Prospectors have been pouring over Northern BC's mountain tops and valley bottoms from both the ground and air for over a hundred years in search of their fortune. Over the decades, much of the exposed land has been explored and prospected for valuable minerals. The early days brought miners looking for for gold after word of the Klondike Gold Rush in Dawson City spread southward in the late 1890's. Miners traveled mainly on foot or by boat, panning the creeks and rivers looking for the telltale signs of gold. Many men and a few women embarked on this hazardous journey; some made it, but only a few found mineral wealth in the lands.
Modern times meant the boots and boats were often traded in for helicopters and airplanes, which opened up much of the land that had been mostly inaccessible for years. A prospector could cover territory in hours by air that would have taken the old timers weeks or even months to pass through.
But both the oldtimers and newcomers shared a common foe that prevented them from testing the ground - glaciers! Prospectors have long suspected that glaciers were hiding many minerals, but looking under the ice was impossible.
Many of the world's glaciers have been shrinking and retreating for the past 10,000 years, ever since the end of the last ice age. Ice ages come and go on a fairly regular and predictable 100,000 year cycle - possibly influenced by the tilt of the earth as proposed by Serbian civil engineer and mathematician Milutin Milanković. During periods of heavy glaciation, the intense weight and pressures generated by the slow-moving ice carve out new valleys from mountains, tearing huge pieces of rock and minerals from solid rock. When the temperates again start to warm, the ice slowly melts and rivers of meltwater flow downhill to the oceans, further eroding the valley bottoms and leaving many interesting rocks exposed.
Starting in the 1950's, the vast wilderness area between Terrace and the Holloway Bar Placer Mine in northern BC was the site of a steady stream of geologists taking advantage of the post-war economy and demand for minerals and metals to fund their prospecting efforts. Bush planes were starting to become common in the area, so a lot of the previously inaccessible areas were now able to be explored.
Soon, short-rough bush landing strips with names like Schaft Creek and Galore Creek were being cut out of the forests for airplanes like Trans Provincial Airlines' deHavilland DHC-3 Otter, seen here taking off from Schaft Creek in the late 1960's. The construction of airstrips had a big effect on exploration in the north - now geologists could get into new areas relatively easily and inexpensively to further explore the mountains for minerals in areas that were not covered by ice thousands of years old - so exploration projects continued annually each summer after the winter snows had melted and the glaciers retreated a bit more.
The Foremore Glacier is located right in the middle of this remote region of Northern British Columbia in the same general area as the proposed Galore Creek mine, which was in the process of being built until 2007 when cost overruns and a declining economy forced the developers to step back for a time. The glacier and nearby Galore Creek claims are about 45 kilometers west of the Bobquinn Airstrip which runs adjacent to the Stewart-Cassiar Highway on the north side of the Ningunsaw Pass.
Highway 37 (the Stewart-Cassiar) was officially opened in the fall of 1972 and was the first highway connection between north and south near the coast. In the early days, it was mainly gravel interspersed with mud and rocks, but now has developed into an all-weather, mostly paved highway. The road has probably done as much to open up this country to development as bush planes and helicopters did in the early days, and the latest project under consideration is the development of a $400 million Northwest Transmission Line project which would connect the area to the North American power grid through a 287-kilovolt line.
