 21, 2011 - Don't miss our new video - McDame Creek Placer Miner! Scott walks us through a day's mining to show us how it all works.
Friday Flashback - rediscover Scott's photo & audio journey back into Holloway Bar history Into the Trenches...
March 17, 2011 - Tag along with Scott on a little Holloway Bar night mining adventure in "Let's Go Mining Tonight" - our latest video...
Friday Flashback - takes us to look at how "The Wizard" - Holloway Bar's gold extracting machine - works.
February 24, 2011 - We've just finished another "sped up" video- Watch "Skeena Sojourn"... a morning drive along the Skeena River.
December 29, 2010 - Our latest video - Tranquil Timelapses - has just been completed and uploaded to our videos section.
Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Placer Gold Mining on McDame Creek in Northern British Columbia
Where are we?
Holloway Bar is located on McDame Creek in Northern BC's beautiful Cassiar Mountains. McDame Creek is where one of BC's largest solid gold nuggets (73 ounces!) was found in 1877 - just downstream from our Holloway Bar project.
What is a Placer Mine?
There are two main ways to find gold. One is to tunnel into rock for gold ore, which is then removed from the rock using a variety of methods. We use the "traditional" method of placer mining, using water - lots of water - to wash the gravel and other material away from the gold, which is caught on its journey through the gold plant.
Waste water and material is captured in a series of tailings ponds where the water filters back into the ground. Unlike some mining ventures, this is a very environmentally friendly operation.
If you have Google Earth installed, you can download this .KMZ file (Google Earth Placement File) to take you directly to the Holloway Bar Placer Mine.
June 14/10: First Mine Visit of 2010I just returned home from the first trip to the mine. Projects include servicing the equipment, a network expansion, webcams, and a load of firewood...
While all prospectors aspire to heavy pans full of gold, sometimes the gold you find requires that you stop digging for a few minutes and sit down to enjoy the beauty around you. This photo of the Cariboo River was taken as a series of seven shots and combined using high dynamic range (HDR) imaging to produce this result. HDR imaging is a photographic technique first imagined in the 1850s by using several exposures to capture an extreme range of luminance, but was first widely seen in the mid-1950s as Life magazine's cover photo of a nuclear explosion. I took these shots while sitting on the side of a bridge for a rest after a long day of driving to go prospecting. When the sun started setting, the colors of the water and the rippling patterns provided enough visual gold for me to continue taking pictures until I realized it was almost dark and I still had a long drive ahead of me. Before I crossed the bridge I was in a rush to get to camp, but after stopping there the rest of the drive passed easily. The next day I was tired while I dug a new test hole, but the thoughts of the images from the night before kept me motivated. Even though the pans were light that trip I sure didn’t come away empty handed. This week's photo and story contributed by SEAMS.
