The Chisana Story

[Steve Herschbach]

This gold prospecting and metal detecting story takes us all the way back to the beginning - my beginning that is.  I was fortunate enough to be born in the Territory of Alaska in 1957. Alaska was still very much on the frontier back in those days. My father was a farm boy from the midwest who headed for Alaska in the early 50's with not much more than an old pickup truck. He worked as a longshoreman offloading ships in Seward, Alaska for a time. He decided to get some education, and earned his way through college in Fairbanks, Alaska, by driving steampipe for the fleet of gold dredges that were still working there. He spent some time in Seldovia, Alaska, working the "slime line" in a fish cannery. He met my mom in Seldovia, the two got married, and finally settled in Anchorage, Alaska.

I came along in 1957. My father had taken a job as a surveyor but money was tight in the early years. I was raised on wild game and garden grown vegetables, and as soon as I was old enough to handle it, I was walking a trapline every winter with my father. Dad was a hard worker, and Alaska was having one of its many booms at the time - the construction of the oil and gas fields in Lower Cook Inlet. This was the Swanson River oilfield, discovered the year I was born.

The state was prospering, and my father along with it as a surveyor on the new Swanson Field. He got the bug for flying early on, and by the time I became a teenager he finally got his dream plane at the time - a Piper Super Cub, the classic Alaska Bush airplane. Super Cubs equipped with oversize "tundra tires" can land just about anywhere you can find about 300 - 400 feet of open ground. A great little airplane and the one I ended up flying to get my own pilot's license.

Super Cub N1769P parked on knoll in Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska

It was in this same timeframe that dad got me hooked on gold prospecting. In 1972 I saw an ad in a magazine "Find Lost Treasure" and had acquired my first metal detector, a White's Coinmaster 4. This must have got discussions going about gold, and my father did have some knowledge on the subject having worked around the gold mines in Fairbanks. He took me to a little creek south of Anchorage, Bertha Creek, and I found my very first flakes of gold! By the ripe old age of 14 gold fever was in the air, I had my first metal detector, and already wanted a gold dredge. My first dredge, a 3" Keene with no floatation, was on the way to me in 1973.

Keep in mind that the price of gold had only recently been deregulated from the old fixed price of $35 per ounce. In 1972 it was around $60 per ounce, and in 1973 made it to just over $100 per ounce. The money was not my motivation at all. I already just loved finding gold, and the connection to the prospectors of old and the historical quest for gold were more compelling than any dream of striking it rich. I just wanted to find gold!

My first metal detector and first gold dredge (my 3502 had the older aluminum header box & a power jet)

A young man with a new detector, new gold dredge, gold fever, and a father willing to fly him anywhere in Alaska on adventure. How great is that? Now there was only one problem - where to go? There was no internet then, so it boiled down to libraries and research. In short order I discovered the United States Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) bulletin series and the number one Alaska title of the series, Placer Deposits of Alaska, U.S.G.S. Bulletin 1374 by Edward H. Cobb. This one book and the references contained in it became my prospecting guide to Alaska. My desired target? Remote locations with large gold nuggets!

I read the book and certain places just jumped out at me. One was the Iditarod area and places like Ganes Creek and Moore Creek - tales told elsewhere. This paragraph of page 114 caught my eye:

"Placer mining in the Chisana district, first of creek gravels and later of bench and old channel deposits of Bonanza and Little Eldorado Creeks, has always been on a small scale with simple equipment. The remoteness of the area, shortages of water on some streams, and the small extent of the deposits all prevented the development of large operations. There has been little activity since World War II; the last reported mining was a two-man nonfloat operation in 1965."

Wow, that alone sounds pretty good. Nothing really about the gold however. The secret to the Placer Deposits series is not so much the books themselves, though they are great for getting ideas, like I did. The key is to use the references listed and in this case the main one is The Chisana-White River District, Alaska, U.S.G.S. Bulletin 630 (1916) by Stephen Reid Capps.

It turns out I had stumbled over the location of the last actual gold rush in Alaska in 1913. It was a small rush and did not last long, but it did mark the end of an era. The world was on the brink of war and the age of gold rushes was soon to be history. The history of the area is covered in the report starting on page 89. It is fascinating reading, but it was this note on page 105 that really sealed the deal:

"The gold is bright, coarse, and smoothly worn. The largest nugget found has a value of over $130, and pieces weighing a quarter of an ounce or over make up about 5 per cent of the total gold recovered. The gold is said to assay $16.67 an ounce."

