The Holloway Bar Placer Mine is located in the valley bottom adjacent to McDame Creek. Most placer operations in this area work the low lands and search for gold dropped into the alluvial gravels by the glaciers. Most of the tributaries of McDame Creek have been prospected if not actively mined in the past as the area has produced a lot of gold over the years. Snow Creek is no expection. In fact, it's the location of one of BC's longest unsolved gold mysteries - right up there with tales of Slumach's lost mine near Vancouver.
The story, as told by Jack Harley on www.mysteriesofcanada.com, tells the story of four Cariboo prospectors that stumbled across the find of a lifetime. After blasting a large boulder out of the way, Christie, one of the prospectors, found numerous large nuggets weighing several ounces. The team dug into the hillside and eventually found bucket fulls of nuggets up to 8 ounces in size.
After two years of working what came to be known as "Christie's Lead", the supply of large nuggets abruptly stopped. After much digging and tunnelling without success, the miners decided things had dried up, so they gave up and moved on, as have many miners since.
Scott and I recently went on a short road trip to visit to a couple of the present-day miners currently working Snow Creek to see their operation. Christie and the early miners from the Cariboo would have had a tough time getting here to try to make their fortunes. They would have first had to make their way to the Dease Lake area using an overland route - which would have been tough going, and then travel up the Dease River to where McDame Creek flows into it. This would put them a day's walk or so from present day Centreville, the gateway to the McDame Creek riches. Eventually a telegraph line was run from Quesel to Atlin, some 150 miles northwest of Dease Lake as the crow flies - but this wasn't started until the spring of 1900. By the next fall, there was less than 200 km to complete, so this did allow somewhat easier access to the general area.
We had an easier trip - after driving a few kilometers south from Holloway Bar on Highway 37, we headed up the old Cassiar road. After a few minutes, Scott turned on to an old gravel road and headed towards Snow Creek. I fully expected to come around the corner and see a traditional placer mining operation in the valley bottom.
Little did I know... We came around the corner and Scott said "There it is!" I looked around, but didn't see anything that looked like a gold mine to me.
Then, I looked up on the side of the mountain and saw what appeared to be a large machine sitting on the edge of the hillside. That had to be it - but we were on the valley bottom, right beside Snow Creek. Fortunately for us, there was a shallow water crossing that the Holloway Bar truck easily went through, and then we started up a narrow, twisting road that would eventually take us to the mining operation.
I was a little puzzled, though, because I'm only familar with placer mining in the valley bottoms. This is only a few kilometers from the hard-rock gold mine which tunnels into the Table Mountain Deposit, up high like this. The Snow Creek area also contains the Taurus hard rock deposit, but this was no hardrock operation.
