A Different Perspective: 3/13/2024

In the early 1980s, I ran the farthest-north underground mine in the United States, halfway between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, in the Brooks Range, eighty miles north of the Arctic Circle. The haul road to the North Slope oil fields was over thirty miles away, so our operation depended on air transportation.

Everyone who came to work on the project, including me, was new to Alaska and couldn’t wait to fly over the mighty Yukon, with images of crystal-clear water surging through rocky canyons. We all arrived at Fairbanks via commercial airlines and flew in light aircraft north over a seemingly endless plain.

Our perspective was shattered when we came within sight of the river, a muddy, wide, sluggish stream meandering slowly across the almost featureless tundra, all in kind of a golden glow from the midnight sun.

The river in our mind’s eye was far to the east. Because of its remoteness, the Chandalar mining district was only discovered in 1909, well after the Alaska gold rush, with the slow development of placer (gravel) deposits, given the transportation limitations at the time.

It was very interesting and humbling for me to look back at those efforts and accomplishments from the perspective of a pilot flying effortlessly over the great Yukon Basin into the mountains. The tundra below, just scenery for me, was a year-round harsh reality for the treasure seekers seventy years before.

The gold found in the Brooks Range was a siren calling men to journey from wherever they caught the gold fever, but the country and the climate cut them no slack. Tundra is an impassable obstacle in the few warmer months, ripped by the winter ice into hummocks and potholes, so all travel had to be done in the frigid winter months with no sun. If you haven’t, read The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service.

In the fall, it was an easy boat trip from the coast up the slow-flowing Yukon, with plenty of fish to eat and no darkness. However, squadrons of mosquitoes and tiny no-see-ums were grateful for fresh blood. It was a relief when the first cold winter wave hit the camps of those waiting for frozen ground and snow for their sleds to head north.

The settlement of Beaver, near where the river intersects the Arctic Circle, was the base camp for those headed to the Chandalar, about 80 miles as I flew, but much more on the trails the terrain forced them to make. I thought about them a lot as I made many easy trips.

The first work done in the district was placer mining along the creeks that flowed away from the mother lode veins. The summer season is short, and flowing water is limited between spring and fall freezes, but the miners would sink shafts to the rich gravels in the permafrost, working all winter and washing the ore when it thawed.

All the supplies and equipment to do the work had to be sledded in, except for the game and fish. They were almost completely isolated for months. The work was hard, and it was cold and dark for months more than it was nicer. Long after they were gone, their equipment and cabins were still there, preserved in the cold, dry air of that Arctic desert.

I often thought about all they faced and endured as I pursued our work with modern equipment, a pretty comfortable camp, air support, and fairly good communication with the outside world, except when the Aurora, invisible in the midnight sun, reduced that to static, sometimes for days. Then, we had a taste of their isolation.

It was, and is, a humbling perspective.