Upper Tanana Bonanza: The glitter of Manh Choh gold.

• Author: Simonelli, Isaac Stone
• Position: MINING

Tetlin Lake in Alaska's eastern interior is situated in the Tetlin Passage, a corridor through the upper Tanana River valley where the Alaska Range and Wrangell Mountains create a funnel for migratory birds. Tetlin Lake also feeds the Tetlin River, a short tributary of the Tanana. Both are named for the Athabascan village of Tetlin, located along the riverbank within hiking distance of both the Tanana and the lake.

The Upper Tanana Athabascan language gives the lake a different name: Manh Choh, which simply means "big lake,"

Manh Choh is also the name of a nearby gold mining development. Until last year, it had been called the Peak project, and the developer is still known as Peak Gold, a joint venture of Texas-based Contango ORE and Ontario-based Kinross Gold. The companies agreed to change the name of the project at the suggestion of the Tetlin tribal council and village chief Michael Sam.

"We look forward to the safe and responsible development of the project and the positive benefits it is expected to generate for our community," Sam says. "We also look forward to further building a relationship with Kinross, a company with a strong track record in Alaska."

The Manh Choh project is designed as an open pit mine about 12 miles west of Tetlin, or 10 miles south of Tok. To shrink both costs and environmental impact, ore will be trucked about 250 miles to the outskirts of Fairbanks for processing at Fort Knox, the largest producing gold mine in Alaska, also owned by Kinross.

"Utilizing existing infrastructure makes this project possible and also reduces the environmental footprint of the operation," Kinross says on its Manh Choh website.

At 4.1 grams of gold per tonne of milled ore, the deposit is considered relatively high grade for an open pit mine. The developers estimate at least 1.2 million ounces of recoverable gold, which would keep the mine operating for about four and a half years.

Short in the life of a very old village; a huge windfall in the life of a very small village.

Off the Road

A gold rush passed through Tetlin once before. Stampeders heading to Chisana, in what is now Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, bought provisions at a trading post along the Tetlin River in 1913. The village swelled... to a few dozen people.

Today, Tetlin has a population of 126 from twenty-five families, according to the US Census Bureau. A dirt road connects Tetlin to the stretch of Alaska Highway between the Canadian border and Tok.

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