July 25, 2010 - Our newest video is now online! Come along with Scott as he struggles to build the Holloway Bar Placer Mine inA Gold Miner's Dream: The Holloway Bar Story. If you've ever wondered what it takes to be a gold miner, this 54 minute documentary will answer all of your questions...
July 12, 2010 - The streaming camera is now online most days when we're mining. The camera is positioned right above the ore pit for a bird's eye view and you can now listed to an archived audio track.
June 18, 2010 - Welcome to Mr. Lucas and his Grade 11 students from Dease Lake who learned about placer mining on their recent visit!
May 11, 2010 - The Mine Cameras are back for the season. Check them out on the Webcam or Minecam pages...
April 6, 2010 - The Lakelse Lake ice went out a couple of weeks ago - and the Holloway Bar webcams were there to capture it. Check out the latest video - Lakelse Ice Breakup 2010 - to see how it happened.
February 25, 2010 - Have you ever wondered how you might look for mineral riches beneath a moving glacier? Come along with us as we go "behind the scenes" of a diamond drilling project through the Foremore Glacier in Northern BC...
December 29, 2009 - We've just posted a new video - Compact Snow with Slippery Sections - in the time-lapse video gallery. This 18 minute film documents a drive up highway 37 from Terrace to the Yukon in December 2008 - with the temperatures hitting -45 at the end!
October 7, 2009 - Shake It! is a new video made from webcam stills
documenting the "last dig of 2009". Enjoy!
July 21, 2009 - Del's been running McDame Creek gravels through his shaker plant for 30 years in search of gold - check out the Del's Shaker Plant video to see how a placer gold shaker plant works!
June 24, 2009 - We've posted a couple of new short videos online - be sure to watch both PortaCam TimeLapse and Ningunsaw!
February 25, 2009 - Come with us on a visit to Cassiar Gold: Mining on Snow Creek where Scott and Al visted a couple of placer mining brothers using a different gold recovery system - a placer mining jig!
September 23, 2007 - Read all about Scott's fabrication adventure buildingEmma, the Holloway Bar Pump Queenwhich was overhauled over the summer and now has a new powerplant...
August 15, 2007 - Be sure to read about "The Wizard" - Holloway Bar's gold machine.
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...
June 12/09: Spring CleaningThere's a ton of work involved and repairs required before we can move into camp and go mining each year. See what Scott and Christina found after one of the toughest Northern winters in years...
Webcam View:
click image for more cams
September 6, 2010
The ore pit is where it all happens in placer mining. New material, hopefully untouched by human hands, is dug out of the side of the pit with the excavator and fed into the gold plant, where it is washed with lots of water and is shaken and beat up to allow the gold to drop out of the gravels and hide in the riffles of the gold plant. Often the diggings are laced with huge boulders which, if small enough, are picked up and dropped out of the way of the digging - but sometimes the large rocks are just too big to handle with the excator. The only thing to do with these monsters is to dig around them. If you do it right, you can remove all of the mineable material around and beneath it and the rock will drop into the hole that was just created - but an inexperienced operator can slow things down or even damage the equipment by trying to move a boulder that shouldn't be moved. Once the material has run through the plant, it is pushed back into the same hole it came out of - intact, except for the dirt and clay that the water washed away and the gold that is caught in the box. It's very easy to tell from this photo the difference between the un-mined material on the left and the washed out material on the right.
