Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

After a long, cold Yukon winter drenched in northern darkness, a slow change starts to happen sometime in February. The daylight comes noticeably earlier in the day, and the sun's warmth starts to break through ever so slowly, warming the air just enough to allow outside activities once again. Watson Lakers took advantage this year and left the warmth of their homes for a weekend spent on a home-built curling rink on the lake in the middle of the town for an outdoor bonspiel. Events like this signal another coming placer mining season, when the days are warm and long and the water flows freely through the sluiceboxes for another summer's adventure.

Much of the bush flying in the south-eastern Yukon in the 1970's and 1980's was in support of mining exploration ventures. Many thousands of flights into the northern mountains were made both in the spring and summer to haul camp supplies for the exploration crews. Often the aircraft would fly deep into the wilderness where there was no road access, over mountain ranges that contained many undiscovered and unproven mineral riches. Often major finds were made but remained undeveloped due to low metals prices. But with the recent rise in value of many of these resources, many old prospects are being re-examined for future production possibilities.

Ingenuity thrives among Northern miners. A good example is this jade miner's cabin at Provenger Lake in the mountains east of Dease Lake. Old-timer Paul lived here year round, and his brother lived a couple of valleys over. Paul was always busy adding features to his cabin and even had indoor plumbing - both his hand-dug water well and outhouse were inside the cabin, the horizontal windmill on the top of the hill spun a driveshaft to run a grinders, drills and saws, and the small "propeller" windmill to the right of the cabin ran a generator to charge batteries to power both his high-frequency communications radio and a short-wave radio for entertainment. The cabin's few windows were home-made from bottles to let a little light in so that he could create his art, which he proudly hung on his walls.

The NovaGold megaproject at Galore Creek is currently on hold in an attempt to control billions of dollars in development costs from spiralling totally out of control. However, the massive copper, silver, and gold deposits found at this spot in a remote area of Northern British Columbia are not a recent discovery. This Bell 47 has landed at the camp as it existed in 1990, and the materials to construct the buildings in the background were flown in to a makeshift airstrip, probably by a single-engine deHavilland Otter, back in the 1960's. Access to these areas have always been difficult but many short, rough airstrips were built pretty much anywhere terrain permitted to allow bush planes to come and go in support of the early mineral exploration efforts.

For gold miners in the southern parts of the province, the mining season has started. Snows have melted enough that prospectors are heading to the hills in search of $1,000 an ounce gold. However, it's a different story in the Cassiar mountains - winter snows are still piled high, but there are early signs of spring. Although still dropping to -20 C or colder at night, the warmth of the daytime sun has started to melt the snow from the top and the running waters of the McDame have eaten away at enough of the ice from the bottom to show open water in parts of the creek. When you see the mountains of snow still in the valley bottoms, it's hard to believe that it will all be gone in another couple of months, but the final snow melt will signal the start of the 2008 Northern mining season.