Ron Wendt
Alaska Yukon Publications
PO BOX 870624 Wasilla, Alaska 99687
First Printing 1988
Introduction
How To Thoroughly Prospect A Creek
Mining & Prospecting Methods: Old And New
Breaking Bedrock
Working Old Tailings
Searching For Gold In Dredges Of Old
Dredging In Alaska's Rivers
Alaska Location Map (Unable To Reproduce)
Flood Gold
Industrial Mining
Rich Paystreaks & Gold Oddities
Alaska's Big Nuggets
Where to Go; Where To Get Permission
Rumors, Treasures, & Lost Gold Mines
Gold Economics: Selling Your Gold
Major Mining Districts
Alaska Gold Discoveries
The Art Of Panning Gold
Alaska Mining Information
Sources
Introduction
When the first trace of gold was discovered in Alaska in 1862, who would have thought that Alaska's gold rich gravels would yield over thirty million ounces.
Alaska does not produce nearly as much gold as it used to, but then again there aren't 10,000 gold hungry prospectors out roaming the hills either.
About 5% of the gold has been found in Alaska, and the surface has only been scratched. Searching for precious metals has been around this world for thousands of years.
In 1987, Alaskan creeks produced over 230 thousand ounces. A big percentage of the gold is taken out by industrial mining methods while a smaller percentage is mined by small-time prospectors and recreation miners.
ALASKA GOLD PROSPECTORS GUIDE covers a lot of mining ground statewide. By first hand examples and experiences this book brings to you some unique techniques, facts, legends, and a lot of how-to type knowledge for the prospective prospector.
The gold mining industry is very much alive in Alaska and there's a certain group of adventurists who keep the mining tradition alive searching for elusive gold.
How To Thoroughly Prospect A Creek
If you're looking for an easy way to prospect a creek...there is none. But there are ways and means which can make prospecting fun, educational, and in some Instances profitable.
There is nothing worse or harder than prospecting on an unproven creek where no gold has been found before. There's probably good reason why there is no mining activity or ever was on some creeks. The old timers were smart. Almost ninety-nine percent of the time those unworked creeks have no mineral or metal values in them worth mining.
Research the area you want to prospect. There are many United States Geological Survey Bulletins printed on minerals and mining state-wide in the federal buildings in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau. Chances are if its had moderate hand mining with even small paying results it may be worth your efforts to dig in. What paid only beans for wages ninety years ago might be worth at least a half ounce a day in modern times. To save a lot of hard work and suffering, prospect where it was found before. That is to say, if your pocket book is small, you can't afford major exploration.
On Hill Creek in the Fairbanks mining district in Alaska's interior, I spent one summer recently prospecting its mile and a half drainage. The creek had had some hand mining done on it during 1909-10. Parts of the upper portions of the creek had been mined with long toms and rocker boxes. While in the middle portion of the creek, a canyon had been mined primarily on the side benches with rocker boxes.
All the evidence was there in the form of crude, graying, wooden sluice boxes, left to rot in the sun. Ruins of several old log cabins sat in the nearby woods. All this was evidence to me that some sort of activity once took place here.
Most of the old diggings were now covered with moss, alder bushes, and willows. Near the headwaters of Hill Creek a granite bedrock could be found close to the surface. After prospecting bits and pieces of the bedrock which were decomposed, I found little or no gold in the headwaters. The gold found was very fine.
The creek was only three feet wide to begin with and any sluicing, past and present had to derive a water source from dammed up pools of water. In a broad portion of Hill Creek above where the long toms and cabins were found, with the aid of a nearby bulldozer, the creek was dammed up and a small pond was built.
I brought a four inch suction dredge along a small ridge where I had found colors near the surface. The ground was quite frozen , a major problem with placer mining in the north. Using a fire hose I was able to hydraulic the frozen gravel spending a week at this spot and advancing a few inches a day into frozen gravels. After spraying water for a few days I dredged up loose paydirt into a triple sluice box. Not all of Alaska has a permafrost problem. Primarily north of the Alaska Range has this problem.
On upper Hill Creek, the gulch is about 100 yards wide. From the headwaters down to the first major evidence of diggings, the creek valley appears to look like a wide trough. Where the most mining activity took place it appears the majority of the gold slid into a bowl like area.
Several side gulches coming into the left limit of the stream heading down, had traces of caved-in prospect holes. I checked each hole with shovel and pan, recording the number of colors for each pan in a journal. Keeping a written record on every portion of the creek is essential especially if you're going to be doing lots of sampling.
From above the diggings I was talking about twenty colors per pan in fine gold. Crossing over the right side of the valley, a cut-bank was exposed where bedrock was nearby. Through the center of the granite bedrock, portions of quartz stringers extended across the valley. It ended up at the old diggings. This formation was called a bedrock riffle and about 200 colors per pan were found in the riffles, a very good indicator that a good paystreak was here or existed at one time.
About every 50 feet on each side of the creek I took samples. The mined portion where the old timers dug, was cleaned out very thoroughly. As I cleared away moss and trees exposing old tailings and washed dirt, the telltale sign of only a few specks of gold convinced me this particular area had been worked over. Mother nature had done a good job of covering up her tracks.
On many worked out paystreaks its worth it to check random edges from a ridge, point of land, wherever you think the miners might have worked up to. Sometimes they never bothered to clean out small half to full yard sections of the original paystreak. Also check underneath where tailings were stacked. In the past, prospectors have had good results in cleaning out under old tailings.
Heading into the canyon which was basically narrow and consisted of high benches, I was confronted with old mining debris and a lot of visible diggings. Here I would look for portions of the paystreak missed by miners about 75 years before. When testing for colors in narrow canyons or gulches, tighten up your test pans. Check color on both sides of the creek every ten feet or so. You can hardly miss when you prospect this close.
Near the head of Hill Creek canyon after only my fifth test pan, I discovered a portion of the original paylayer. The layer was about six inches thick and consistently ran on top of the bedrock. I recovered a small match head sized nugget along with about 30 good colors which convinced me I was into the old pay channel. I dammed the creek up and sluiced for two hours and recovered a half ounce of gold in a half yard of gravel. It was a pretty sight to see streaks of yellow in the top three riffles of my three foot aluminum sluice.
The canyon extended for about a quarter mile before it turned into a fairly wide gulch. The bedrock was deeper here and I prospected on high benches where rocker boxes still sat along a ditch line where miners had derived their water source from. Only fine colors were found on the upper benches.
So far, testing from headwaters to the canyon I had discovered that no gold could be found in the bedrock, but only on the surface.
Testing the canyon every ten feet only resulted in the recovery of fine colors. Running occasional sluice box loads through for an hours worth of shoveling might produce some fair results. One of the keys to a lot of mining operations is how many yards can be washed per day producing varied amounts of gold. If a paystreak runs a tenth ounce of gold per yard of dirt, you'll shovel ten yards to get an ounce.
Under moss above the high benches. a frozen paylayer existed but could only be mined with larger mining equipment. Below the canyon the creek started to fan out. The side benches became higher, and the bedrock sloped. From the bottom of the canyon to the mouth of Hill Creek the bedrock sloped off deeper. There were more trees and bushes along the lower creek and I checked for color in the roots along with random prospecting.
