The placer mining operation at Boulder is similar to many other small operations found across the North. Heavy equipment needed for mining included large bulldozers and excavators to break up and de-rock the raw materials to be run through the wash plant, rock trucks to haul the material from the source of the gold-bearing gravelrs on Wheaton Creek to the gold processing plants located a bit closer to camp. Once the raw materials are dumped near the gold plant, a loader takes over to feed the material into the hopper at the high end of the plant.
Skilled heavy equipment operators with a smooth, light touch are essential for a successful bush mining operation. Any breakdowns cost a lot of money when in an isolated area. Apart from the plant downtime that a broken loader brings, any required repairs must be done out in the field (sometimes in bad weather conditions surrounded by millions of mosquitoes and blackflies). In addition, any parts that aren't on hand have be be ordered in to the nearest town - either Watson Lake or Dease Lake - and then flown into the minesite at great cost. It's a little tough to run down to the local Finning dealer to pick up a replacement part - and they don't make house calls to these types of remote locations cheaply!
Once moved for processing, the raw materials are fed into a hopper at the highest point on the gold plant. If the miners loading the rock trucks are good, you'll see very few larger rocks here as the material is de-rocked whenever possible. Only material that will be fed into the gold plant is moved; larger rocks are just moved off to the side or worked around (in the case of huge boulders, of which there are many). Most of the gold found in this area is coarse and "nuggety"; most of the grains are larger than wheat kernels. Numerous nuggets have been found on Wheaton Creek in the several ounce range; the largest nugget found in the area on Alice Shea Creek, which flows into Wheaton Creek, (called the "Turnagain Nugget") weighs 52 ounces and is occasionally put on display by its owner, the BC Government.
On the most productive section of Wheaton Creek, the creek flows over clay-laced gravel that lies on a thin layer of clay above the bedrock of an old channel formed after the last ice age. Gold was recovered from the top layers of gravel above the clay. There are also some benches in the area containing rich pay-dirt, undoubtably another by-product of past glacier activity in the area. The area is rich with minerals, and an analysis of the black sand concentrate recovered from area sluiceboxes in the 1960's and 1970's found magnetite, small grains of a natural nickel alloy (awaruite), pyrite, hematite, chromite, as well as native copper nuggets, some as large as several inches across. With this kind of mineralization, it's no wonder that most of the recently announced mines in BC are within several hundred kilometers of this area.
