The Mark of a Successful Season!

Friends of ours recently flew over our minesites and sent us these great photos. Here are three great developments in the Cariboo Goldfields. All of them are produced hundreds of ounces of gold for us and thousands of ounces over their lives. Still more to come! Watch out for 2011! The Top photo shows Devlin's Bench, a great producer for 150 years. The highly successful dredge ponds from Kumhilla Dredge company still dominate the view on both sides of the Bowron Road.

35f actually adjoins Devlins in one large package that stretches across and along the original path of Williams Creek. This photo shows our workings in the upper placer canyon, our settling ponds and pay decs, and the virgin pit, with the mine road loop surrounding the future pit development toward the bottom of the picture.

Here's two shots of Grouse Creek. The first shows the orderly layout of the roads, ponds, equipment and drainage, and the lower shot shows the whole site in profile, illustrating the amount of material moved. This entire site was completed from scratch this fall, from land clearing to arriving at our bedrock target!

Winter Closes up the 2010 Season!

The Winter finally drove us out as you can see from the top photo. We managed to uncover a fabulous piece of history and we can do nothing but stand in awe of the work of early turn of the century miners who burrowed through this property with nothing to orient themselves! Drifts, adits, air shafts, tunnels honeycombed our workings and stood as a testament to the incredible resourcefulness of these miners. Every roll of the bedrock that we uncovered, we hoped for a mistake by those early miners, but each time, a beautiful drift was set down on the rock, timbered with still strong beams and sometimes reaching up to 30 feet wide.

It's a testament to modern mining technology that, despite the thorough workings of portions of this ground we can still show up the gold. Here are some shots from one of our cleanups and both the gold in the box and then, in the pan, the cleaned up remains of the days take.

It's not just luck that produces these kinds of results. It's also to the credit of brilliant leadership, combined with the excited commitment of a team of up to 20 guys who made this project successful for 2010, and set it up for 2011. In only 6 weeks we shifted over a quarter of a million cu metres of ground to uncover these historic riches.

In addition to the gold, there are also a variety of artifacts down there. In this same cleanup that is photographed a brass button showed up in the 'boil box'. The button was stamped with JCW Drummond, Cockersmouth, England. I did a little research and found out that this button came from a fine tailer and clothing store in the north of the English lakes District. How did a button from a fine clothing store, in a remote corner of Cumbria, make it all the way across the ocean to British Columbia and get lost 300 feet up a drift, 80 feet underground? Did it snag off the coat of a rich mine owner as he inspected the workings? or belong to an itinerant miner, who's worn fine travel clothes were only fit for 'work clothes' as they aged? It's little gifts like these that make placer mining more than a search for gold and turn it into a real and vital connection with the past and all of man's search for work and wealth.

To see more of these photos, I've also posted an album at http://picasaweb.google.com/109755961285514000452/GrouseOctober28th#

Historic Drifts and Shafts Uncovered!

We're close now....
Here are two photos. One looks down into a collapsed room, at the bottom is an incline tunnel from the turn of the previous century. Dirt is piled on the roof but the walls are exposed, indicating that the miners were rooming out from the protection of their tunnel. That is, they must have been digging into the unsupported gravels to get as much pay as possible for as little timbering as they could get away with!
The other photo shows the junction of the Jimmy Allen incline with the Heron Lead itself, and a cross tunnel heading off in search of other underground treasure. The sheer volume of wood under here is amazing. It is perfectly preserved from being flooded for 100 years!

Here is a portion of a press release I wrote on the subject: "This week a local, private mining company, Devlin's Bench Mining, did what no-one has been able to do in the last 100 years. They have reached to the center of this historic ground and are beginning to excavate the remaining channel. In an intense 6 week period they have dug into the hillside and removed 250 thousand cubic metres of overburden to expose the historic shafts to the atmosphere, rather than trying to enter them from underground.