I concentrated most of my prospecting efforts to the lower side benches, about five feet above the creek bed. The main portion had been worked back in the 1940s by bulldozer and was cleaned out. The big part about thoroughly prospecting any creek is patience, lots of hard work, and persistance. This all paid off eventually for me.
It wasn't long after I got closer to the mouth of the creek that I found my reward. I dug in about three feet into a thawed paylayer on bedrock. My first panful yielded about $60 worth of small nuggets.
Prospecting this creek was well worth the effort!
Mining & Prospecting Methods: Old & New
Every person looking for gold seems to have their own techniques. A lot of these techniques were picked up from the old timers.
Axel Johnson arrived in Eagle in 1898 and settled at a place called Falls, on the Seventy Mile River. Johnson mined and prospected on several of the area creeks. It was in the fall when he would get down to the usual sniping along the rivers. He knew the creeks well, and was able to clean out natural riffles that had formed during the course of the summer.
When the water level dropped, he would scratch out the bedrock and paydirt with a spoon. One autumn Johnson claimed to have sniped 67 ounces in this fashion in several spots on his way to Eagle. He was said to be one of the most successful miners in the area.
Throughout Alaska, a prospector could classify each mining district for various methods of mining. On the Kenai peninsula one could call this "pocket country". A lot of gold here is found in swirl holes beneath boulders or in the stream bend.
Whereas the Fairbanks district has a more uniformed paystreak on its creeks. The gold is much deeper here and harder to mine due to permafrost. But its much more profitable to mine here because the paystreaks are very rich.
In the Fairbanks gravels, the old timers used to thaw the frozen gravels with steampoints. The first steam point was originated by Klondike King, Clarence Berry. He used a shotgun barrel and stuck it into the ground and shot steam through it. Later, a regular manufactured steam point was made from a hollow pipe measuring 6 - 16 feet in length with a steel point and a steam connection below a solid head.
At first the steampoint is driven down by sledge hammers while hot water is being forced through the point, thawing enough to allow the point to penetrate the ground. As soon as the point is driven full length into the ground the steam is turned on and replaces any water. The point is allowed to stand from 10 - 36 hours, depending on the nature of the gravels.
This will effectively remove the frost for a radius and will allow for the paydirt to be removed. The steam is then shut off and the ground allowed to cool and gravel is then hoisted out of the shaft with a windlass.
A windlass sits above the shaft on two posts with a cross log on top. It has a hand crank at one end, and a rope hung from the center enabling one to crank up buckets of paydirt to be washed in the spring when the water flows.
In later years the large dredging companies found that cold water thawing melted frost faster. This technique is used in dredging operations today.
Several miners in the Fairbanks area are still thawing the conventional steampoint way and can manage to thaw about four feet a day.
In the winter of 1983, miner Dave Eberhardt tried to find the rest of his paystreak on Hill Creek by sinking a shaft to bedrock. He used a steam machine belonging to a couple of miners down on Smallwood Creek. Eberhardt went 12 feet to bedrock in a couple of days on an upper bench. The pay was poor however so he abandoned efforts to try and mine the bench.
Near the old ghost town mining community of Olnes, a miner was planning on using a new innovative mining process called water laser which cuts away the frozen dirt like a knife. The water coming from this device was highly ultra sonic with a fine point cutting jet of water. The bedrock paid as much as $1,000 a square foot in some places. The shaft walls were made of culvert to prevent the dirt from caving in.
In the early 1950s, a couple of miners found several deep shafts near Olnes that went down about 200 feet. The shafts were full of water. The miners pumped one of the shafts out and discovered the bedrock to be very rich. The bedrock was schist and stood on end so that it was jagged. Gold could be seen in cracks and scraped out with a knife.
At the bottom of the shaft large rooms measuring 16 X 16 feet were found. Some gold could be found next to a gravel wall in small mounds. The ceilings were held up by huge gravel pillars but the shafts still weren't safe.
When shafting, the method to follow was to sink a shaft as close to the center of the paystreak as possible, then tunnel up and down the paystreak.
This process is called blocking out. At this time the steam points are at the ends of the blocked out areas and thawed toward the shaft. At the same time the pay was removed and the bedrock cleaned as the tunnel work proceeded. These tunnels are not timbered but filled in after all the pay is removed. After crosscutting and following the paystreak toward the main shaft, the last main pillar is finally removed and the bedrock cleaned up and the shaft abandoned.
During the old dredging days in Fairbanks, some side pay was left because the dredges had trouble manuvering in tight corners. One case occured near the junction of Pedro Creek, and Twin Creek valley. In 1960, Tony Lanning mined on the left limit of Thanksgiving Creek and recovered side pay left beside old drift mine workings. He used a bulldozer to mine and to stack tailings, and a hydraulic monitor to wash the paydirt into the sluice box.
The old mine dumps today are proving to be good pay where the old timers forgot and it pays to study an area that's been heavily mined and to locate these old piles.
Near Olnes, old tailings are still quite rich and good sized nuggets have been found in them. In 1979 near Ruby, an unconfirmed 48 ounce nugget was found in tailing piles with a metal detector.
During the dredging season in Alaska most dredges mined a million cubic yards of gravel a year and recovered $800,000 in gold. Quite a few nuggets have been found in the tailing piles at Fox, Ester, Goldstream, Pedro, Engineer, and many other creeks statewide. Inside the massive dredges a man whose job was to watch for nuggets running out the conveyor belt at the end of the trommel said quite a few nuggets escaped the dredge sluice boxes, only to end up in the tailings.
The nugget watcher was working on the Engineer Creek dredge near Fairbanks and said his job got so boring, he would sit and read a dime store novel rather than strain his eyes looking for nuggets. In tailing piles all over the state nuggets are being found with metal detectors. In 1980, one fellow panning near the junction of Twin Creek and Pedro found a one ouncer near the edge of some tailings.
SNIPING FOR GOLD
Working the Bars
Along Napoleon Creek in the Fortymile region, there's a place called Bonanza Bar where the creek forms natural riffles and every spring gold can be recovered in the riffles.
What happens is the river bar forms a catch-all where gold gets caught among small rocks or corrugated surfaces of sand and rock. In most cases a pan or rocker box could be used on the bar.
In 1934 at a place called Long Bar, some prospectors made a rocker sluice out of whipsawed lumber then prospected along the bar and found a place which was known as a natural riffle.
The first panful yielded about a pennyweight of gold with some pieces the size of wheat grains. The rocker box was set up, and a strip of the river bar about thirty feet long and four feet wide was worked for three days in which 18 ounces were recovered. Over twenty ounces were found on the bars on Montana Creek in the Fortymile in about a weeks time.
Metal Detecting
One miner in the Eureka area near Manley Hot Springs in interior Alaska had a friend on his claim using a metal detector. The miner was busy pushing paydirt off the bedrock with a bulldozer while the friend was busy collecting sizeable nuggets right behind him.
Several times the cat operator kept looking back because he thought he kept hearing beeping sounds. Finally on one occasion he turned around just in time to see his friend plop a nugget in his pocket. He stopped the cat and got off.
"Hey, what are you finding with that thing anyway? I didn't think those things worked." The metal detecting prospector grinned and held out a handful of raw coarse gold nuggets.
