Placer gold mining is all about moving material. If there was a place on earth where gold nuggets were just laying on the ground, it would be too packed with miners to get close! So, miners are left with this problem - they know (or suspect) that there's gold in the ground, but they can't see it, and they have to do a bunch of work before they know it's really there. Most miners have a two-pronged approach: first, they test and sample the ground with a shovel and goldpan to look for "colours" - the fine gold that shows you where to dig. Then once they start digging, they look for the signs in the ground. If you watched Gold Rush Alaska last season, you saw the miners digging deep looking for the big boulders that surrounded the elusive gold nuggets. In fact, they spent most of their short season digging deep to find these signs some 20 or 30 meters below the surface. Although every gold find is a bit different, you can see some of the the same signs on Holloway Bar, but with a bit of a twist. Here, many big boulders are just below the surface of the ground and not six or seven stories deep. The old timers mined the surface by hand but found these bigger rocks too tough to move so mostly kept their search for gold to the surface materials. The excavator takes us just underneath the old diggings to find these big rocks - along with their hidden gold...
Be sure to visit us on www.hollowaybar.com!
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