Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

Early prospectors generally stayed low in the valley bottoms looking for gold in the placer gravels of the streams and rivers of BC. Later exploration efforts expanded into the solid rock of the surrounding hills and mountains in search of untold riches. During the last couple of decades, some exploration efforts were seeking new untouched ground in areas that were previously impossible to reach. In the early 1990's, diamond drillers were charged with the task of drilling through a moving glacier to discover what lay underneath. This drill job, through the Foremore Glacier in the Galore Creek area, faced the difficult task of drilling through a thick sheet of ice sometimes moving a few centimeters per day, without losing or breaking equipment. The area has since been proven to contain vast reserves of gold, copper, and silver in quantities sufficient to justify starting a mine. Challenging, yes - but not impossible!

Mining exploration - and bush flying - is mostly a seasonal affair in Northern BC and the Yukon. The early morning fogs hang over the lakes as the temperatures drop off in the fall delaying any attempts to get an early start on the day. Often clear blue skies can be seen above, but even if a plane could take off, the river valleys that serve as the flying routes for small aircraft in the north would be plugged solid with the same fog. However, by late morning, the sun's warmth has worked to burn off much of the fog from the valley bottoms to allow the aircraft to leave and fly to their destinations. Most of the flying work this late in the fall was picking up the last few prospectors and hunters who would also be running in to winter in the back country. By late September or mid-October, many of the smaller, higher lakes would already be skimming over with ice leaving only lower locations ice-free and available as landing spots.

The change of the seasons also brings a change in the undercarriage of many Northern bush planes. Summer flying is generally done on floats, allowing the planes to land on any one of thousands of Northern lakes. However, once the lakes start to freeze, flying must be done onto airstrips in the fall, and later in the winter, onto frozen lakes and rivers. To change an Otter, as seen here, from floats to wheel-skiis, the aircraft is first connected to a chain-block hoist which will be used to lift the aircraft off of the ground. After removing the water rudder control cables, the bolts that hold the float gear onto the bottom of the aircraft are removed and the plane is slowly lifted off of the floats. The floats are then rolled back and the landing gear legs attached to the now-hanging aircraft. Hydraulic lines for the brakes and skiis are reconnected, the tail-wheel reinstalled and reconnected, and once everything is double-checked, the plane is lowered to the ground where it is ready to fly in a new season.

Many gold miners wish they had this problem - figuring out what to do about the fine gold that's hidden in the black sand, one of the by-products of placer mining. Coarser gold is extracted from the sluiceboxes during the cleanup process, but there's always a mixture of black sand and fine gold left at the end. Some miners just send it all out to a lab for chemical processing, but others use a variety of methods to try to extract the remaining gold, including running the mixture through a spiral wheel to spin out the gold. The resulting gold is very fine and hard to do much with, so it's sometimes melted and made into bars. The melting pot is blasted with a propane torch to heat the gold close to its melting point of 1,065 C, which allows it to be poured off and worked into small gold bars. A pinch of borax is added to the mixture to help purify the gold and pour the nearly-molten metal out of the pot. This pot full was a good one - resulting in about 20 ounces of gold formed into bars at the end!