The metal detector is revolutionizing the prospecting world. It's just another method to finding gold. More and more people are using detectors to nugget shoot for gold.
When using detectors to locate gold, they will not pick up fine pieces of gold and dust but will locate heavy minerals along with black sand deposits. When the nuggets are found, the more character they have the more they'll be worth.
In Alaska highgrading old mine dumps and tailing piles can be very lucrative. Some of the large nuggeted creeks throughout the state are listed here. In most cases, with patience and hard work, one can come up with a yellow chunk to pay the bills.
In the Fairbanks area, good metal detecting ground would be; Goldstream Creek, Pedro, Smallwood, Dome, Vault, Treasure, Cleary, Fairbanks, Gilmore. Nuggets found on these creeks range from a half ounce to 15 ounces to 83 ounces in some cases.
The Circle Mining District has produced large nuggets; Harrison Creek, a 13 ouncer, Porcupine, a 5 ouncer, Deadwood, 5 ouncer, Switch, 7 ouncer, most creeks in the immediate Circle district. Streams in the Wiseman area of the Brooks Range are; Hammond River, Nolan, Mascot Creek.
A few years ago, Franklin Gulch in the Fortymile area was the scene of a $20,000 nugget recovery, including a five ouncer. What's really fun is the amount of excitement that goes along with searching for nuggets in tailings or on bedrock. In a lot of cases the metal detector finds antiques like lanterns, shovels, the usual tailing pile find. But when a nugget is found it can take your breathe away.
In Australia metal detectors find large nuggets everyday in the gold fields. Most of the detectors being used are Garrett and White's. Alaska's dirt and gravel is usually highly mineralized. To a lot of detectors, mineralized ground is a 'kiss of death' and makes it hard to pick up a signal from gold.
Large nuggets were usually spewed out of the large dredges or sluicing systems. Out of the many millions and millions of yards of gravel, a lot of large nuggets made their way into tailing piles.
In 1987 a woman, using a White's 6000 DI detector for the first time, found a 16 ounce nugget along a road shoulder at Livengood, north of Fairbanks. A five ouncer was found by a woman in the Kantishna area.
In 1984, a 28, 13, 10, and several smaller ounce nuggets were found in the backside of Denali Park's Kantishna. A local Willow resident found a large assortment of nuggets in the Nome area. This man is probably Alaska's most current successful nugget hunter with a detector.
The dredges lost a lot of nuggets. Gold was separated into a trommel system. The trommels were perforated with 1 - 2 inch holes and only small pieces of gold would drop through these small holes while the larger nuggets slipped on out the tailings.
At the end of the trommel a tailing watcher sat looking for nuggets. It was usually hard to see any nuggets and they were at times few and far between. The nugget watcher became bored with watching.
The advantage of using a detector for prospecting is being able to cover a lot of territory and finding choice pieces of gold without moving lots of dirt.
When a prospector is down on his luck, he can always resort to finding old sluice boxes out in the bushes and clean out the cracks with a knife or sharp object. Sluice sniping has been around for quite awhile. In the Nizina mining district in the Wrangell Mountains, several prospectors took a wedge and a hammer and pried apart old sluices and recovered gold accumulated in cracks.
In 1974 I was working for a mining operation at Collinsville - Twin Creek and found some old sluices. I recovered my fair share from the boxes including a four penny weight nugget. The cracks in the sluice were stuffed with rags and held lots of fine gold.
There are several techniques used to recover gold after a clean-up. Since gold will be inter-mingled with dirt, or as some miners call it "heavies" there are easy ways to separate this gold from the heavies.
In small operations one way is by simply panning. Another way is to dry the gold and dirt out is on a stove in a pan or tub of some sort and when dry, use the blowing process.
The blowing process occurs when a miner scatters the gold and dirt on a newspaper, and blows away the dirt particles. The gold stays behind with the exception of some finer pieces like flakes which sometimes will be scattered in with blown dirt.
Another process is the old hanky trick. Get yourself a hanky and a small powered magnet. Place the magnet behind the hanky and run it through a mound of dirt infested gold. A lot of the heavies that remains with the gold is black sand and is magnetic. Gold is not magnetic so the particles will be attracted to the magnet while the gold stays behind.
This is a safe way to process gold. Unsafe ways are with mercury and cyanide. These two ways are only safe if the process is set up in a well ventilated room. The only time you'll ever need cyanide is if you process 50 tons of hardrock gold ore per day.
If you want to get a real blast out of mining, use ditch cord. A lot of caution should be used when using this. Ditch cord is an explosive and can be strung out on gold bearing bedrock and detonated. The pay and rock and gravel will barely shatter up in the air, but the bedrock will be opened up a few feet down and a few feet wide. This eliminates having to hire a D-8 bulldozer to come in with a ripper on back and tear your bedrock up at $300 an hour. You must be licensed to obtain explosives.
Another mining method is OPEN-CUT mining. This is where the entire deposit is worked from the surface down. The easiest forms of open-cut mining use manual labor almost entirely and are restricted to small workings.
The depth of a deposit that can be mined by open-cut methods are governed by the depth of overburden that can be removed by stripping. One great advantage of open-cut mining is that it permits natural thawing of shallow exposed gravels after the overburden has been removed.
MANUAL METHODS
Beach Mining
Sea-beach mining was at it's peak during the Nome rush, Lituya Bay, Yakataga, Kodiak, Popov Island, and elsewhere. Most of the rich deposits were mined out by hand methods. Large scale attempts with big equipment failed. After a storm was usually the best time to mine with larger equipment. The high surf washed the overburden of beach materials leaving a new concentration of the heavier black or ruby sands containing gold.
These concentrates were washed in rockers, long toms, surf washers, or small sluices. On the beaches of Nome small prospect holes were dug to find ruby-sand concentrates which are covered with a foot or more of barren sand and gravel. This overburden is shoveled away, and the 2 to 3 inch depth of concentrate was shoveled into buckets or wheelbarrows and transported to a washing device.
LONG-TOMS- a small sluice box with a grizzly or screen at the head for removing the coarser material. For saving fine gold the box is set at a high gradient, 3 to 4 inches to the foot, and the screened material is passed over riffles and amalgam plates. The plates are protected from scouring with 1/2 inch screen or punch plate.
Sluice water is usually dipped with a can or pan used for pouring water.
GROUND SLUICING-is a method that removes much of the gravel, leaving the balance to be mined by shoveling or a similar method best adapted to shallow gravels, usually not over 10 feet deep which contain coarse gold.
To ground sluice gravel successfully steeper grades are necessary. The best areas for ground sluicing are on benches and the upper regions of a creek.
BOOMING-In the interior districts the water supply at many placer mining areas are inadequate, during most of the season. The creek is dammed up and water is released to wash cuts carrying material with it. The water is dammed up again after washing material and the miner picks the gold from the bedrock.
Breaking Bedrock
The dream of most gold prospectors is usually to find the ultimate deposit, paystreak, or large nugget. But in most gold mining districts across the state, the prospector seeks to locate outcrops of bedrock or side benches where the ancient stream channel once ran. The best pay in most cases is located in or on bedrock.
Bedrock mining can be very lucrative and requires only a few tools. Tools needed for this type of mining are tweezers, spoons, a knife (Buck knife), gold pan, vial or plastic container, hacksaw blade, baster; (for sucking up small pieces of gold), and a crowbar.