Their work has revealed a honeycomb of old shafts and drifts from turn of the century miners struggling underground in wet dangerous conditions. Pumps hoses, shovels and ore-carts have emerged from the mud and debris which has slumped into parts of the old workings. One of the partners, Rick Mason, says, “This is an incredibly exciting project. The historical connection alone is worth it, but, of course, we're here to discover gold!”

As winter closes in on the Cariboo, this mine, which is already being dusted with snow, is racing the clock to clear out the slum at the old drifts and follow the bedrock to the unexplored sections of the Heron Channel. Although this channel was sometimes as narrow as 8 feet wide it was documented to have produced over 100 ounces of gold to the lineal foot! This makes it one of the richest finds in North America, and this small company is on the verge of uncovering the remaining portions."

Snow Flying and So is the Dirt!

Development work continues on the Heron Channel at Grouse Creek. These two photos show the orderly development of the benches as we reached the back bench to the back of the pit. Look in the background! Snow sits on the trees behind the highest hoe. At 5,000 feet winter can come early! The next photo shows the pit a couple of days ago. In the background is the new settling pond and trommel set up. In the forground the pit takes on its ultimate shape as we drop onto the section of virgin ground directly below. What a beautiful location to work in, with beautiful views of the Quesnel Highlands and the Cariboo Mountains.
In the last couple of days we have begun breaking into the 1860's channels, uncovering air shafts, looking down at flooded rooms and contemplating our pumping program as we are only a few feet above the original workings. Meanwhile, we have begun sluicing some surface pay that is stockpiled on the property and recovering fine gold with the new plant. It is incredibly exciting as we reach down to a target that has not been seen for 150 years and which is reported to have payed up to 10 lbs to the linear foot!

Now Opening the Heron Channel! - Grouse Creek

The Heron Channel on Grouse Creek is one of the last great treasure hunts in Canada.
Geologists report, "An estimated 64,435 oz. of placer gold was produced from
various hydraulic and underground workings at Grouse Creek. Of this total, 45,000 oz. was recovered on Crown Grant claim # 13F. This portion of Grouse Creek's gold production came from a bedrock gutter measuring 3m across, 3m deep, and 60m long." This gutter has lain dormant for 100 years with only two significant attempts made to re-tunnel into the flooded portions of the claim(one attempt in the 1930's by hydraulic, and one in the 1960's by retunnelling). Both attempts failed to reach the target. Now, Devlin's Bench Mining Ltd has begun the process of removal of overburden to open up this famous gutter with modern machinery. To read more about this staggering treasure, have a look at the pdf "Grouse Creek Prospectus" at http://www.williamscreekgoldfields.ca/links_devlin.html
We've just uploaded a video as well, of the beginning of the stripping program. Snow flies early in the Cariboo, so we're going full steam to capture this prize by mid-october. That will open up the claim for further developments in the new year. The Heron Channel produced fantastic amounts of gold, but all of the surrounding pay layers are also high producers. Even as we dig to the target we are uncovering pockets of high paying gravels that we are stashing to the side as we set our sights on the main target! To see the latest video visit http://tinyurl.com/13f-opening-video

Revisiting old Mine Methods

After finishing our exploration of the main pit, we moved back up the canyon for one more look at the workings of the old miners.

It wasn't long before we broke into a huge underground room, directly underneath a surface hydraulic sluice. The accompanying photos clearly show the sluice emerging from the old surface tailings. Coming out of the puddle are posts from the old chamber. As we extracted more material huge roof beams emerged....Imagine the weight of these logs when they were first lowered down the shafts and dragged along the drifts to this location.

Cleanup from this area was the most difficult we've ever experienced. Over 40 ounces of fine gold was recovered from this area, but it was completely covered in Mercury, so it ran silver instead of gold on the wave table. If we hadn't been familiar with the action of the material and the performance of the table we would have thought we had been skunked, just looking for colour! The old-timers used mercury to 'soak up' fine gold, and then panned it out, and burned it off in what can only be considered an extremely hazardous situation. In the process of hydraulic mining, sometimes the mercury was poured right into the sluice boxes and that is clearly what happened here, with large quantities of it being sloshed out of the box and 'contaminating' the gold in the surrounding soils.

