Click on any picture to load a larger image, and then use your browser "back" button to return here.
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!
July 14, 2008
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.
July 21, 2008
Plywood is one of the most versatile pieces of lumber that a prospector can have when building an exploration camp. However, at 4' by 8', it's an awkward size, and cutting it into smaller pieces isn't always practical. That leaves two ways to get it into the bush - in a larger bush plane (like the deHavilland Otter) that has doors large enough to fit a sheet through, or slinging it out under a helicopter. This Bell 205 is slinging a load of plywood from Dease Lake to parts unknown. Plywood is used to build the lower walls in tent frames, as building material for cook houses and latrines, and even serves as food for hungry porcupines, which like the taste of the glue.
July 28, 2008
In the old days, prospectors walked miles into the back country with all the supplies they could carry and only the most essential mining implements - like a shovel and goldpan. But today's advances in electronics have changed much of that for some exploration companies, and now helicopters carrying sensitive test equipment can be seen flying through remote valleys performing geomagnetic surveys of the ground below. While these don't find minerals directly, they do measure the magnetic field variations that often indicate the presence of large ore bodies buried deep underground. The shout of 'Eureka' now comes from the laboratory, not from the river banks.