The best type of bedrock for hand mining in Alaska is usually slate, schist, or a brittle shale. The slate and shale usually pry apart with a crowbar in layers, while the schist bedrock to be worked is decomposed and can be broken up with knife, spoon, or any other type of scraping tool.
The first time I worked bedrock cracks in Alaska was on the Kenai peninsula. The bedrock in the area consists mostly of slate and stands on end in layers. Springtime is the best part of the year to search the bedrock. The water is usually lower, and gold has been washed down and settled in cracks which act as riffles.
I've found small nuggets on top of bedrock where I could simply reach down and pick them up. The nuggets are very small, but when found on the surface are usually a good indicator of more gold in the bedrock.
The first step in searching bedrock is prying crevices or slabs apart with a crowbar. Gold can fool lots of people. It will work its way farther into the bedrock than one can imagine. A hammer can be used to pound the crowbar into cracks and pry back the layers. Between the layers, small gravel and gold become wedged into the deepest portion of the crack. A spoon or knife is handy for scraping out cracks. Each scoop is placed into a gold pan. The pan may be filled up at least halfway before checking for colors.
The slab bedrock layers broken off often have layers of attached clay mixed mixed with tiny rocks. The clay is a natural trap for nuggets. Its also hard to retrieve gold from. These larger pieces of bedrock can be put in a bucket and cleaned off later. A wire brush is a good tool for cleaning these pieces.
Whenever looking for a good place to take out gold, working bedrock is much the same as looking for placer deposits in the stream; where a lot of bedrock stands on end, is usually a good place to start digging.
Money values in bedrock are measured by the square foot. It's a good idea to work out a paying bedrock area before going to other sections. On the Kenai Peninsula's East Fork River, I worked a square foot of bedrock for six hours one time and recovered $1,200. It was easy work; and the deeper I went into the bedrock, the finer the gold was.
The pay eventually ran out, and it took me several days to find more pay worth scraping out.
One time I found a large chunk of bedrock that weighed about 200 pounds and sat embedded in clay. I figured this would be a real storehouse for gold. After a half hour of prying and breaking up, I panned up most of the clay and didn't find one color.
Near the mouth of Coal Creek along the Yukon River, bedrock outcrops of shale are found with only a two foot wide stream rolling over the surface. The only time bedrock is replenished with gold is in spring. During summer months gold can be found consistently all over bedrock for about 50 square yards. About an ounce of gold per day can be pried from the bedrock.
After a day of breaking bedrock in slate, the fingertips have a tendency to develop small cuts. To prevent this, gloves should be worn. Most of the larger gold found in these cracks is flat and of jewelry quality.
The easiest type of bedrock to work is decomposed schist. The schist is soft and stands on end, and gold imbeds easily. Bedrock on Union Gulch in the Brooks Range is made up of decomposed schist. The schist can be broken apart with the fingers, dug up with a spoon, or shoveled into a sluice box. It's usually high and dry, several feet above the stream channel. Thicker matchhead size nuggets are found in this bedrock type. The gold does not always penetrate deep into the schist. However in harder schist, mostly in rock form, the gold can drop down as deep as two to four feet.
One miner in the Kantishna used a boom dam to wash hard schist bedrock. The gulch where he worked was narrow with a dam halfway up. The water builds up every few hours and the dam is released. The swift water action washed gold out of the lower gravel banks and bedrock. When the water is through washing the gulch is dammed once more and the miner walks up and down the creek collecting nuggets-some in the two ounce size.
Breaking bedrock is a cheap and rewarding way to make a few extra dollars: If you're willing to put up with sore knees and sore finger tips, it will provide hours of fun and profit.
Working Old Tailings
Whether its with metal detectors, a sluice box or gold pan, tailing piles can be profitable for finding gold nuggets. Sometimes it might take a week to find one nugget...but its worth it.
Miles of tailings still line the valleys and streambeds throughout the state and still contain much gold.
Within the past three years, probably the largest nugget found in tailings with a metal detector was 28 ounces. A miner in the Kantishna mining district behind Denali National Park was mining with a bulldozer and sluice box and drove over an 82 ounce nugget. He picked up the large lump of gold and discovered a piece broken off. The break was fairly recent. The miner brought out a detector, a White's 6000, and after two days was able to locate the broken portion of the large nugget. With another 10 ounce piece added to the large nugget, the 92 ounce nugget became the fifth largest nugget ever found in Alaska. The largest was 182 ounces. The irony about this large nugget was that while the miner was searching for the other half of the large nugget, he located a 28 ounce and a 13 ounce nugget from tailings in the same day!
In a lot of cases miners from the gold rush era had poor recovery systems. During the winter months when men thawed frozen dirt and pay gravel to bedrock by shafting, they stacked up piles of paydirt nearby to be washed in spring when the water ran. Some miners went as deep as 350 feet to bedrock on creeks near Fairbanks.
On Smallwood Creek for example, in 1916 miners dug 300 feet down to bedrock and nearly drowned when they were overcome by an underground stream which filled up the shaft in five minutes.
The miners did not wash all the paydirt outside these shafts. Such has been the case on Smallwood Creek. Modern day prospectors have been able to recover an ounce per day from these tailings with a rocker sluice box. The tundra is extremely thick in this area and tailings once stacked ten feet high have sunk into the permafrost.
Old tailings like these can be readily identified by an ancient water filled hole where the shaft has caved in slowly. Wherever miners hand dug for their gold, you can bet they left some behind.
On Goldstream Creek near Fairbanks the giant Yuba-type gold dredges left their share of tailing gold. Scattered throughout these rock piles are small mounds of clay and cassiterite nuggets commonly known as tin. Most of the time gold can be found in these clay piles.
In the Circle mining district northeast of Fairbanks, a 13 year old boy recently found a five ounce nugget in the tailings along Porcupine Creek. Most of the mining there had been done by dragline and bulldozer.
Since a lot of the tailing gold is fine, gold saving techniques must be developed. When working these old tailings the dilemma is lack of flowing water nearby. Old groundwater ponds are the only water source. Water pumps with sluices or rocker boxes are probably the best way to mine from these.
When operating a water pump from a distance and pumped into a hand sluice, it has been a practice of mine to place a metal or wooden box at the end of the sluice with a fine mesh screen in the bottom and placed over a five gallon bucket. Not only will the fine gold be caught, but large amounts of heavier minerals like black sands and garnets will sift into the bucket. The bucket should be watched closely so it won't overflow. After several hours of processing tailings the bucket will have to be dumped a few times and checked for gold later.
The most lucrative tailings are the ones 400 feet above the stream channel. Working old hillside dumps or tailings especially with a rocker box, increase your chances of finding rich amounts of gold. Interior Alaska and the Klondike goldfields in the Yukon Territory have proved to be the best tailing recovery areas.
The best recovery I've ever heard of was on Hunker Creek near Dawson City, Y.T. A prospector found an old shaft and started digging remnants of the old winter dump left many years before and recovered 74 ounces in a quarter yard of gravel. This is not a bad days work!
There are a lot of old diggings and tailings to be mined. The old timers have done all the hard work bringing up the paydirt and sifting through it. But they left a lot behind for any ambitious prospector.
