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Okay, this is the continuation of my much-belated trip journal. I had Internet access troubles along the way, but I was able to keep up the journal mostly in real-time.
More tacky (but enjoyable) tourist stuff in the afternoon. The El Dorado Goldmine used to be a real and functional mine, but as mining became more expensive and difficult for small operators, the owner decided to run it as a visitor attraction instead. It's now run in partnership with the Binkley family, the ones who run the riverboat that we went on in the morning.
We took a replica railroad across the tundra, through a permafrost tunnel, and finally to the mine, while the conductor and commentator told us about the history of mining in Fairbanks. There, "Yukon Yonda" and Dexter Clark demonstrated how placer mining is done ("placer" has a short "a"). They're real gold miners -- they came to Alaska over 25 years ago, and were bitten by the gold bug, as Yonda said. They run their own small mines, as well as working at the El Dorado site.
The placer mine demonstration was fascinating. It looks like an almost horizontal, downward-slanting washboard, with different heights of boards for the washboard -- though the boards are made of metal. There's a holding pond of water that is pumped from the bottom to the top to be used and re-used. When they're ready to run a batch, the water is started running, and a steam shovel full of ore-containing dirt is dumped in gradually. The water drags it down the washboard, and since the gold is heavier than the dirt or rocks, it sinks and gets caught in the boards. The bottom is lined with Astroturf, and once the water is run through, they clear out the boards and the Astroturf and pan for what remains.
While we watched, they panned the first set of boards, where the pickings are supposed to be richest. This is the sample bin, since the quality of the rest of the run can be inferred from the quality of this set. This was a good one -- a nice assortment of gold flake, plus one nugget. Nuggets are valuable for themselves, as decorative gems, more so than their actual weight of gold. Yonda was wearing a necklace containing three gold nuggets, each weighing more than an ounce. She said that a nugget is defined as something that you can hear if you drop it on a pan, and we could hear the "clink" as she dropped the little nugget on the pan. Of course, the microphone helped.
The largest nugget she and Dexter had ever found was 19 ounces. It was on display in the gift shop, where they let us handle it -- though there was always someone keeping a watchful eye on it. The value of that one is about $25,000.
After the placer mining demonstration, we were each given a bag of high-quality ore (pay dirt) and given an opportunity to try our own hand at panning. I'd done it once before, and I'm reasonably certain my technique was okay, but there wasn't much gold when I finished. It measured out at 2.5 grains, or about $5 worth. I could have bought another bag for $10, but at my current rate of panning that didn't seem to be a winning proposition. My nephews didn't do much better, but my parents got about $15 worth each, as did my brother.
They did the weighing and valuing of the gold in the gift shop, where they (inevitably) sold little lockets that you could put the gold dust in for display. After all, what else can you do with a few grains of gold? I tried to persuade our family to combine all our takings into one pile that would be a reasonable fraction of an ounce, but couldn't get them to go along. So I still have my 2.5 grains in a film canister, which is what they provided for storage. I don't know what I'll do with it, but maybe it'll have some use as a souvenir.
That evening we went to the Pumphouse Restaurant. It's at a site that used to be an actual pumphouse for mining, but now has one of the original pumps out back pumping water into the river. We had a lovely view of the river, and the food was very good. I ordered salmon with a teriyaki sauce, and my nephew Daniel ordered reindeer steak, and we shared our meals. Both entrees were very good. The reindeer meat was rich in flavor, though rather tougher than most of the beef I've had. It's probably more like what beef from grass-fed cows would be. By the way, the difference between reindeer and caribou is that caribou and wild and reindeer are domesticated. Otherwise, they're the same species.
I tried to get on the Internet to write this update, but the lodge only had two terminals, and I didn't have my computer yet -- that would show up in the suitcase that went directly to the cruise ship -- so this was written several days after the fact. The rest of these updates should follow quickly, if I can figure out some way to get them from my computer (which has no Internet access) to one of the computers in the ship's Internet lounge. It's not feasible to compose on the ship's system, because it costs $.35 per minute to use those computers. My computer doesn't have a CD writer (just a reader), and while I have a floppy drive, I'm not sure that the computers on the ship do, even if I could hunt up a floppy disk. So this whole thing may have to wait until my return for posting on LJ. (11 July -- And, in fact, it did.)
