Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

Long-time visitors to hollowaybar.com will know that we have a soft spot for animals and often come to the rescue of critters in need. The latest member of the Holloway Bar family is Russell the Grouse, saved from a pack of town dogs by Scott last week. This little guy emerged from the battle a little worse for the wear with a hurt wing, but he'll at least have a chance to heal now before being released back into the wild to join his own kind. A year-round Yukon resident, the spruce grouse lives on a diet of ground plants and berries in season, and survives the winter on pine and spruce needles and buds. Any animal that expects to survive a Yukon winter has to be tough - so hopefully Russell will grow big and strong with a little help.

Update - October 9 - A happy ending - Yesterday, Russell flew off into the Yukon forests strong and happy to rejoin his family!

Autumn in the Terrace area is often characterized by cool, gray days with the clouds reaching right down to the ground. This time of year, the storm clouds seem to blow in from the Pacific constantly to dump their contents over the first few mountain ranges as they lighten themselves before drifting over the rising lands of the interior. At ground level, the rains are relentless, but occasionally a break in the clouds shows what's happening up higher in the mountains where it's cooler. The early snows have already covered nearby peaks with the first layers of the season. Some say we're in a time of global warming, but sometimes it's hard to tell around here as this year's early snows has again covered up snow and ice from years before that haven't fully melted with last summer's warmth.

Once the snows start to come to ground level and the water freezes a little more solidly than usual (the first frosts come to the McDame Creek valley in August!), it's time to put the equipment away for the season. Some years it's possible to mine into late October or November, but this year had a late spring and was looking like an early fall, so Scott was starting to winterize things by early October. Winterizing the mine is a big job for one man - and putting the equipment away properly is just one thing that has to be done. One of the most important tasks is testing the antifreeze to make sure it's good to -50 and below - if the coolant isn't up to the task, even though the motors probably won't run this year, a major cold snap would surely mean big trouble and big bills if things froze up and the coolant expanded and cracked an engine block.

Rising from a sea of green growth, these burned-out trees are all that remain after an old forest fire. Historically, fires are a natural occurrence in northern forests with most areas being burned every century or two, and are needed to allow the pine to regenerate by spreading their seeds. Modern policies dictate that wildfires, both naturally-caused and man-made, are controlled whenever they approach populated areas. But this policy of interfering with nature, however necessary it may be to protect property, may have caused some longer-term problems in the forests. We've witnessed the spread of the mountain pine beetle in BC forests in recent years. Scientists mainly attribute this to two things - the mature pine trees that remain in the forest have fed summer population explosions of the beetles, and the warmer winters of recent years have failed to wipe out the beetles to curb the infestations. Photo courtesy of Bob Wall.