Mayo, YT; July 12, 2007

For the last two and half days we have been staying at a campground in Mayo, YT and taking day trips to explore. We are in the midst of an area in which there was silver mining area in the first fifty years or so of the twentieth century. The big silver mines were in the little towns of Elsa and Keno City, each of which now have populations of approximately five and twenty. In the silver mining days, silver ore was transported in bags to Mayo, where it was put on steamboats, (not unlike the steamboats that used to ply the Mississippi River) to be transshipped to Whitehorse, eventually ending up in smelters in Seattle. Mayo, once a major river port, now has a population of four or five hundred. About half the citizens belong to First Nation, which is a Canadian term for an Indian tribe. Mayo has a post office, government liquor store and various governmental offices, as well as one restaurant a grocery store, two gas stations and, of all things, a Chinese restaurant.

This area here in many ways is reminiscent of Southern New Hampshire, where I was raised. Many dirt roads in fair repair, lots of lakes (more and bigger than in New Hampshire), lots of gravel and gravel pits. The foliage is mostly aspen and black spruce, not too unlike New Hampshire grey birches and hemlocks. The thing that is most striking to me is that the whole area seems awfully lonesome. You can travel down a road, and you will probably see another car about once every half hour to an hour. When traveling, one rarely sees another house. There are side roads, but not very many of them and you get the feeling that you are about a mile from complete wilderness. The local mountain is Mount Haldane Mountain, which reminds me of our Mount Monadnock. A picture of Mount Haldane is above.

One thing that is different is that the rivers are large, and long. May of the rivers are navigable, and steamboats wee a major form of transportation in the early 1900’s, with many landings, to take on wood. The Yukon is a major river going from Whitehorse, up to Dawson city, and then down through Alaska. On the road to Dawson from Whitehorse, there are many overviews and the Yukon our Mississippi or Missouri River for size and width, and is often in the middle of a very beautiful valley, surrounded by mountains.

Silver mining is pretty much defunct now. There is a little gold mining – more about that later. We are staying at an RV park associated with a motel, neither the RV park or the motel seem very busy. However once or twice a day a helicopter lands in front of us and two or three people get on or off. We discovered that there is exploratory drilling going on out about a 45 minute helicopter trip from here. We are seeing some of the drilling worker leaving or returning from a 12-hour shift. They say the drilling company interested in any minerals they find, and if they find a productive spot, I suppose it will be mined.

What have we been doing? The first day we toured Mayo. This mostly involved going to the visitors Center and learning the history of the area. Yesterday we drove to the two Silver mining towns, Elsa and Keno City. Elsa is closed to the public and people there are protecting the area hoping, I suppose, to be able to open the silver mine some day. Keno City (population about 20) has an interesting museum, mostly dealing either with mining or the past history of the town’s glory days. We ate lunch at the local snack bar (hotdog and potato chips) and then drove up to the top of Keno Hill, the site of the original big silver strike. It was very cold up there. Although there were some interesting hikes we could take, it was just too cold (There was still snow in shaded spots from the winter.) Keno Hill would be a mountain in New Hampshire, about as high as the Pack Monad nocks. We then drove home, Madie stopping to unsuccessfully pan gold.

Today we drove to a placer gold mine. This is a sort of family affair. The mine was started by our guide’s grandfather, and is now run by his father and brother. It sure makes gold mining seem like uncertain and arduous work. Placer mining means that they are mining gold that has deposited in old creek beds, or glacial run-off. Placer mining differs from “hard-rock” mining, because there are no rocks that have to be crushed, etc. Essentially the process involves finding which level of gravel contains the gold (usually the gravel down near bed rock), then removing over-burden until the level containing gold is reached. Then the gold-containing gravel is dumped into a machine, whose name I forget, which is really a classifier. (See picture) It removes the big stones, dumped out one end, then the lighter gravel, comes out each side, until a small amount of pebbles and sand remains, caught on baffles and matting like a door mat, that hopefully contains the gold. This in turn is removed for further classification to get concentrated gold, in another smaller classifier. This final step of concentration takes place about every week and a half, so it takes that long until one is sure they are mining in the right spot. And will have a pay day. A picture of the machine that does the first separation is above.

After this wonderful tour with all this explanation, we (Madeline, I am not that patient) had a chance to pan gold (See picture). Madeline panned out about three flakes. That was pretty good, I think, but she wonders if she should not return the pan for one that recovers more gold.

We are having a wonderful time. Tomorrow, we leave for Dawson City.

Opps! Cant get the pictures upoaded today. I''try again another day.