More tacky (but enjoyable) tourist stuff in the afternoon. The El Dorado Goldmine used to be a real and functional mine, but as mining became more expensive and difficult for small operators, the owner decided to run it as a visitor attraction instead. It's now run in partnership with the Binkley family, the ones who run the riverboat that we went on in the morning.
We took a replica railroad across the tundra, through a permafrost tunnel, and finally to the mine, while the conductor and commentator told us about the history of mining in Fairbanks. There, "Yukon Yonda" and Dexter Clark demonstrated how placer mining is done ("placer" has a short "a"). They're real gold miners -- they came to Alaska over 25 years ago, and were bitten by the gold bug, as Yonda said. They run their own small mines, as well as working at the El Dorado site.
The placer mine demonstration was fascinating. It looks like an almost horizontal, downward-slanting washboard, with different heights of boards for the washboard -- though the boards are made of metal. There's a holding pond of water that is pumped from the bottom to the top to be used and re-used. When they're ready to run a batch, the water is started running, and a steam shovel full of ore-containing dirt is dumped in gradually. The water drags it down the washboard, and since the gold is heavier than the dirt or rocks, it sinks and gets caught in the boards. The bottom is lined with Astroturf, and once the water is run through, they clear out the boards and the Astroturf and pan for what remains.
While we watched, they panned the first set of boards, where the pickings are supposed to be richest. This is the sample bin, since the quality of the rest of the run can be inferred from the quality of this set. This was a good one -- a nice assortment of gold flake, plus one nugget. Nuggets are valuable for themselves, as decorative gems, more so than their actual weight of gold. Yonda was wearing a necklace containing three gold nuggets, each weighing more than an ounce. She said that a nugget is defined as something that you can hear if you drop it on a pan, and we could hear the "clink" as she dropped the little nugget on the pan. Of course, the microphone helped.
The largest nugget she and Dexter had ever found was 19 ounces. It was on display in the gift shop, where they let us handle it -- though there was always someone keeping a watchful eye on it. The value of that one is about $25,000.
After the placer mining demonstration, we were each given a bag of high-quality ore (pay dirt) and given an opportunity to try our own hand at panning. I'd done it once before, and I'm reasonably certain my technique was okay, but there wasn't much gold when I finished. It measured out at 2.5 grains, or about $5 worth. I could have bought another bag for $10, but at my current rate of panning that didn't seem to be a winning proposition. My nephews didn't do much better, but my parents got about $15 worth each, as did my brother.
They did the weighing and valuing of the gold in the gift shop, where they (inevitably) sold little lockets that you could put the gold dust in for display. After all, what else can you do with a few grains of gold? I tried to persuade our family to combine all our takings into one pile that would be a reasonable fraction of an ounce, but couldn't get them to go along. So I still have my 2.5 grains in a film canister, which is what they provided for storage. I don't know what I'll do with it, but maybe it'll have some use as a souvenir.
That evening we went to the Pumphouse Restaurant. It's at a site that used to be an actual pumphouse for mining, but now has one of the original pumps out back pumping water into the river. We had a lovely view of the river, and the food was very good. I ordered salmon with a teriyaki sauce, and my nephew Daniel ordered reindeer steak, and we shared our meals. Both entrees were very good. The reindeer meat was rich in flavor, though rather tougher than most of the beef I've had. It's probably more like what beef from grass-fed cows would be. By the way, the difference between reindeer and caribou is that caribou and wild and reindeer are domesticated. Otherwise, they're the same species.
I tried to get on the Internet to write this update, but the lodge only had two terminals, and I didn't have my computer yet -- that would show up in the suitcase that went directly to the cruise ship -- so this was written several days after the fact. The rest of these updates should follow quickly, if I can figure out some way to get them from my computer (which has no Internet access) to one of the computers in the ship's Internet lounge. It's not feasible to compose on the ship's system, because it costs $.35 per minute to use those computers. My computer doesn't have a CD writer (just a reader), and while I have a floppy drive, I'm not sure that the computers on the ship do, even if I could hunt up a floppy disk. So this whole thing may have to wait until my return for posting on LJ. (11 July -- And, in fact, it did.)