Alaska Yukon Publications
PO BOX 870624 Wasilla, Alaska 99687
First Printing 1988
Introduction
How To Thoroughly Prospect A Creek
Mining & Prospecting Methods: Old And New
Breaking Bedrock
Working Old Tailings
Searching For Gold In Dredges Of Old
Dredging In Alaska's Rivers
Alaska Location Map (Unable To Reproduce)
Flood Gold
Industrial Mining
Rich Paystreaks & Gold Oddities
Alaska's Big Nuggets
Where to Go; Where To Get Permission
Rumors, Treasures, & Lost Gold Mines
Gold Economics: Selling Your Gold
Major Mining Districts
Alaska Gold Discoveries
The Art Of Panning Gold
Alaska Mining Information
Sources
Introduction
When the first trace of gold was discovered in Alaska in 1862, who would have thought that Alaska's gold rich gravels would yield over thirty million ounces.
Alaska does not produce nearly as much gold as it used to, but then again there aren't 10,000 gold hungry prospectors out roaming the hills either.
About 5% of the gold has been found in Alaska, and the surface has only been scratched. Searching for precious metals has been around this world for thousands of years.
In 1987, Alaskan creeks produced over 230 thousand ounces. A big percentage of the gold is taken out by industrial mining methods while a smaller percentage is mined by small-time prospectors and recreation miners.
ALASKA GOLD PROSPECTORS GUIDE covers a lot of mining ground statewide. By first hand examples and experiences this book brings to you some unique techniques, facts, legends, and a lot of how-to type knowledge for the prospective prospector.
The gold mining industry is very much alive in Alaska and there's a certain group of adventurists who keep the mining tradition alive searching for elusive gold.
How To Thoroughly Prospect A Creek
If you're looking for an easy way to prospect a creek...there is none. But there are ways and means which can make prospecting fun, educational, and in some Instances profitable.
There is nothing worse or harder than prospecting on an unproven creek where no gold has been found before. There's probably good reason why there is no mining activity or ever was on some creeks. The old timers were smart. Almost ninety-nine percent of the time those unworked creeks have no mineral or metal values in them worth mining.
Research the area you want to prospect. There are many United States Geological Survey Bulletins printed on minerals and mining state-wide in the federal buildings in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau. Chances are if its had moderate hand mining with even small paying results it may be worth your efforts to dig in. What paid only beans for wages ninety years ago might be worth at least a half ounce a day in modern times. To save a lot of hard work and suffering, prospect where it was found before. That is to say, if your pocket book is small, you can't afford major exploration.
On Hill Creek in the Fairbanks mining district in Alaska's interior, I spent one summer recently prospecting its mile and a half drainage. The creek had had some hand mining done on it during 1909-10. Parts of the upper portions of the creek had been mined with long toms and rocker boxes. While in the middle portion of the creek, a canyon had been mined primarily on the side benches with rocker boxes.
All the evidence was there in the form of crude, graying, wooden sluice boxes, left to rot in the sun. Ruins of several old log cabins sat in the nearby woods. All this was evidence to me that some sort of activity once took place here.
Most of the old diggings were now covered with moss, alder bushes, and willows. Near the headwaters of Hill Creek a granite bedrock could be found close to the surface. After prospecting bits and pieces of the bedrock which were decomposed, I found little or no gold in the headwaters. The gold found was very fine.
The creek was only three feet wide to begin with and any sluicing, past and present had to derive a water source from dammed up pools of water. In a broad portion of Hill Creek above where the long toms and cabins were found, with the aid of a nearby bulldozer, the creek was dammed up and a small pond was built.
I brought a four inch suction dredge along a small ridge where I had found colors near the surface. The ground was quite frozen , a major problem with placer mining in the north. Using a fire hose I was able to hydraulic the frozen gravel spending a week at this spot and advancing a few inches a day into frozen gravels. After spraying water for a few days I dredged up loose paydirt into a triple sluice box. Not all of Alaska has a permafrost problem. Primarily north of the Alaska Range has this problem.
On upper Hill Creek, the gulch is about 100 yards wide. From the headwaters down to the first major evidence of diggings, the creek valley appears to look like a wide trough. Where the most mining activity took place it appears the majority of the gold slid into a bowl like area.
Several side gulches coming into the left limit of the stream heading down, had traces of caved-in prospect holes. I checked each hole with shovel and pan, recording the number of colors for each pan in a journal. Keeping a written record on every portion of the creek is essential especially if you're going to be doing lots of sampling.
From above the diggings I was talking about twenty colors per pan in fine gold. Crossing over the right side of the valley, a cut-bank was exposed where bedrock was nearby. Through the center of the granite bedrock, portions of quartz stringers extended across the valley. It ended up at the old diggings. This formation was called a bedrock riffle and about 200 colors per pan were found in the riffles, a very good indicator that a good paystreak was here or existed at one time.
About every 50 feet on each side of the creek I took samples. The mined portion where the old timers dug, was cleaned out very thoroughly. As I cleared away moss and trees exposing old tailings and washed dirt, the telltale sign of only a few specks of gold convinced me this particular area had been worked over. Mother nature had done a good job of covering up her tracks.
On many worked out paystreaks its worth it to check random edges from a ridge, point of land, wherever you think the miners might have worked up to. Sometimes they never bothered to clean out small half to full yard sections of the original paystreak. Also check underneath where tailings were stacked. In the past, prospectors have had good results in cleaning out under old tailings.
Heading into the canyon which was basically narrow and consisted of high benches, I was confronted with old mining debris and a lot of visible diggings. Here I would look for portions of the paystreak missed by miners about 75 years before. When testing for colors in narrow canyons or gulches, tighten up your test pans. Check color on both sides of the creek every ten feet or so. You can hardly miss when you prospect this close.
Near the head of Hill Creek canyon after only my fifth test pan, I discovered a portion of the original paylayer. The layer was about six inches thick and consistently ran on top of the bedrock. I recovered a small match head sized nugget along with about 30 good colors which convinced me I was into the old pay channel. I dammed the creek up and sluiced for two hours and recovered a half ounce of gold in a half yard of gravel. It was a pretty sight to see streaks of yellow in the top three riffles of my three foot aluminum sluice.
The canyon extended for about a quarter mile before it turned into a fairly wide gulch. The bedrock was deeper here and I prospected on high benches where rocker boxes still sat along a ditch line where miners had derived their water source from. Only fine colors were found on the upper benches.
So far, testing from headwaters to the canyon I had discovered that no gold could be found in the bedrock, but only on the surface.
Testing the canyon every ten feet only resulted in the recovery of fine colors. Running occasional sluice box loads through for an hours worth of shoveling might produce some fair results. One of the keys to a lot of mining operations is how many yards can be washed per day producing varied amounts of gold. If a paystreak runs a tenth ounce of gold per yard of dirt, you'll shovel ten yards to get an ounce.
Under moss above the high benches. a frozen paylayer existed but could only be mined with larger mining equipment. Below the canyon the creek started to fan out. The side benches became higher, and the bedrock sloped. From the bottom of the canyon to the mouth of Hill Creek the bedrock sloped off deeper. There were more trees and bushes along the lower creek and I checked for color in the roots along with random prospecting.
