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There’s gold in them there hills
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After a couple of days hanging around Anchorage stocking up on reading material and groceries, getting the brakes checked, the laptop rebuilt and the laundry done, we were keen to get out of the city. It’s a nice enough town – spacious and spread out between the broad tidal reaches of the Ship river and Turnagain arm on one side and mountains on the other, but as we have discovered a few times now, cities are no fun when you’re trying to navigate them in a 24 foot RV with three kids in the back seat.
We didn’t hit the road till late, so had only made about an hour out of Anchorage when we came across a sign for Crow Creek Mine – Hiking, Gold Panning, Camping. Sounded perfect. And as we pulled up in the small campground, a 6 year old girl spotted the kids bikes on the back of our RV and tore across the campground on her bike – ‘Do you have a daughter!?”. Well, as a matter of fact… (and when it turned out she had an 8 year old sister, the kids were in raptures.) It turns out that Crow Creek Mine was once the site of SouthEast Alaska’s most productive gold mining, and it has the historical remains of the old miners equipment and buildings in a picturesque setting along a section the original Iditarod trail – but the main focus of attention for campers here is the lure of gold. Apparently there is plenty still in the creek, and as we are discovering, Alaskans take their outdoor pursuits pretty seriously. While we turned up the next morning with a rented goldpan, shovel and a bucket, most of the locals had sluiceboxes (a long tray that you place in a running stream, shovel your gravel in one end and let the running water sort the rocks from your fortune in gold), and our new neighbours were fully equipped with a 1.5inch dredge (a petrol driven pump that sucks up your water and gravel into your sluicebox). Still, no matter how you approach the matter, it’s still a lot of hard work – digging and shoveling gravel and levering boulders – all in freezing river water. And without much to show for our initial efforts, the kids soon took off with their new friends to go exploring and clamber over rocks instead. But I’d seen enough tiny flecks of color to figure I was onto something, and stuck with digging in a deep hole behind a boulder in the icy running water – till the pain of the cold was gone and I couldn’t grip the shovel anymore… Back at the campsite, we compared the day’s haul – our neighbours had a little vial with their flakes of gold and a few ‘tingers’ (big enough to make a ‘ting’ when dropped into the bottom of the pan), and we had a couple of flakes to show for the dull burning ache in my forearms… Digby picked up the little plastic container with our treasures in it for a closer look, took the lid off and tossed the contents into the grass - “AAAARGH!!!!” (or something to that effect) we cried. And he turned, bottom lip trembling, a picture of innocent confusion, to face the shock and horror of his father and brother – “but I was just throwing the water out…” |
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