Day trip up the Steese Highway to Nome Creek- 5-28-2014
Yesterday I took a day trip up to Nome Creek to check out the cultural resources there. The photo above is of the Nome Creek Valley from the top of the ridge between Nome...
Tagged: mining history
Old Gilmore/McCarty stamp mill near Fairbanks may soon disappear
Gilmore McCarty mill as it looked in the 1990s Fairbanks Creek, 20 miles northeast of town, was one of the most productive gold producing areas around Fairbanks. Genevieve Parker Metcalfe, who was the...
Tisha’s schoolhouse and old town of Chicken, Alaska still attract visitors
Old Chicken schoolhouse as it looked in the 1990s The first time we visited Chicken in the 1990s there was little you could see from the Taylor highway. Downtown Chicken (adjacent to the highway)...
Log cabin post office is about the only building left along historic Valdez Creek
Valdez Creek post office in the 1990s The small log cabin shown in the drawing, built by miner Leburn Wickersham in the early 1900s, is one of the last buildings at the old mining...
Remote Sourdough Creek mining camp offered modern conveniences in 1930s
Sourdough Creek flows south out of the White Mountains and empties into the Chatanika River at about 66 Mile Steese Highway. Several miles upstream, along Sourdough Creek Road, lies the old Zimmerman/Carlson mining camp....
Nordale Adit at Homestake mine a remnant of Fairbanks hard-rock mining
Before the development of Fort Knox gold mine northeast of Fairbanks, it’s likely that most people had only heard about the Fairbanks area’s placer gold production. The early drift mines and later dredges that...
Ester Gold Camp a reminder of the town’s heyday
The Ester Gold Camp hotel, constructed in the 1930s, was originally a mess hall-bunkhouse for the Fairbanks Exploration Company. The structure is at the center of Ester Camp Historic District, located in Ester,...
Samppi Mine near Chatanika typical of old drift mines that dot Interior Alaska
The giant dredges scattered along the creeks around Fairbanks are testament to the decades when dredging dominated local gold production, just as the headframes and mill buildings in the hills are reminders of hard-rock...
McCarty Stamp Mill looks like it won’t survive much longer
On the same day we visited the Nordale Adit at the head of Wolf Creek, we also drove to the other side of the ridge and hiked in to the McCarty Stamp Mill at...
Headframe and garage all that’s left at historic Nordale Adit
We drove out to the Wolf Creek area northeast of Fairbanks this weekend to take a look at the Nordale Adit—the entrance to an old hard-rock gold mine. The mine (on the north side...
