Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

Dragon Mountain has seen a lot of different miners and their equipment working in its shadow over the years. The old days saw tough men working with whatever tools they could pack into the country or build by hand. A lot of the early mining equipment was built from local materials - you can still find remnants of old wooden sluiceboxes held together with square-headed nails forged by a blacksmith. More recent years have seen a variety of heavy equipment and mostly home-built gold plants. The Wizard has been processing gold-bearing gravels on Holloway Bar for a dozen years now, but last summer Del started mining here with his shaker plant. The shaker plant works differently than a trommel system - an out-of-balance shaft is rotated by a small motor and shakes the deck to loosen the gold from the gravel. Added water helps form concentrate that is later removed and further processed to extract the gold.

Placer mining is an outside job. In this part of the world, that means working in all conditions in changeable weather, usually surrounded by all kinds of bugs. Insects are a fact of life in the North and something that most locals just have to learn to deal with every summer. You can often identify those new to the area by the odor of the chemicals found in the insect repellents that they apply liberally to all of their exposed skin, but many Northerners chose to try to live without "bug dope". This can be done (the First Nations peoples lived here for thousands of years without it) - but it does require a bit of planning and preparation. After a hard day's work in the mine, it's nice to lay back and relax in a lounger in the evening sun, but in the North, you do it inside of a screen house. You also have to be prepared when going outside and wear long sleeved shirts, a good hat, and generally just cover up well to avoid being eaten alive.

The bush flying business in Canada's North is a very interesting vocation as you never know what you'll be called upon to haul in your aircraft. On this trip, the single-engine Otter will be flying to an isolated lake in the Northwest Territories near the Nahanni River where a group of enterprising adventurers chose to build a log cabin and spend a couple of years. Of course, to do this they have to be self-sufficient as running to the grocery store is completely out of the question, so part of the supplies and equipment hauled in by air consisted of a few goats to provide fresh milk over the long, cold, northern winters. Other interesting payloads hauled over the years include trained birds for the movie "Clan of the Cave Bear" also filmed near the Nahanni, loads of empty cardboard boxes transported to the site of a forest fire to help pack up camp, huge jade boulders, briefcases full of gold, snowmobiles, ATVs, many thousands of litres of fuel, diamond drilling rigs, and just about anything else that the crew could fit through the Otter's rear double doors.

Every placer miner has his own method of determining where to mine. Some use the "lottery method" - they just dig and hope they hit some rich ground. But others put more thought and work into it by digging many test holes and sampling the soil. Dirt is dug out of the hole and dumped into a 20 litre plastic pail, where it's packed back to camp and panned to determine the gold content. While not an exact science, after enough holes are dug, a "feel" for the property develops. Sometimes a pattern emerges based on the gold size and quantity found in a series of test holes which will either lead a person back to the same general area for more work or send the prospector in a new direction. Some look at the "big picture" as well, either using modern tools like "Google Earth" to examine the lay of the land from miles above or simply climbing to a high point on the property for a good look around. The goal is to try to figure out where the ancient water passed through the property digging out and then redepositing gold as it flowed on its long journey to the oceans.