Bedrock Struck at 35f

Bedrock was struck in the St. George Pit on the weekend. This marks the end of a long journey down through geological history. Everything you've ever read about undergound mining in the cariboo; the blue clay, the limestone bedrock, the pay layers, the weeping groundwater, the tremendous struggle to raise the gold to the surface, the gold, the employment, the risk, is all being played out right now at our mine. We've practically held hands with miners from 150 years ago, and we're now in the place they've all dreamed of being.

It is quite a scene, with pay layers heaving across the profile of the wall, the Blue Clay layer which even fooled us for a while, imitating bedrock, and then the limestone bedrock itself. Where we've touched it, the bedrock tips steeply downward, while the blue clay ramps steeply upward. This indicates that we have plunked ourselves directly onto the old pay channel.

Gravels are showing good coarse gold in the boxes....As we dig up the floor of the pit and keep going down on the deeper side, using the bedrock as a handrail, we'll soon reveal the channel and the secrets it holds. To see the whole development of this pit to date, visit http://www.williamscreekgoldfields.ca/photos_devlin.html and watch the slide show called 35f Virgin Channel.

Gold Mining Movie Captures our work!

A small film company, http://jpsmediaworks.com/Home.html , has taken on an ambitious project. From making Tourism documentaries they were smitten by the gold bug and began to film a piece about the Gold Rush. However, through the alignment of the stars, they have come to us to and been transformed by the relationship between the early attempts to get gold and the ongoing development of mining in the Cariboo. They are doing an excellent job of putting together the pieces and showing the relationship between the drive and allure for gold that existed in the 1800's with the current situation. Frankly I thought we were immune from the kind of passionate gold fever that existed then, but when I see how they've woven the story together, I see I was wrong!

In addition to our work at 35f, they've begun to capture the reopening of the greatest treasure hunt in the Cariboo, the completion of the Heron Lead on Grouse Creek. That property has been the subject of a small 'war', owned by the most prestigous historical figures of the Cariboo goldfields and still holds the mystery of the missing section of lead, packed with nuggets, but cut off by water! We're so happy to have this development documented as there is so much more to mining than moving rock!

Just to pique our interest, the boys at jps whipped up this preliminary teaser. Although it is a work in progress, it gets to the heart of the matter in an instant. If you want to see it too, go to http://www.williamscreekgoldfields.ca/photos_devlin.html scroll to the bottom of the page and select Wilds to Riches

2010 - New Directions

This season, we've partnered with our neighbours on Crown Grant 35f to dig down onto the Williams Creek Channel directly upstream from Devlins Bench, on property that abuts our claims.

The goal is two pronged....explore the channel that the miners of the 1860s were working and see what they missed. Secondly, dig deep and reach the remaining virgin Channel of Williams creek that has never been mined due to depth and water problems.

The first goal was accomplished in the first months of the season. We uncovered drifts from the 1860's that were set down and refilled with Cobble by the original miners of the area. What a great feeling to reach into the past and pick up a rock that had so carefully been placed by a miner 150 years earlier. He was working by the light of his tallow candle, chipping away at the hardened gravels, wondering if he was going make it out of that deep dark hole, and if there was enough gold to pay his wages.....Other than the deep dark hole and substituting a giant ripping excavator for a pick axe...the problem remains the same!

Obviously, the early miners did well, because they had bothered to build their drifts three sets wide, a sure indication that they were on good paying ground. As often happens, though they were primitive in their technology, they were efficient in their methods. In one side channel, a beautifully carved gothic arch, unsupported with timbers, still had the marks on the floor from the broom!

Too see more pictures of this find visit http://www.williamscreekgoldfields.ca/photos_devlin.html

Although we got good pay from fine gold in this upper channel, we did not discover any errors in their ways, and as the big prize/mystery lay below, we concentrated our efforts there.