After a long climb out of the valley in the four wheel drive truck, we finally reached a clearing and the mining operation came into view in front of us. There was a loader working on a large pile of raw material, feeding it into a hopper to feed this gold plant.
These are industrial operations using large pieces of equipment - so we kept our distance until we were sure that this miner had seen us. The last thing you want it to have your shiny 4x4 pickup crushed by a loader with a bucket full of dirt! What a way to ruin your day!
Most of the placer gold operations I've seen, including the Wizard at Holloway Bar and the Boulder mining operation use a trommel - a large rotating tube - that feeds a sluicebox. But this one certainly looked different to me.
The miner spotted us and motioned for us to come over, so Scott pulled the truck into a safe location while the loader finished dumping his load and throttled it down to an idle. We then climbed out of the truck into the light drizzle and walked towards the gold plant.
Scott introduced me to Kevin, who mentioned that he was about due for a break anyway so our timing was good.
There's such a short mining season in the McDame Creek area that many miners just can't afford to take any time away from their operation - especially up this high in the mountains. We visited at the end of June and the mining season had only been under way for a few weeks - if we had been here a month before, we might have needed a snowmobile to reach up this high into the mountains!
We then heard a distant rumble - the sound of another piece of equipment arriving. A rock truck filled full of raw material pulled into the clearing from the opposite side we had arrived from and wheeled around in the open area.
The placer miner said this was his brother Doug arriving with another load of material. I said to him, "This might be a stupid question, but I thought placer miners worked in the valley bottoms. This load of dirt and gravel obviously didn't come from there..."
He took the time to give me a little history lesson. This whole area was heavily glaciated back in the last ice age, and much gold was scraped out of the mountains and carried deep into the valleys. But they were trying a little different approach - they had found an area where the glaciers had pushed materials off to the edge into the hillside, and that's why there were up high above Snow Creek. They were mining the gravels pushed to the side of the glaciers rather than what dropped off the ends as they receded.