I concentrated most of my prospecting efforts to the lower side benches, about five feet above the creek bed. The main portion had been worked back in the 1940s by bulldozer and was cleaned out. The big part about thoroughly prospecting any creek is patience, lots of hard work, and persistance. This all paid off eventually for me.
It wasn't long after I got closer to the mouth of the creek that I found my reward. I dug in about three feet into a thawed paylayer on bedrock. My first panful yielded about $60 worth of small nuggets.
Prospecting this creek was well worth the effort!
Mining & Prospecting Methods: Old & New
Every person looking for gold seems to have their own techniques. A lot of these techniques were picked up from the old timers.
Axel Johnson arrived in Eagle in 1898 and settled at a place called Falls, on the Seventy Mile River. Johnson mined and prospected on several of the area creeks. It was in the fall when he would get down to the usual sniping along the rivers. He knew the creeks well, and was able to clean out natural riffles that had formed during the course of the summer.
When the water level dropped, he would scratch out the bedrock and paydirt with a spoon. One autumn Johnson claimed to have sniped 67 ounces in this fashion in several spots on his way to Eagle. He was said to be one of the most successful miners in the area.
Throughout Alaska, a prospector could classify each mining district for various methods of mining. On the Kenai peninsula one could call this "pocket country". A lot of gold here is found in swirl holes beneath boulders or in the stream bend.
Whereas the Fairbanks district has a more uniformed paystreak on its creeks. The gold is much deeper here and harder to mine due to permafrost. But its much more profitable to mine here because the paystreaks are very rich.
In the Fairbanks gravels, the old timers used to thaw the frozen gravels with steampoints. The first steam point was originated by Klondike King, Clarence Berry. He used a shotgun barrel and stuck it into the ground and shot steam through it. Later, a regular manufactured steam point was made from a hollow pipe measuring 6 - 16 feet in length with a steel point and a steam connection below a solid head.
At first the steampoint is driven down by sledge hammers while hot water is being forced through the point, thawing enough to allow the point to penetrate the ground. As soon as the point is driven full length into the ground the steam is turned on and replaces any water. The point is allowed to stand from 10 - 36 hours, depending on the nature of the gravels.
This will effectively remove the frost for a radius and will allow for the paydirt to be removed. The steam is then shut off and the ground allowed to cool and gravel is then hoisted out of the shaft with a windlass.
A windlass sits above the shaft on two posts with a cross log on top. It has a hand crank at one end, and a rope hung from the center enabling one to crank up buckets of paydirt to be washed in the spring when the water flows.
In later years the large dredging companies found that cold water thawing melted frost faster. This technique is used in dredging operations today.
Several miners in the Fairbanks area are still thawing the conventional steampoint way and can manage to thaw about four feet a day.
In the winter of 1983, miner Dave Eberhardt tried to find the rest of his paystreak on Hill Creek by sinking a shaft to bedrock. He used a steam machine belonging to a couple of miners down on Smallwood Creek. Eberhardt went 12 feet to bedrock in a couple of days on an upper bench. The pay was poor however so he abandoned efforts to try and mine the bench.
Near the old ghost town mining community of Olnes, a miner was planning on using a new innovative mining process called water laser which cuts away the frozen dirt like a knife. The water coming from this device was highly ultra sonic with a fine point cutting jet of water. The bedrock paid as much as $1,000 a square foot in some places. The shaft walls were made of culvert to prevent the dirt from caving in.
In the early 1950s, a couple of miners found several deep shafts near Olnes that went down about 200 feet. The shafts were full of water. The miners pumped one of the shafts out and discovered the bedrock to be very rich. The bedrock was schist and stood on end so that it was jagged. Gold could be seen in cracks and scraped out with a knife.
At the bottom of the shaft large rooms measuring 16 X 16 feet were found. Some gold could be found next to a gravel wall in small mounds. The ceilings were held up by huge gravel pillars but the shafts still weren't safe.
When shafting, the method to follow was to sink a shaft as close to the center of the paystreak as possible, then tunnel up and down the paystreak.
This process is called blocking out. At this time the steam points are at the ends of the blocked out areas and thawed toward the shaft. At the same time the pay was removed and the bedrock cleaned as the tunnel work proceeded. These tunnels are not timbered but filled in after all the pay is removed. After crosscutting and following the paystreak toward the main shaft, the last main pillar is finally removed and the bedrock cleaned up and the shaft abandoned.
During the old dredging days in Fairbanks, some side pay was left because the dredges had trouble manuvering in tight corners. One case occured near the junction of Pedro Creek, and Twin Creek valley. In 1960, Tony Lanning mined on the left limit of Thanksgiving Creek and recovered side pay left beside old drift mine workings. He used a bulldozer to mine and to stack tailings, and a hydraulic monitor to wash the paydirt into the sluice box.
The old mine dumps today are proving to be good pay where the old timers forgot and it pays to study an area that's been heavily mined and to locate these old piles.
Near Olnes, old tailings are still quite rich and good sized nuggets have been found in them. In 1979 near Ruby, an unconfirmed 48 ounce nugget was found in tailing piles with a metal detector.
During the dredging season in Alaska most dredges mined a million cubic yards of gravel a year and recovered $800,000 in gold. Quite a few nuggets have been found in the tailing piles at Fox, Ester, Goldstream, Pedro, Engineer, and many other creeks statewide. Inside the massive dredges a man whose job was to watch for nuggets running out the conveyor belt at the end of the trommel said quite a few nuggets escaped the dredge sluice boxes, only to end up in the tailings.
The nugget watcher was working on the Engineer Creek dredge near Fairbanks and said his job got so boring, he would sit and read a dime store novel rather than strain his eyes looking for nuggets. In tailing piles all over the state nuggets are being found with metal detectors. In 1980, one fellow panning near the junction of Twin Creek and Pedro found a one ouncer near the edge of some tailings.
SNIPING FOR GOLD
Working the Bars
Along Napoleon Creek in the Fortymile region, there's a place called Bonanza Bar where the creek forms natural riffles and every spring gold can be recovered in the riffles.
What happens is the river bar forms a catch-all where gold gets caught among small rocks or corrugated surfaces of sand and rock. In most cases a pan or rocker box could be used on the bar.
In 1934 at a place called Long Bar, some prospectors made a rocker sluice out of whipsawed lumber then prospected along the bar and found a place which was known as a natural riffle.
The first panful yielded about a pennyweight of gold with some pieces the size of wheat grains. The rocker box was set up, and a strip of the river bar about thirty feet long and four feet wide was worked for three days in which 18 ounces were recovered. Over twenty ounces were found on the bars on Montana Creek in the Fortymile in about a weeks time.
Metal Detecting
One miner in the Eureka area near Manley Hot Springs in interior Alaska had a friend on his claim using a metal detector. The miner was busy pushing paydirt off the bedrock with a bulldozer while the friend was busy collecting sizeable nuggets right behind him.
Several times the cat operator kept looking back because he thought he kept hearing beeping sounds. Finally on one occasion he turned around just in time to see his friend plop a nugget in his pocket. He stopped the cat and got off.
"Hey, what are you finding with that thing anyway? I didn't think those things worked." The metal detecting prospector grinned and held out a handful of raw coarse gold nuggets.
