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July 7, 2008
Snow Creek is one of the more famous tributaries of McDame Creek. Flowing into the McDame a few kilometers upstream from Holloway Bar, it's home to one of Canada's great mysteries, Christie's Lead, which contained bucket-fulls of 1 to 5 ounce gold nuggets. While Christie's Lead stopped as suddently as it started, the search for gold continues. This operation is high on the mountaintop near the summer snowline, and the mud and clays left behind by the melting glaciers of the last ice age are fed through the placer jig, a different type of gold plant from the Holloway Bar trommel system. But the goal is the same - to extract the most gold for the lowest cost!
The urban legend says that National Geographic rated the Port Elgin, Ontario sunset the most beautiful in the world. The first French settlers would have marveled at the beauty cast by the sun's last golden rays as it set into the waters of Lake Huron. The third-largest fresh water lake in the world, early settlers called this great lake La Mer Douce - the fresh-water sea. While a large copper deposit was discovered on the north shore of Lake Huron in 1846, the earliest settlers were more interested in exploring this vast land and trading furs than in searching for the precious metals that would eventually draw miners further north in Ontario and west into the sunset.