Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

Once the temperatures have permanently dropped below freezing and the winter snows have arrived to stay for a few months, some miners trade their goldpans in for a good set of snowshoes. These tracks lead into one of the valleys that lie a few hundred kilometers south of Holloway Bar and might belong to a trapper heading off into the woods to check his traps. Some people in the North live off the bounty of the land and can't imagine anything better than heading off into the peace and quiet of a snow-filled valley on a beautiful sunny day. Of course, northern winters in can be dangerous for the uninitiated - but part of being a Northerner is being prepared for anything at any time. Trappers on showshoes carry the essentials of winter survival - a rifle, axe or saw, a bit of high-energy food, and the means to make a fire. One hidden hole in the river ice could mean the end if you don't build a fire fast to warm up and dry out.

In a recent Picture of the Week, we saw what happens to some of the fine gold contained in the black sands of Holloway Bar, one of the by products of placer mining. These sands contain very fine flour-like gold which, once separated, is melted into gold bars. However, much of the gold found and mined on McDame Creek in general and Holloway Bar in particular is quite coarse. The chunky pieces of gold in the bottom of this pan are easy to spot and easy to imagine as part of a necklace, earings, or a sluicebox ring worn on your finger. It would be a miner's dream to be able to wash down a pan full of gravel freshly dug out of the ground and be left with this kind of gold - but the reality is that the source gravel for this pan's gold is the result of many cubic meters of raw gravel being fed through the gold plant with the hoe, leaving a rich concentrate with a high percentage of gold to gravel, which makes panning it a lot of fun!

Holloway Bar is about as much of a totally in-house project as you can get in this modern age. Christina and Scott acquired Holloway Bar in the early spring of 1997. In April and May of that year, Scott spend hundreds of hours single-handedly building "The Wizard", Holloway Bar's gold plant. All of the improvements to the property, which are well represented in the Pictures of the Week, are the result of a dozen years of hard work in the short summers, splitting the time between making the property more "livable" and moving gravel through the gold plant. The web site content and videos have also been totally created in-house by Al over the past 4 or 5 years. During the last few long, cold Yukon winters, Scott's taken up the challenge of turning some of the beautiful, coarse, McDame Creek gold into gold nugget jewelry such as this chain in his basement "Glaza Gold Shop". Glaza means Grizzly Bear in the Kaska language and is the First Nations name given to Christina by her Grandmother years ago.

Families of both trumpeter swans and ducks can be seen throughout the day on the newest Lakelse Lake webcam, installed earlier this year. The shoreline has been frequented by waterfowl all summer, with a family of geese visiting regularly earlier in the summer and bringing their young by to feed and rest. Now the geese have flown south for the winter, but the swans winter here,so will be around for a while. The swan family that usually visits consists of two adults and 6 youngsters, but it was joined yesterday by another couple of adult swans as well as a family of ducks - and they've all paused in front of Webcam 15 long enough to have their pictures snapped and uploaded to the website. If you're visiting the website trying to catch a glimpse of the swans ( Webcam 14 is also a good bet), you should know that they have a schedule - they've been seen most frequently about an hour or two after it gets light in the morning (9 or 10 AM PST) and again about mid-afternoon when they return home.

The Holloway Bar Placer Mine strives to be an environmentally friendly operation. As you've seen from some of our recent videos (Del's Shaker Plant & Shake It!), the mining operation is small and sustainable, and we strive to make as small an impact on the surroundings as is possible. One of the keys to Holloway Bar's minimal environmental impact is its power generating system. Rather than run a diesel generator to create power for living (and running the mine webcams), Scott ran almost a kilometer of plastic waterline up one of of the draws above camp that brings water to both supply the camp needs and run a micro-hydro power generating system. The 100 psi of water pressure at the bottom of the line flows through the turbine spinning it at many thousand RPMs. The generator charges almost 1000kg of 2 volt storage batteries, and the resulting power is converted to 120 volts for nice, clean, stable camp power. Once the initial cost of the equipment is recovered, the energy produced is much cheaper than that obtained by running a generator, and the system's "fuel tank" is refilled each year with the winter snows.