The metal detector is revolutionizing the prospecting world. It's just another method to finding gold. More and more people are using detectors to nugget shoot for gold.
When using detectors to locate gold, they will not pick up fine pieces of gold and dust but will locate heavy minerals along with black sand deposits. When the nuggets are found, the more character they have the more they'll be worth.
In Alaska highgrading old mine dumps and tailing piles can be very lucrative. Some of the large nuggeted creeks throughout the state are listed here. In most cases, with patience and hard work, one can come up with a yellow chunk to pay the bills.
In the Fairbanks area, good metal detecting ground would be; Goldstream Creek, Pedro, Smallwood, Dome, Vault, Treasure, Cleary, Fairbanks, Gilmore. Nuggets found on these creeks range from a half ounce to 15 ounces to 83 ounces in some cases.
The Circle Mining District has produced large nuggets; Harrison Creek, a 13 ouncer, Porcupine, a 5 ouncer, Deadwood, 5 ouncer, Switch, 7 ouncer, most creeks in the immediate Circle district. Streams in the Wiseman area of the Brooks Range are; Hammond River, Nolan, Mascot Creek.
A few years ago, Franklin Gulch in the Fortymile area was the scene of a $20,000 nugget recovery, including a five ouncer. What's really fun is the amount of excitement that goes along with searching for nuggets in tailings or on bedrock. In a lot of cases the metal detector finds antiques like lanterns, shovels, the usual tailing pile find. But when a nugget is found it can take your breathe away.
In Australia metal detectors find large nuggets everyday in the gold fields. Most of the detectors being used are Garrett and White's. Alaska's dirt and gravel is usually highly mineralized. To a lot of detectors, mineralized ground is a 'kiss of death' and makes it hard to pick up a signal from gold.
Large nuggets were usually spewed out of the large dredges or sluicing systems. Out of the many millions and millions of yards of gravel, a lot of large nuggets made their way into tailing piles.
In 1987 a woman, using a White's 6000 DI detector for the first time, found a 16 ounce nugget along a road shoulder at Livengood, north of Fairbanks. A five ouncer was found by a woman in the Kantishna area.
In 1984, a 28, 13, 10, and several smaller ounce nuggets were found in the backside of Denali Park's Kantishna. A local Willow resident found a large assortment of nuggets in the Nome area. This man is probably Alaska's most current successful nugget hunter with a detector.
The dredges lost a lot of nuggets. Gold was separated into a trommel system. The trommels were perforated with 1 - 2 inch holes and only small pieces of gold would drop through these small holes while the larger nuggets slipped on out the tailings.
At the end of the trommel a tailing watcher sat looking for nuggets. It was usually hard to see any nuggets and they were at times few and far between. The nugget watcher became bored with watching.
The advantage of using a detector for prospecting is being able to cover a lot of territory and finding choice pieces of gold without moving lots of dirt.
When a prospector is down on his luck, he can always resort to finding old sluice boxes out in the bushes and clean out the cracks with a knife or sharp object. Sluice sniping has been around for quite awhile. In the Nizina mining district in the Wrangell Mountains, several prospectors took a wedge and a hammer and pried apart old sluices and recovered gold accumulated in cracks.
In 1974 I was working for a mining operation at Collinsville - Twin Creek and found some old sluices. I recovered my fair share from the boxes including a four penny weight nugget. The cracks in the sluice were stuffed with rags and held lots of fine gold.
There are several techniques used to recover gold after a clean-up. Since gold will be inter-mingled with dirt, or as some miners call it "heavies" there are easy ways to separate this gold from the heavies.
In small operations one way is by simply panning. Another way is to dry the gold and dirt out is on a stove in a pan or tub of some sort and when dry, use the blowing process.
The blowing process occurs when a miner scatters the gold and dirt on a newspaper, and blows away the dirt particles. The gold stays behind with the exception of some finer pieces like flakes which sometimes will be scattered in with blown dirt.
Another process is the old hanky trick. Get yourself a hanky and a small powered magnet. Place the magnet behind the hanky and run it through a mound of dirt infested gold. A lot of the heavies that remains with the gold is black sand and is magnetic. Gold is not magnetic so the particles will be attracted to the magnet while the gold stays behind.
This is a safe way to process gold. Unsafe ways are with mercury and cyanide. These two ways are only safe if the process is set up in a well ventilated room. The only time you'll ever need cyanide is if you process 50 tons of hardrock gold ore per day.
If you want to get a real blast out of mining, use ditch cord. A lot of caution should be used when using this. Ditch cord is an explosive and can be strung out on gold bearing bedrock and detonated. The pay and rock and gravel will barely shatter up in the air, but the bedrock will be opened up a few feet down and a few feet wide. This eliminates having to hire a D-8 bulldozer to come in with a ripper on back and tear your bedrock up at $300 an hour. You must be licensed to obtain explosives.
Another mining method is OPEN-CUT mining. This is where the entire deposit is worked from the surface down. The easiest forms of open-cut mining use manual labor almost entirely and are restricted to small workings.
The depth of a deposit that can be mined by open-cut methods are governed by the depth of overburden that can be removed by stripping. One great advantage of open-cut mining is that it permits natural thawing of shallow exposed gravels after the overburden has been removed.
MANUAL METHODS
Beach Mining
Sea-beach mining was at it's peak during the Nome rush, Lituya Bay, Yakataga, Kodiak, Popov Island, and elsewhere. Most of the rich deposits were mined out by hand methods. Large scale attempts with big equipment failed. After a storm was usually the best time to mine with larger equipment. The high surf washed the overburden of beach materials leaving a new concentration of the heavier black or ruby sands containing gold.
These concentrates were washed in rockers, long toms, surf washers, or small sluices. On the beaches of Nome small prospect holes were dug to find ruby-sand concentrates which are covered with a foot or more of barren sand and gravel. This overburden is shoveled away, and the 2 to 3 inch depth of concentrate was shoveled into buckets or wheelbarrows and transported to a washing device.
LONG-TOMS- a small sluice box with a grizzly or screen at the head for removing the coarser material. For saving fine gold the box is set at a high gradient, 3 to 4 inches to the foot, and the screened material is passed over riffles and amalgam plates. The plates are protected from scouring with 1/2 inch screen or punch plate.
Sluice water is usually dipped with a can or pan used for pouring water.
GROUND SLUICING-is a method that removes much of the gravel, leaving the balance to be mined by shoveling or a similar method best adapted to shallow gravels, usually not over 10 feet deep which contain coarse gold.
To ground sluice gravel successfully steeper grades are necessary. The best areas for ground sluicing are on benches and the upper regions of a creek.
BOOMING-In the interior districts the water supply at many placer mining areas are inadequate, during most of the season. The creek is dammed up and water is released to wash cuts carrying material with it. The water is dammed up again after washing material and the miner picks the gold from the bedrock.
Breaking Bedrock
The dream of most gold prospectors is usually to find the ultimate deposit, paystreak, or large nugget. But in most gold mining districts across the state, the prospector seeks to locate outcrops of bedrock or side benches where the ancient stream channel once ran. The best pay in most cases is located in or on bedrock.
Bedrock mining can be very lucrative and requires only a few tools. Tools needed for this type of mining are tweezers, spoons, a knife (Buck knife), gold pan, vial or plastic container, hacksaw blade, baster; (for sucking up small pieces of gold), and a crowbar.
