The Chisana Story

[nugget hunter]

thanks for the story steve ....what i remember of that area to the south is where it all started in chititu and rex creek those giant copper nuggets then the mine at mccarthy ......the only mining town with alcohol during the dry period thanks to walter of may creek  ... i guess maybe that rex creek mountain named after him after all .....

[Steve Herschbach]

9 hours ago, Glenn in CO said:

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

I am glad to hear Dave is still at it! I shipped him a lot of gear over the years. If anyone can get your son-in-law onto decent gold it’s Dave. I hope they do well.

[Glenn in CO]

5 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

I am glad to hear Dave is still at it! I shipped him a lot of gear over the years. If anyone can get your son-in-law onto decent gold it’s Dave. I hope they do well.

Yep! Dave is still at it. He goes every summer and stays about three months. This will be the fourth season my son-in-law has been mining with Dave and I think the gold fever is starting to set in. If I were twenty years younger I'd consider a go at it, but nuggethunting with a metal detector is a hell of lot easier than dredging.

[Steve Herschbach]

I got my first metal detector in 1972, a White's Coinmaster 4-TR. This was before ground balancing technology was developed. The older BFO (beat frequency oscillator) models of the 60's were just being supplanted by this newer TR (transmitter/receiver) technology. TR was unproven but I decided to go with it as the latest thing. A wise decision because BFO detectors were soon replaced completely by this new way of detecting.

Unfortunately I proved something to myself quite quickly. White's sold an accessory item at the time, a 4" coil on a handle they called the "Gold Probe". My Coinmaster had an 8" coil and I got the Gold Probe accessory to hunt gold nuggets. Even with the small coil these old models could barely detect a 1 gram nugget sitting right on the coil. And even that bit of detection capability disappeared in bad ground due to the inability to ground balance the detector.

Steve with first detector - White's Coinmaster 4-TR with "Gold Probe"

White's also sold a detector at the time called the Goldmaster. The Coinmaster did not seem to be able to find gold nuggets, so I got a Goldmaster next. Being the inquisitive sort, I opened up the Coinmaster and Goldmaster and got my early lesson in detector marketing. The exact same circuit board was in each box! Basically when you got a Goldmaster you got a bigger box with a bigger meter, and that was "better". And seriously, Ken White Sr. believed exactly that - bigger meant better. In fact, White's sold three models that were all basically the same detector in three different boxes - the Coinmaster 4, Goldmaster, and the "Alaskan", a chest mount version. I still have one of the old Alaskan series with a Gold Probe, the exact model pictured in the 1976 catalog excerpt below.

White's Electronics Coinmaster 4, Goldmaster, and Alaskan 1976 TR model detectors

That early experience turned me off metal detecting for gold nuggets for the remainder of the 70's and in fact for most of the 80's I was biased against metal detectors as a nugget finding method. When I started selling detectors in 1976 my standard line was that a $5 gold pan was likely to find more gold than a $200 metal detector, and for nearly all situations that was true. You needed ground with coin size and larger nuggets to even have a chance with the detector.

Therefore in the early visits to Chisana I did not do any detecting, but mostly just sniped around with gold pans and sluice boxes. Even a pump was only employed a couple times due to the difficulty of getting fuel on site.

Since we were new to the area this was also the time to hike around and explore. The place was amazing back in the 1970's. There were Long Tom's (the old timer's long wooden sluice boxes) scattered everywhere, and shovels left right where the old timers last worked. Old cabins had plates and the shelves and cutlery in the drawers. Many places looked like the people left, planning to come back - and then never did. The area became popular with sheep and caribou hunters in the 80's, and anything that could be carted off slowly disappeared. The old sluice boxes were recycled for the wood or just burned for firewood. I do not have many photos from that time, and the following is a few that show what things looked like back in 1973-1975.

First, here is a general location map. All the major gold bearing streams in the area center around a round top mountain called Gold Hill. The gold is conjectured to have been deposited in old Tertiary channels that were mostly destroyed in the last ice age. Gold Hill is a small area that was surrounded by a sea of ice, but which escaped direct glaciation. The rounded top of the hill is surmised to be made up of a remnant of the old Tertiary gravels. Click image for larger view.

Gold Hill and surrounding gold bearing creeks

Camp at Little Eldorado Creek

There are several camps in the area. The oldest and best preserved is the camp at the junction of Skookum Gulch with Little Eldorado Creek. Little El, as it is called, is the creek in the foreground above. Skookum Gulch is the little drainage coming down behind the cabins. The main cabins here were built around 1916 and have been in use more or less continuously ever since.