Gold nuggets a quarter ounce or larger make up five percent of the gold? And that $130 nugget at $16.67 an ounce? Somewhere over seven ounces. That's all I needed to know. Very remote, worked by simple means, and large gold - I wanted to go to Chisana in general and Bonanza Creek in particular. Even the creek names scream gold - Bonanza Creek, Big Eldorado Creek, Little Eldorado Creek, Coarse Money Creek, and Gold Run. Now all we had to do was get there. But when I said remote, I meant remote. Chisana is practically in Canada 250 air miles from Anchorage.

To be continued.....

Chisana, Alaska location map

[Steve Herschbach]

Can you believe I still remember when we had a hand crank phone and a party line in our house? Geez, I am getting old!! I literally saw Anchorage grow from a true frontier town cut off from the world (I watched the first live television satellite broadcast in 1969 - the moon landing) to what is today just another American city with all the big box stores. Not that different than Reno really except for the weather. Communications kind of ruined everything. You can be out in the middle of nowhere and there is a satellite dish and internet connection these days. It was that being off grid, totally on your own thing that got lost in the process.

Dear old Dad is going strong at 87, though maybe a little slower. Yes, he is an amazing man in many ways. He let me do things I would be too scared to let a child of my own do but which instilled in me a great sense of confidence and self-reliance. My father ended up being a partner in the surveying firm he hired on with, and later founded his own surveying company. He worked from one end of the state to the other and his name is on records all over the state. He was one heck of a bush pilot and flew supply plane on many of the jobs. My good fortune again as I got to see a lot more of Alaska than most people ever will.

My goal is to add a "chapter" to the tale each morning covering the time from the 1970's until the present. Chisana was a big part of my prospecting life but I have never told the story in full until now. So check back daily for new entries.

[Gerry in Idaho]

The 4 D's & a P.

Dream, Dredge, Detector, Dad with a plane sure can make a young mans life enjoyable.  So cool to read.

[Steve Herschbach]

The main problem with a Super Cub is the lack of cargo space. Fuel can also be a problem in Alaska, and you often have to bring your own. That being the case the best way to access the Chisana area is by driving supplies up the highway into the Slana area, and then ferrying out of there into the mines. From Slana a person flies southeast towards Nabesna and through Cooper Pass. Nabesna is closer but the airstrips there are private.

The old boom town of Chisana is in the valley down below the gold creeks, and has been more or less continually occupied until the present day. There is a very large airstrip there but no facilities or stores, just some private residences. We always bypassed Chisana and flew straight into the mines, and only used the Chisana strip if weather at the higher mine elevations forced us to land and wait for better conditions.

The desired destination is a small dirt airstrip near Gold Hill, the small mountain that many of the gold bearing streams center on. This is a classic Alaska bush strip, just a cleared area running at quite a bit of uphill slope into the side of a mountain. It is basically a Cub strip but can handle planes as large as a Cessna 206. Even with a Super Cub it is an exciting airstrip to work out of. Due to roughly 5000 foot elevation and the angle of the strip into the mountainside, a pilot basically has exactly one shot at getting the landing right. A Cub might be able to power out of a failed approach if it was aborted soon enough, but it would be a risky thing.

The entire area is above treeline, with only some sparse willow growth in a few areas. Here is a view of the landing strip from the bottom looking up. The uphill slope is considerable, like maybe a 15% grade at a guess.

Landing strip near Gold Hill, Alaska

The closest creek to the airstrip that the records mention as being rich in Gold is Skookum Creek, some distance away over typical high altitude tundra. From the 1916 report "The pay streak was narrow, averaging only 6 feet in width, but was unusually rich." and "The gold occurs for the most part upon bedrock and is very coarse, little fine gold being recovered. The largest nugget found had a value of $52, and pieces worth from $10 to $20 were numerous. The gold is said to assay $16.50 to the ounce."

My plan was pretty simple. Fly my new little 3" gold dredge into the airstrip, then pack it the couple miles to Skookum Creek and go find some gold. Now, keep in mind that at this point in the spring of 1973 all my mining experience boiled down to some panning and sluicing at Bertha Creek. I maybe had 100 flakes of gold in a vial weighing less than a quarter gram total!

I don't remember anything in particular that proved a particular challenge on this first trip. The main thing is that due to the elevation, there is a very short season on Gold Hill. June may or may not have too much snow on the ground and so is a risky month to go in. By July it is pretty much guaranteed to be melted out. Serious snow can be expected sometime in September. So about 4 months max but really only July and August can be counted on at the higher elevations. Lower Bonanza Creek is over 1000 feet lower and has a longer season.

