Gold Belt Tour
Phantom Canyon Road Part 2

This canyon opens up just around the curve above that first big bridge. This is how these mountains became known as the Rocky Mountains. Now this looks more like a glacier carved valley but there's still a lot of eroding that's been done by the vegetation. You can see some Douglas fir, some spruce and lots of lodgepole pine in this view, never mind all the different rock formations. In the old days, prospectors would have made their way up the bottom of this canyon, panning the sands and gravels as they went, looking for traces of gold. Once they found something, they kept moving up until it played out, then they went back down and tried to locate the place where the flakes may have entered the stream flow. Once they found that, they'd go up that side canyon looking for the source(s) of those flakes and that's one way in which a lot of gold ore was discovered. But that worked only as long as there was a considerable body of ore. Those guys took the easy stuff. These days, the big gold mining companies will go back into those areas and crush some rock to see what they get. If the amount of trace gold found is good enough, they'll then bring in heavy equipment, dig a big pit, line it with rubberized plastic, pour in a mound of crushed rock, soak it down with the arsenic-cyanide mix and voila: a new heap-leach extraction process gold mine is started.

It's Eightmile Creek that flows along the bottom of this canyon.