Holloway Bar Placer Mine - Picture of the Week

Miners are always looking closely at the dirt they dig. The land we walk on is temporary - just a snapshot of things the way they are now. But the ground underneath is made up of layers upon layers of material built up over many thousands of years of natural processes. The McDame Creek area was formed, at least in part, by the forces of the last ice age and the last retreat of the glaciers from the lands. If we were able to watch a time-lapse video of the last 10 or 20 thousand years, we'd first see great expanses of white glaciers over the land, their immense weight carving veins of quartz and gold out of the hard rock mountains and grinding it up into smaller chunks and scattering it across the land. Over the next few thousand years, watch as we turn up the heat a little, add some organic material to form some clay layers, throw in some gravel, drop in a bunch of larger rocks and boulders, sprinkle generously with chunks of gold, then run millions of litres of meltwater through newly exposed valleys, shake and stir and you're left with the recipe for Holloway Bar. Gold miners study the layers they find carefully - when an prospector peels back the layers of time, he hopes he's reading a recipe for success!

Some of the most popular features of the hollowaybar.com website are its webcam pages. The website itself sprung out of an idea that was developed by Christina & Scott Jamieson and Al Sande in a summer 2005 get-together and Al started building it a few months later. The first couple of webcams, including Camera 3 seen here with Al Sande, were installed the next spring, at the same time as a wireless network and satellite Internet-based communications system. We were so taken by the first couple of cameras that we quickly decided to get more cameras - several times! We use several different types of low-cost Trendnet IP cameras and now have them in both Watson Lake and Terrace as well as the original mine cameras. These cameras have proven to be tough as nails - and every single camera we have ever purchased, including Camera 2 which has now survived a few long, cold Yukon winters living in a chunk of unheated sewer pipe, is still operational! The mine cameras are silent each winter, but should be coming online shortly as the 2010 placer mining season gets underway in the coming weeks. Watch for them - they could go live and pop up on the website any time now!

Henry McDame first discovered gold on McDame Creek in the 1870's - and after spending a few mining seasons in the Cassiar mountains, he was next reported to have discovered placer gold on Lorne Creek around 1884, said to be the richest of the placer streams running into the Skeena River just outside of Terrace. Henry and the other early prospectors and explorers to come to the area were certainly in for an interesting sight - the Kermodei Bear. Coming across a white bear wandering the forests along with the many black bears in the area would have been quite the topic of discussion around the dinner table - if the others believed your story! The kermodei - also known as the 'Spirit Bear' - isn't a lost polar bear or an albino, but is a type of black bear found only in this area, and most of the area bears carry the recessive gene that makes these bears white. While these white bears are relatively rare, it's not unheard of to see a black bear with a white cub or a black cub with a white parent.. But as all outdoorspeople know, any bear can be trouble, white or black, so keeping a clean camp is essential to avoiding any of the problems that bears might bring. Photo courtesy of Bonita Young-Mercer.

Modern-day gold miners often use heavy equipment to dig and move raw materials through their gold plants during the short summer gold mining season. Christina's climbed up and is overlooking a past summer's mining operation from the top of this excavator. The ground being worked is one of the main deciding factors when a miner is figuring out which type of equipment might work best for him or her. Some areas consist mainly of river gravels without a lot of large rock - these miners often get away with using a smaller loader to scoop up the raw materials and feed their gold plant - but other areas require something a little different. The most common piece of equipment in the Cassiar gold fields is the excavator. The McDame Creek gravels in both the valley bottoms and sidehill benches are littered with huge rocks and boulders, and the excavator with its smaller bucket and big power seems to be very effective at working around the seemingly immovable pieces of solid rock that protrude from the ground to get at the surrounding gold-bearing gravels. The machine used wasn't an issue to the old-timers - they had two choices - a pick or a shovel, each combined with lots of elbow grease!

The little Holloway Bar miner has been watching over the mine from near the garden for a few years now. If he had been here longer - for a couple of centuries, for example - he would have seen some big changes. 200 years ago, he would have seen the local peoples gathering berries and hunting for food to prepare for the long northern winters. Within a few years, he might have watched early explorers and missionaries first pushing into the area in the mid 1800's. By 1874, the miner would have seen the start of a major flurry of activity as that was the year that Henry McDame first discovered coarse gold on the creek flowing just in behind. Once the easy gold was retrieved, the first miners moved on and the Chinese started their mining efforts. The little miner likely smiled as he supervised the many hours of hard work as the Chinese hand-dug their vast network of trenches and waterways. A few more miners came and went over the years, but many of the big changes have come recently with the arrival of Christina and Scott - bringing with them more than more placer miners. Now the little miner was being wired - with power from the micro-hydro system and Internet to feed the hollowaybar.com webcams!