Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

Our mining discussions on hollowaybar.com are usually centered around the search for placer gold - but there are others searching for mineral finds near by. This huge jade boulder was found a couple of years ago only a few valleys away from Holloway Bar and dragged out to civilization on this sled. Most pieces of jade we see are small (although we have posted pictures of pieces weighing several hundred kilograms), but this huge boulder was rumoured to weigh some 10+ tonnes with a value in the millions. Jade has been found in the valleys southeast of the McDame Creek for many years, but until the area was opened up to heavy equipment and road construction in the 1950's with the opening of the Cassiar mine, it was pretty much impossible to move the jade out of the area. Now, most large pieces are dragged out, but some years, miners have even chosen to "air mail" their smaller pieces out to market when necessary.

If you look up placer mining on Wikipedia, it's defined as "mining the precious metal deposits (particularly gold and gemstones) found in alluvial deposits - deposits of sand and gravel in modern or ancient stream beds." This might give the impression that all a prospective miner has to do is to shovel a big pile of gravel into a sluicebox to get on the road to riches! But, any placer miner will tell you this is a long way from the truth. Sure, there's gold mixed in with the gravel, but someone forgot to mention that the gravel is often interlaced with huge boulders that have to be moved out of the way first. The old timers dug around and under these big rocks as best as they could, sometimes finding nuggets hiding under some of the larger pieces. Modern miners have to contend with big boulders as well, but use heavy equipment like excavators and loaders to move these huge rocks and haul just the gravel (and hopefully gold) to the gold plant.

The Holloway Bar Placer Mine strives to have a low impact on the surrounding environment - and one of the ways it does this is by exploring sources of alternative energy like the gravity-fed water turbine generator that supplies camp power. However, this only works in the summer when water is flowing - so another alternative was needed for the winter months. This solar collector system gathers solar radiation from the sun and converts it into heat. Each bank of 20 tubes in this WSE58 pressurized water heater collector produces over 2,600 BTU per hour in full sunlight; this energy is used to heat water using heat exchangers located inside of the house. These pressurized tubes are insulated by their vacuum design so the wind and cold temperatures have a minimal effect on the system's efficiency. But, does it work in a Yukon winter? You be the judge - on this clear winter day of -25C, these two panels were heating water to a temperature of +72C - a temperature increase of almost 100C!

Mine maintenance at Holloway Bar is a year-round job. As soon as the days get longer and spring is near, Scott and Christina head down to Holloway Bar and snowshoe into the mine from the highway. This isn't a pleasure trip, but more of a working weekend to clear the rooftops of the camp buildings. This year, there is a lot of snow and a very heavy load on everything. It's a little late for this webcam as its metal mounting brackets have already buckled under the weight of the snow - so a repair job with some new parts will be on this spring's "to-do" list. Scott did get to the rest of the buildings in time to relieve the pressure this year, but it took a few days of heavy sweat at the working end of a shovel. The snow already on the ground was packed by the winds that brought even more snow from the nearby mountaintops, resulting in six or seven feet of highly compressed snow on the ground. You can't brush this packed snow from the roof, but instead pry and break large chunks off with the shovel.