Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

A bit to the south and a couple of valleys over from Holloway Bar lies some of Northern BC's richest jade deposits. Jade is usually found in huge, multi-ton boulders that just look like another rock until it is polished or cut into pieces with a large semi-portable jade saw like this one set up at Wolverine Airstrip just south of the Kutcho area. Jade is often cut into pieces out in the field to make it more manageable to haul out to the outside world. If time permits, the jade is hauled out to the nearest road via cat train and bush roads, but if you're in a hurry and can cut it into pieces smaller than about 300 kg, it can be hauled out to Dease Lake by air.

In this Northern part of the province, the snows often come by mid-August covering the mountaintops with a white dusting. It's also the time of year that local residents are well into their preparations for another long winter. Life's fairly easy if you live in town, but those living away from civilization have a tougher task. This "house on poles" isn't really a house, but a food cache where a winter's worth of supplies is stored. You'll notice that each of the poles is partially wrapped with a metal jacket to keep foraging animals from climbing in and helping themselves to your winter supplies. It's a bit strange looking, but very effective, and often essential for survival.

A beautiful day, a pile of unprocessed ore shaped like it came right out of Dragon Mountain itself, the Holloway Bar digger, and the newly rebuilt pump warming up down by the river - we had everything we needed to start feeding material to the Wizard gold plant and do some gold mining. Once the gravel was fed into the top of the plant, the swirling waters started to do their magic, separating the small gold flakes and little nuggets from the material that has enveloped these riches for thousands of years. Gold mining is a bit of a gambler's game - all the pieces need to be in place to do the work, and then it's still a mystery until you pan out the concentrate at the end of the day to see if your efforts have paid off.

If you've been watching the Holloway Bar webcams, you've probably noticed that we fired the plant up a week ago after a few weeks of downtime. Water is essential for placer mining and Scott's been busy rebuilding the pump by installing a new, larger motor. Now that the pump modifications are complete, the water volume through the plant has at least doubled. The old pump just barely moved enough water to create the slurry needed to efficiently mine gold, so the improvements have come just in the nick of time. Gold mining is about more than just digging material out of the ground - it also requires good equipment and maintenance practices for the long term. If your equipment is wearing out, you won't be mining for long!