Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

Winter travel in Northern BC comes with many potential hazards. In addition to the usual precautions that must be taken when travelling in temperatures plunging well below -40C - like making sure you have plenty of fuel and a reliable and well-equipped vehicle as well as the means to keep warm or make a fire - you must watch out for many of the "local residents". This herd of caribou lives just north of Holloway Bar and is a frequent sight along the northern reaches of Highway 37. Tracks of these large animals can be seen in the snowbanks that line the road in winter, giving those familiar with winter travel a "heads-up" that a herd could be right around the next corner. Although these signs can't be seen in the recent Compact Snow video, the driver (me!) slowed down to an average speed of 60kmh for the last 120 km of the journey because of the abundance of visible caribou tracks in this area.

There are several ways to identify the Holloway Bar miners away from the mine, particularly in the winter off-season when the snows have stopped the digging. One way is to watch out for someone sporting a large, embroidered picture of "The Wizard" hard at work at the base of Dragon Mountain. We've had a few of these colourful pictures embroidered onto the back of a select few coats and jackets. Measuring almost 40 cm from corner to corner (that's just about 12 inches for those of you stuck in the non-metric world), these huge embroideries are almost impossible to miss, even in a crowd. Although not hand-embroidered, these are produced by an embroidery shop in Whitehorse using a computerized pattern that started out as a photograph, very similar to the summer view from Webcam 3. So, if you happen to run across someone proudly wearing "The Wizard", stop and say hello - it'll likely be one of us!

The clear blue skies of Northern BC and the Yukon are a skywatcher's dream. A steady stream of high-flying aircraft travel overhead daily, their contrails pointing to them like a directional arrow. Usually the travelling jets are alone, but occasionally two or more are seen flying close to one another. The four-engined lead plane appears to be pulling ahead of the two-engined chase plane, but in reality, they are flying in a several-mile long formation, each guided by pre-determined flight routes drawn invisibly into the sky and directed by air traffic controllers sitting in a little room somewhere far away. Early miners would have been shocked and amazed at the sight of such strange things in the skies, but we take these things for granted as they're a frequent sight, and in some cases, you can almost set your watch by the high flyers on their weekly routes. If you think hard, you can almost see a passenger looking out through the window wondering what's happening far below on the ground.

The RCMP is responsible for most policing in Canada north of 60. One of the challenges of this is being responsible for keeping law and order across thousands of kilometers of mostly unpopulated areas sprinkled with small settlements. Many of these small towns and villages are not connected by roads, making access difficult at best. Canada's police force has done what many other Northerners have done when faced with the same dilemma - take to the air! One rainy day, these two RCMP aircraft met at the Watson Lake airport, each representing a different world. The low-winged King Air on the right, based out of Vancouver, flies quickly between airports at speeds of a few hundred kilometers per hour, but needs a smooth (preferably paved) runway to safely operate. The Twin Otter on the left, based out of Whitehorse, needs almost no facilities at all to take off and land and often is used to deliver officers and supplies to very rugged and isolated areas where the King Air cannot go.