Looking down Little Eldorado Creek to where it joins Bonanza Creek below

Old "Long Tom" remnants on Skookum Gulch

Upper end of mine workings on Skookum Gulch

Like I said earlier, this was before I got into seriously detecting for gold, so all the gold we recovered was by panning and sluicing. My brother and I found a patch of blocky bedrock on Bonanza Creek that had gold. It was just the two of us, a couple gold pans, a pry bar and some spoons. Sorry for the poor photos, but each of the pans below are single pans of dirt scraped out of crevices and then panned. As you can see the gold is chunky, and the two of us panned over an ounce of gold that day off the patch of bedrock. In case the reader does not know it, anywhere a couple people with just pans can find over an ounce of gold in a day is very rich ground. We even found nuggets just walking the creek and eyeballing the bedrock - here and there nuggets would peek out of a crevice, ready to be pried out and placed in a bottle.

Bedrock next to Bonanza Creek

Gold nuggets in 14" plastic pan

Gold nuggets in 12" steel pan

Old cabin and hydraulic workings on upper Gold Run Creek (possibly Poorman Creek)

Boom dam and steam boiler on lower Gold Run Creek

A lot of the mining in the area used a method called "booming". This involved building dams to retain the water, and then periodically letting it all go to create a brief flood event. The dams could be released manually, but often were constructed with automatic gates so they could run unattended. Between flood washes, miners would enter the cut below the dam and stack all the large rocks to the side. The next flood would wash away the finer gravels materials, while gold settled lower and lower. Finally, when only a couple feet of enriched material was left, everything would be shoveled into sluice boxes and bedrock cleaned. This worked particularly well for areas with coarse gold and where gold is mainly concentrated on bedrock, with relatively barren overburden.

An alternative was to use the impounded water to flush material into sluices set lower down the creek. This was the better way to go if the overburden had a lot of gold. At Gold Hill it appears booming to simply strip the overburden and then shoveling into boxes was more common.

More complete remnant of a wooden "boom dam"

Automatic gate boom dam; dam itself made of hand stacked rock (upper Gold Run)

The channel at Gold Run is so narrow that the rocks were stacked along both sides as high as a man could reach. Walking up the creek at this point is like walking up a narrow passageway in a castle - rock walls on both sides.

Hand stacked rock on Gold Run Creek

An old rocker box

Another little gulch that enters Little Eldorado Creek is called Snow Gulch. There was another hot spot there, and we used the pump off my 3" dredge to help wash material through an old wooden sluice. Again, lots of nice fingernail size nuggets recovered.

Ground sluicing on Snow Gulch

The partners working the ground at the time were using similar primitive methods - usually just a little pump supplying water to hand work a mining cut with old sluices found on site.

"Shovel into" operation on Bonanza Creek

What happens when you stay too long.....

N1769P parked on dirt strip near Gold Hill

Dad takes off ferrying people and gear back out of the mines

The fact is those were early days. I only have a smattering of photos and slides from Chisana in the 1970's, and my memories have faded with the years. All the above happened in the 1973 - 1975 time frame. By 1976 my school chum Dudley Benesch and I had founded Alaska Mining & Diving Supply, the same year we were graduating from high school. Don Dipple, who I met because of Chisana, clued us onto a creek nearer to home, Stetson Creek, that ended up taking over from Chisana as my main place of interest in the late 70's and early 80's. It was not until 1989 over a decade later that I was to return to the Chisana area. The reason? New metal detector technology!

To be continued...

[Hard Prospector]

Beautiful area, sure isn't drywashing country......Ha!  "Booming", man never seen placer workings like that before, very cool stuff Steve . Bet your glad you (or your Dad ) took those pics back then. A shame much has been carried off or burned.... too bad about that.  Thanks for the history lesson in Alaska mining. You need to write a book,  perhaps already in the works? Anyway, thanks for sharing..........Rob

[Norvic]

Loving it Steve. Many Thanks.

[strick]

Great story Steve. Those fish packing plants were a great place to meet girls. Is that were dad met mom? When I used to fish on a gill netter for sockeye during the summers there where college girls all over the packing plants lol My dad also was a pilot and I think his favorite plane to fly was the super cub. Looking forward to more...seems to be gold everywhere!

strick

[Dig It]

Love the photos & story Steve, I guess you could say Stetson Creek now has a Booming situation going on, they have built a dam on upper Stetson and open a gate once a week to flush gravels out from behind dam, which in turn flush gravels down. stream. And like the old timers I also would be picking and hand stacking any large rocks. ( Big part of my decision to sell my claim & all gas powered equipment to retool for a detectors life now. ) Can't wait to read what you have on Stetson, use to see your equipment, on Stetson back in the day on my hiking trips.

[Jim_Alaska]

On 8/31/2018 at 5:25 PM, Bob(AK) said:

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.

This post brought back memories. It was probably around the same time frame, maybe a bit earlier in 1978. I bought my first dredge, a Keene 2 1/2" on an inner tube from Steve's store.

Wanna hear something crazy? I still have that dredge and it is not because it was little used, I have used it to death and everything is still original, with the exception of the inner tube.

I have used it as a dredge and also made temporary conversions to be used as a high banker. The old engine still runs strong.

[IdahoPeg]

Love the story and pictures! Must have been a wonderful time, for sure!?