The best type of bedrock for hand mining in Alaska is usually slate, schist, or a brittle shale. The slate and shale usually pry apart with a crowbar in layers, while the schist bedrock to be worked is decomposed and can be broken up with knife, spoon, or any other type of scraping tool.
The first time I worked bedrock cracks in Alaska was on the Kenai peninsula. The bedrock in the area consists mostly of slate and stands on end in layers. Springtime is the best part of the year to search the bedrock. The water is usually lower, and gold has been washed down and settled in cracks which act as riffles.
I've found small nuggets on top of bedrock where I could simply reach down and pick them up. The nuggets are very small, but when found on the surface are usually a good indicator of more gold in the bedrock.
The first step in searching bedrock is prying crevices or slabs apart with a crowbar. Gold can fool lots of people. It will work its way farther into the bedrock than one can imagine. A hammer can be used to pound the crowbar into cracks and pry back the layers. Between the layers, small gravel and gold become wedged into the deepest portion of the crack. A spoon or knife is handy for scraping out cracks. Each scoop is placed into a gold pan. The pan may be filled up at least halfway before checking for colors.
The slab bedrock layers broken off often have layers of attached clay mixed mixed with tiny rocks. The clay is a natural trap for nuggets. Its also hard to retrieve gold from. These larger pieces of bedrock can be put in a bucket and cleaned off later. A wire brush is a good tool for cleaning these pieces.
Whenever looking for a good place to take out gold, working bedrock is much the same as looking for placer deposits in the stream; where a lot of bedrock stands on end, is usually a good place to start digging.
Money values in bedrock are measured by the square foot. It's a good idea to work out a paying bedrock area before going to other sections. On the Kenai Peninsula's East Fork River, I worked a square foot of bedrock for six hours one time and recovered $1,200. It was easy work; and the deeper I went into the bedrock, the finer the gold was.
The pay eventually ran out, and it took me several days to find more pay worth scraping out.
One time I found a large chunk of bedrock that weighed about 200 pounds and sat embedded in clay. I figured this would be a real storehouse for gold. After a half hour of prying and breaking up, I panned up most of the clay and didn't find one color.
Near the mouth of Coal Creek along the Yukon River, bedrock outcrops of shale are found with only a two foot wide stream rolling over the surface. The only time bedrock is replenished with gold is in spring. During summer months gold can be found consistently all over bedrock for about 50 square yards. About an ounce of gold per day can be pried from the bedrock.
After a day of breaking bedrock in slate, the fingertips have a tendency to develop small cuts. To prevent this, gloves should be worn. Most of the larger gold found in these cracks is flat and of jewelry quality.
The easiest type of bedrock to work is decomposed schist. The schist is soft and stands on end, and gold imbeds easily. Bedrock on Union Gulch in the Brooks Range is made up of decomposed schist. The schist can be broken apart with the fingers, dug up with a spoon, or shoveled into a sluice box. It's usually high and dry, several feet above the stream channel. Thicker matchhead size nuggets are found in this bedrock type. The gold does not always penetrate deep into the schist. However in harder schist, mostly in rock form, the gold can drop down as deep as two to four feet.
One miner in the Kantishna used a boom dam to wash hard schist bedrock. The gulch where he worked was narrow with a dam halfway up. The water builds up every few hours and the dam is released. The swift water action washed gold out of the lower gravel banks and bedrock. When the water is through washing the gulch is dammed once more and the miner walks up and down the creek collecting nuggets-some in the two ounce size.
Breaking bedrock is a cheap and rewarding way to make a few extra dollars: If you're willing to put up with sore knees and sore finger tips, it will provide hours of fun and profit.
Working Old Tailings
Whether its with metal detectors, a sluice box or gold pan, tailing piles can be profitable for finding gold nuggets. Sometimes it might take a week to find one nugget...but its worth it.
Miles of tailings still line the valleys and streambeds throughout the state and still contain much gold.
Within the past three years, probably the largest nugget found in tailings with a metal detector was 28 ounces. A miner in the Kantishna mining district behind Denali National Park was mining with a bulldozer and sluice box and drove over an 82 ounce nugget. He picked up the large lump of gold and discovered a piece broken off. The break was fairly recent. The miner brought out a detector, a White's 6000, and after two days was able to locate the broken portion of the large nugget. With another 10 ounce piece added to the large nugget, the 92 ounce nugget became the fifth largest nugget ever found in Alaska. The largest was 182 ounces. The irony about this large nugget was that while the miner was searching for the other half of the large nugget, he located a 28 ounce and a 13 ounce nugget from tailings in the same day!
In a lot of cases miners from the gold rush era had poor recovery systems. During the winter months when men thawed frozen dirt and pay gravel to bedrock by shafting, they stacked up piles of paydirt nearby to be washed in spring when the water ran. Some miners went as deep as 350 feet to bedrock on creeks near Fairbanks.
On Smallwood Creek for example, in 1916 miners dug 300 feet down to bedrock and nearly drowned when they were overcome by an underground stream which filled up the shaft in five minutes.
The miners did not wash all the paydirt outside these shafts. Such has been the case on Smallwood Creek. Modern day prospectors have been able to recover an ounce per day from these tailings with a rocker sluice box. The tundra is extremely thick in this area and tailings once stacked ten feet high have sunk into the permafrost.
Old tailings like these can be readily identified by an ancient water filled hole where the shaft has caved in slowly. Wherever miners hand dug for their gold, you can bet they left some behind.
On Goldstream Creek near Fairbanks the giant Yuba-type gold dredges left their share of tailing gold. Scattered throughout these rock piles are small mounds of clay and cassiterite nuggets commonly known as tin. Most of the time gold can be found in these clay piles.
In the Circle mining district northeast of Fairbanks, a 13 year old boy recently found a five ounce nugget in the tailings along Porcupine Creek. Most of the mining there had been done by dragline and bulldozer.
Since a lot of the tailing gold is fine, gold saving techniques must be developed. When working these old tailings the dilemma is lack of flowing water nearby. Old groundwater ponds are the only water source. Water pumps with sluices or rocker boxes are probably the best way to mine from these.
When operating a water pump from a distance and pumped into a hand sluice, it has been a practice of mine to place a metal or wooden box at the end of the sluice with a fine mesh screen in the bottom and placed over a five gallon bucket. Not only will the fine gold be caught, but large amounts of heavier minerals like black sands and garnets will sift into the bucket. The bucket should be watched closely so it won't overflow. After several hours of processing tailings the bucket will have to be dumped a few times and checked for gold later.
The most lucrative tailings are the ones 400 feet above the stream channel. Working old hillside dumps or tailings especially with a rocker box, increase your chances of finding rich amounts of gold. Interior Alaska and the Klondike goldfields in the Yukon Territory have proved to be the best tailing recovery areas.
The best recovery I've ever heard of was on Hunker Creek near Dawson City, Y.T. A prospector found an old shaft and started digging remnants of the old winter dump left many years before and recovered 74 ounces in a quarter yard of gravel. This is not a bad days work!
There are a lot of old diggings and tailings to be mined. The old timers have done all the hard work bringing up the paydirt and sifting through it. But they left a lot behind for any ambitious prospector.
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