When you've moving thousands of cubic meters of raw placer gravel, you need to have a plan. When you have a plan, things tend to go much smoother than when you just "dig" based on a hunch. If you look at this photo carefully, you can see two plans coming together. The first plan is the blocking system mapped out based on prior prospecting. Test digs from previous years have identified several channels running lengthwise down the property, with each channel suspected to contain a denser mixture of gold than the surrounding gravel. This summer's dig zone has been split into a dozen or so blocks that can each contain up to a couple of thousand buckets of material, and you can clearly see the edge of block 6 on the hillside - with about a day's dig left to complete this block. You can see the blocking system in action in this summer's video series - The Holloway Bar Gold Miners (Part 1, 2 and 3!). The other part of the plan you could liken to painting the floor of a room. Without a plan, you can end up painted into a corner with no way out. On this day, the excavator is sitting on a mound of the last un-processed ore in this block - and Scott will dig this out and feed it all into the gold plant as he moves back on the last day of this block before another cleanup and payday.
Don't miss visiting hollowaybar.com before your next dig!
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