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January 5, 2009
Just as the sun rises over the mist-covered valley just north of Holloway Bar, the temperature plunges a couple of degrees cooler. One would expect that the sun would bring immediate warmth to the -45 C temperatures of this cool morning, but that has to wait a bit. In temperatures this cold, being prepared is everything. Vehicles won't start unless they've been plugged in for hours (and even then, the engine is very stiff and just barely catches), radial tires are frozen square at the bottom of each wheel, thumping away for the first few blocks of travel, and solid objects - metal and plastic - get very brittle and break easily. Travellers also must anticipate that they could be stranded for hours on this remote wilderness road, so must pack extra warm clothes, food and water, and a way to light a fire to keep warm if trouble strikes. But the clear, cold morning sunrises in the mountains are beautiful in spite of the dangers.
January 12, 2009
The blasts of cold winter weather at Lakelse Lake just outside of Terrace are often accompanied by heavy snows, but every few years the cold comes alone in advance of the snows. This allows the ice to freeze into a huge eight-kilometer long by two-kilometer wide skating rink. After a couple of weeks of -10 to -15 C temperatures, holes bored through the frozen lake have shown that the ice is plenty thick to support the weight of skaters and other recreational users. This day brought nice skating conditions except for a brisk breeze blowing out of the north. The wind does provide energy for some, though, and occasionally an inventive soul will construct a home-built iceboat, which is better described a sailboat on skates, to "sail" around the lake on the smooth ice. But after an hour or two out playing in the cold, even the hardiest will agree that it's time to come to shore and gather around a warm fire to warm up and sip a cup of hot chocolate.
January 19, 2009
There are many different methods of placer mining. You've already seen the Holloway Bar "Wizard" - a trommel-based system that uses water and a large rotating tube to help separate out the larger rocks from the slurry containing the gold. This shaker plant accomplishes the same thing by using vibrations. The raw material is fed into the top of the plant with a hoe, where it moves across a shaker table that is vibrating intensely to also help separate the larger rocks from the gold-bearing gravel. The end result is the same - the material finishes its journey through the plant as a slurry flowing through the sluicebox, where the gold is trapped in the riffles and the waste material runs out into a tailings pond to allow the water to filter back into the ground. But with all their differences, placer gold plants have one thing in common - they all use lots of water to recover the gold.
January 26, 2009
Another method of extracting gold from the surrounding gravels is to use a suction dredge. It's not often seen in British Columbia as regulations only permit its use in a few specific areas; however, this gold mining operation in Africa is putting their dredge to good use. A suction dredge, particularly a larger unit such as this one, requires several people to operate. The key to the system is the diver in the water, who guides the "business end" of the unit to the material on the bottom of the river, This is like a large vacuum cleaner, sucking up all of the bottom gravel containing the gold. The slurry is pumped through a sluicebox where the water and gravel flows off the end and the gold falls into the riffles, just like in a traditional placer mining operation. However, it appears that this mining operation should consider building a larger sluicebox to be more efficient.