We pitched a camp at the airstrip, and packed the 3" dredge down to the head of Skookum Gulch. Since we were backpacking everything I picked the first decent bedrock exposure I could find that had a decent place to set up. I was already learning getting a powerjet stye dredge with no floats may have been a good idea when it comes to saving weight and bulk. The problem is since the junction of the jet and hose must be at or below water line finding a place to set up in a shallow creek can be a real pain. This nicely placed rock had a lot to do with this being the location I chose.

Steve's first gold dredge, a 1973 Keene 3" with no floatation

And here are a couple more shots. You can see that Skookum Gulch is just a narrow little thing with very little water, and in fact it dries up often in a low water year. You can see bedrock in the water in the picture above - blocky granitic rock heavily fractured by thousands of years of freeze/thaw cycle. The oldtimers tore up as much as a dozen feet of this stuff in places. The gold seems to never quit - it just gets smaller the deeper you go into the bedrock.

 Steve working 3" Keene dredge on Skookum Gulch in 1973

View looking down Skookum Gulch - my brother messing with an old sluice box in background

I cleaned off a nice little patch of bedrock. I got a little bit of fine gold, but was thrilled to find a nugget weighing maybe a pennyweight (1.5 grams) that was not only the largest nugget I ever found, but probably weighed more than all the gold I had ever found at this point!

Here is where things get funny. It never in my wildest dreams occurred to me that this remote location with early 70's low gold prices might have mining claims. I was a rookie still and had not found out yet that even when gold was $35 an ounce people still were mining gold around Alaska, and that historic old areas often still had active mining claims. At some point we took a break and wandered down Skookum Gulch around that corner you can see in the last photo above. It was there we saw a couple people working a sluice box in the creek. Yikes, we might be claim jumping!

Being older and wiser now I would have just went and talked to the people. However, I basically just freaked out and decided to evacuate post haste. We packed everything back to the airstrip and called an end to this first adventure.

I was understandably disappointed. I don't remember how it happened, but Alaska was a much smaller place in those days. Inquiries were made, and we contacted one of the claim owners, a gentleman by the name of Don Dipple. Long story short Don did not mind some kids playing around looking for gold if we flew in some goods for him also when we came in. My father has never been much on finding gold per se - he did it mainly because I wanted to - but he was interested in caribou and sheep hunting in the area. We basically had permission to come up and play around going forward.

It turned out to be more complicated than that. There were several partners in the claims, but due to some dispute one half of the group was not talking to the other half. Yet everyone was always nice to us - I think they liked seeing youngsters taking an interest in something that at the time was the province of an older group of people. Regardless, the stage was now set for visits in future years.

To be continued...

View of Gold Hill

[LipCa]

Steve, our telephone number was 3 shorts and a long.... remember yours?

[Steve Herschbach]

Nope, I was a mere tyke Harry. I remember the old crank phone more for what happened to it later. It sat around in a shed and my friends and I played with it electrocuting each other by turning the crank while holding the wires. Funny what makes for a toy when you have to make your own! 

[Bob(AK)]

Very good Steve, I remember the party line. Also started with a 3” dredge bought from your store around ‘79 or ‘80, was on an inner tube. Super Cub on 36” tires best thing out there with a good pilot. I see this being a long story, can’t wait for more

[Steve Herschbach]

Hey Bob! My fathers Cub had smaller tires if my thinking is right. I have seen those 36” tires and they are crazy tall. I am thinking ours were more like 24” - 28”? Anyway, we had some good times at Mills! Thanks for any help you give John. ?

[deathray]

Following buddy.

[Glenn in CO]

Steve , I believe if you had to live your life all over again you wouldn't change one thing. I and my wife when we started out prospecting, gold panning, dredging along with metal detecting that we feel the same way and would not change the adventures and opportunities that came are way. Our youngest daughter, son-in-law and grand kids moved to Homer four years ago and their neighbor across the street was a person named Dave Olsen. Dave's stories and gold he and his partners found dredging in the Bering Sea and inland around the Nome area was incredible. My son-in-law and Dave are in a remote area out of Nome now and are dredging and on some good gold. We gave a gold detector to my son-in-law for Christmas to take with him this summer and hopefully he and Dave will find more gold to take home with them.

Can't wait to hear your next chapter!

Here's some pictures of my son-in-law and Dave getting the gold!