For more than the fun of it.

• Author: Cutler, Debbie
• Position: Placer mining in Alaska

Environmentalists want clean creeks. Placer miners say they're trying to shut them down. These days the rich rewards are hard to come by.

They are the small business of placer mining. The sort who take mining seriously enough to invest several years pay into dredging equipment; who work their claims from the ground's thaw to early winter, who spend nearly every waking hour in search of that shine of rock. They are nothing like your Red Dogs, or your Fort Knoxes.

They often sleep at their claim - some in tents, some in rickety shacks, some in mobile homes towed across a frozen river in the dark of winter. They have been called the end-of-the-road people, those who may or may not fit into mainstream society, those who find gold mining a necessary relief valve to societal pressures.

"There's a real mystique about gold mining," said Steve Borell, executive director of Alaska Miners Association. "It's an entirely different lifestyle than most have. There are thousands of people who have dreams of gold mining. One day, they may be sitting in Miami, or some other city, and think 'man, I'd like to go to Alaska. That would be fun.' Some do come. Others see their dreams and opportunities slowly growing closed."

Historically, about 71 percent of Alaska's total gold production is in the placer industry; and about 200 placer mines are in operation in Alaska each year. Most placer mines are family owned - or at most, employ only a few individuals.

An average small placer mine produces about 690 ounces of gold each year. Statewide, nearly 800-900 jobs result from placer mining annually; with approximately 280 of those from recreational placer mining.

The Gravitational Pull

Unlike hard rock miners who go after gold still intact in the mountain, placer miners go after the remnants. As erosion occurs, mountainous veins are exposed, and rocks carrying bits of vein tumble down.

In a gravitational pull, the gold-laden rocks settle deep beneath the soil, or make their way into rivers and streams, rolling along in a trek toward the Great Pacific. As they churn, gold, 19 times heavier than water, separates, settling into muck beneath glacier-silt waters.

Some gold has been ground so fine it is turned into flour. Some gold looks like flecks of fish food. Some gold is dark - black sand they call it - distinctive only by weight. Some are rocks: Big, beautiful nuggets, dimpled from the imprint of their protective shells, perhaps still holding the shapes of the channels they filled eons ago as hot liquid.

To retrieve the gold settled in the bottom of stream beds, many miners use suction dredges, which excavate alluvial deposits of sand, silt and clay from riverbed bottoms for processing.

Open-cut placer miners go after the gold that's deep within the earth. Bulldozers plow through overburden, the top layers of soil and rock, until they reach paydirt. It is in this paydirt, the last six feet of earth before bedrock, that gold will likely be found.

In both types of operations, sluice boxes are generally used to separate the gold from the dirt. As water and ore flow down the sluice's sloped trough, the density of gold causes it to drop between the sluice's ridges. With suction mining, the sluice box is usually attached to the dredge, and backwash is sent back into the river.

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