Ahh, home again. After being back in Fairbanks just a few days I have met a new friend that drove all the way here from New Hampshire! His name is Ken and he is here not only for a job but is also hoping to make some money doing some gold prospecting.
I was hoping when I got back to Fairbanks that I would be able to catch a ride up to Murphy Dome and then hike down to the Chatanika. But it sounds like the river is still flooded and that there is still a good amount of snow on the north slope of the trail. I hiked out there last spring in these same conditions and a trip that should take 2 1/2 hours took 6 hours! I figured it would be a good idea just to wait and in the mean time I could work on getting a job in town for the summer.
As usual I am staying in a tent at Billie's hostel while in town to save as much money as possible. While hanging out in the common area of the hostel Ken and I struck up a conversation and eventually he needed some help getting his GPS to communicate with his computer. That turned out to be a great "ice breaker," and later that morning he asked if I wanted to go for a ride to scout out some potential gold prospecting spots.
We eventually ended up about 50 miles north east of Fairbanks on a minimum maintenance road that had a creek running across it. Ken thought that the creek would make a great spot for a sluice box and all we needed was some dirt to run through it. So we picked a hill side near by and started filling some buckets. After running a few buckets through the sluice we took what was left in the box and made our way back toward Fairbanks. We needed to find some calmer water to pan out what had been left in the sluice box.
All along the highway, we had taken out of Fairbanks, piles upon piles of old material that had been processed by miners years ago cover the landscape. About 15 miles outside of Fairbanks there is a spot to pull off the road into an area that is a old gold claim from 1902. There you are welcome to pan for gold all you like but can't camp over night. Ken had stopped at this spot the previous day and did find a few flakes of gold, panning out some material from an old tailing pile(tailing pile is what is left after being processed for gold).
This was a good spot to pan through our material left from sluicing up the road. Before we new it it was 9pm and we were both pretty tired. We didn't quite make it through all of the material but figured we could pan out the rest somewhere in town the next day.
Ken did find a tiny flake of gold, but for 3-5 gallon buckets that's not a very good ratio. So our plan for the next day was to head back to that old claim just out side of town and dig a little deeper into one of the tailing piles. I should mention that the 3 buckets I spoke of were run through the sluice box and what was left was only about an inch thick in the bottom of 1 bucket. Just that little bit still took the two of us several hours to pan through!
The old mining claim that they allow you to pan for gold doesn't want you to use any "mechanical assistance," like sluice boxes or dredges so we came up with a plan to work our way around that. While filling our buckets we used a classifier, which is just a fancy name for a screen, to filter out all of the big rocks leaving us with only quarter inch and smaller material. Any gold that is larger than that has probably already been cleaned out from the mine in the past.
When we had our buckets filled with nice fine material we loaded up Ken's truck and made our way up the road to a different location to run it through the sluice box. Ken has a pair of sluice boxes so we both took a bucket and spent several hours filtering down our potential gold bearing dirt. Setting up a sluice box is quite tedious and I think it took longer to get it set right than to run all of the dirt through it. Ken is a great teacher and has made this new learning experience a lot of fun.
After getting all of our material run through the sluice boxes it was approaching 9pm again and was time to head home. We are only getting a few hours of darkness right now and it is getting hard to tell what time it is later in the day.
The pics are of Ken and I in the Chatanika river, many many many miles up stream from the lake cabin, running our buckets of dirt through the sluice boxes.
Today we'll head to out to our little panning spot in town and take down the material from yesterday and hopefully score a little gold.
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