Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

The Gitselasu First Nations are the "People of the Canyon", one of seven villages of the Tsimshian Nation. These totems overlook the Kitselas Canyon on the Skeena River and represent the four clans in the village - Wolf, Eagle, Raven, and Killer Whale. Archeological digs show that the Gitselasu have lived on this site for at least 5,000 years. Living a subsistence lifestyle, the people spent much of their time gathering food, fuel resources, and plants to be used for medicinal and ceremonial purposes. Gold and other mineral riches attracted prospectors like Henry McDame here in the 1870's, but these minerals were of little interest to a people more interested in gathering supplies to survive the upcoming northern winter.

Among the most spectacular sites in the Nahanni National Park Reserve are the tufa mounds at Rabbitkettle Hotsprings. Up to 30 meters high and 60 meters wide, these mounds were formed some 10,000 years ago by warm mineral water depositing calcium carbonate as it flows from the ground at its year-round temperature of about 20 degrees celsius. The tufa mounds are very fragile and are accessible only through guided tours by park staff. Unlike most of Canada, much of the Nahanni has been ice-free for several hundred thousand years so was untouched during the last ice age. Scientists call the Nahanni River an "antecedent river", which means that it was flowing here before the mountains rose up 1.4 million years ago.

The glaciers left behind mountains of gravel and great big rocks, with hopefully a bit of gold thrown in for good measure! This is the raw material that's mined at Holloway Bar some 10,000 years later. It's a tough digging assignment as the gravel is laced with huge boulders - these ones dwarfing a large refrigerator, but some as big as houses. Other than the possibility of having a bit of gold stuck embedded in the dirt stuck to the side of one of these monsters, there's no value in these large pieces. Once the larger rocks are rolled out of the way, the de-rocked gravel is loaded into the dump truck and hauled to the ore pad beside the Wizard gold plant. After being fed into the top of the plant, the water, silt and mud ends up in the tailings pond, the smaller rocks roll out the back, and the gold should be what's left.

Two years before gold was discovered on on McDame Creek, Henri Thibert's discovery of coarse nuggets on Thibert Creek in 1872 was the find that really got the Cassiar Gold Rush moving. With miners averaging 4 ounces of gold per day from this creek, it's easy to see the attraction to so many seeking a better life than the $25 a month most were making. Thibert Creek was but one of the soon-to-be discovered gold-laden creeks running into Dease Lake. Within a couple of years, the valleys were filled with hundreds of people looking for their fortunes, and small communities sprung up like Centreville on McDame Creek, and Laketon and Porter's Landing on Dease Lake. With some finding nuggets as big as 40 ounces, the area boomed for about 20 years before the Klondike gold rush captured the attention of the miners and many moved on.

We owe much of the gold we dig from the ground and the landscapes that surround us in Northern BC to the glaciers. The remnants of the last ice age have been steadily melting for the last 100 centuries, but what's left is often spectacular. A slow-flowing river of ice, the Salmon Glacier pictured here near Stewart, BC, has carved out steep-sided trenches from the mineral-rich coast mountain range. As the glaciers receded they left behind millions of tonnes of gravels rich with placer gold and other minerals scraped out of the mountains. But Stewart is best known for its hard rock mines where deep tunnels were bored into the mountains in search of copper, gold and silver. Names such as Big Missouri, Cassiar Rainbow, Scottie Gold, Premier and Granduc roll off the tongues of the oldtimers as they remember both good times and bad of Stewart's rich mining history.

Photo courtesy of Bob Wall.