Northway Exploration Project Shows Promise: Rock containing gold and silver deposits has been visible from the Alaska-Canada Highway for decades.

• Author: Jones, Patricia
• Position: Mining Special Section

Mineralized rocks from one of the state's most recent gold discoveries have been visible by thousands of Alaska Highway travelers for nearly 60 years.

Since construction of the Alaska-Canada highway in 1942, a hillside road cut at the Northway village junction has exposed rocks containing significant amounts of gold, silver and other valuable minerals.

"The fact that it is sitting on a road is doubly embarrassing to the mining community, because everyone has driven by it going 80 miles an hour," said Curt Freeman, a Fairbanks-based consulting geologist. "Here it is, in our back yard and no one knew it was here."

Despite some earlier exploration in the area by prospectors during the 1930s and 1940s, the area has remained virtually untouched. That is until a grassroots reconnaissance program on roadside cuts was conducted in 1999 by geologists hired by Doyon Ltd., the for-profit Native corporation in Interior Alaska.

During the summer of 1999, geologists gathered rock samples from a number of road cuts, including the bank along the Alaska Highway at the Northway junction, located about 50 miles southeast of Tok and about 40 miles from the Alaska-Canada border.

Small amounts of gold and arsenic were detected in the rock samples from the Northway Junction location, enough to warrant follow-up studies and more sampling, said Tom Bundtzen, a former state geologist who headed up that entry-level exploration program on Doyon land.

"I'm surprised it was missed. It's pretty obvious-the alteration in the rocks," Bundtzen said. "Native elders knew about gold in that hill, and there were reports of prospectors finding high-grade gold cavities back in the 1930s and 1940s close to where the Alaska Highway was built."

Bundtzen now serves as the Alaska field operations manager for North Star Exploration, a junior-sized mineral exploration firm based in Lakewood, Cob., which has an exclusive option to explore on about 7 million acres of Doyon-owned land.

North Star spent a little more than $2 million this year on exploration prospects in 10 different areas of that Doyon-owned land. Work ranged from Takotna, west of McGrath, to Kandik, near the Alaska/Canadian border.

The Northway prospect, dubbed Road Metal, topped North Star's priority list for exploration spending, accounting for about $600,000 of the company's prospecting budget in 2001.

That level of interest came after the initial rock sampling two years ago and a limited drill program conducted in the...