DJ Ed Alexander
"The Old Prospector"
My Tales:
March 26, 2008 - My Introduction to Gold:
I was doing my morning show on the Public Radio station in Kotzebue, Alaska, 30 miles above the Arctic Circle. An instructor from the local community college was a guest on my show, and we were going to talk about the small engine repair class that he was taking registrations for. But I remembered him from the messages he would call in to our hourly Tundra Telegraph broadcasts on-the-air. They were messages to and from his gold mine 100 miles from town. So after we talked a bit about his class offerings, we talked about his background, which of course included his gold mining. And that's where we spent 15 minutes of the 20 minute interview. I asked silly questions like, "Do you ship the gold out in dumpster-sized bins?" He answered that, no, he carried it out himself. I was determined to find out more. Right away I accepted his invitation to visit the diggings that weekend.
The flight over there was about $50 each way, on the regular mail and passenger run out to two other villages. As we landed, I saw the miners' joke of a mailbox atop a ten foot pole. Airmail. I toured the grounds, saw the sluice boxes and the settling ponds and the big holes they were digging the gold laden mud out of with a bulldozer. The capper was at supper that night, when one miner opened up his safe and dumped a small plastic jar of nuggets onto a dinner plate.
It was heaped high with gold nuggets. It was from just one month.the best month they ever had, one that they'd worked 5 years to get to. Then he says, "I've got a little something else we found here." And he brought up his other hand to reveal a nugget the size of a pack of cigarettes. The same shape, pretty much, too, except for slanted sides. I had no idea a nugget could get so big. It was a rock! I held that in my hand, tossed up a little way to hear it plop back into my palm. Hoo boy! I had gold fever!
June 12, 2008 - My Days of Gold Mining in Alaska
After my introduction to gold mining there in Candle, I couldn't wait to get back. I'd fly there on the weekends and spend my time manning the "giant," a huge hose that gushed water on the loads of gold-laden mud that the miners would dump into the sluice box by the truckload. I'd be aiming the high-pressure stream of water at the gobs of gooey dirt, blasting it apart to free all the particles of gold. As the dirt mounds would break apart, they would calve like a galcier and splash into the sluice box. Then I'd aim the "giant" at another glob and go to work on that. And all the while, I would contemplate whatever geat meal the camp cook would have waiting at supper hour.
This gold-wahing plant was a two-story affair. The main sluice box was a metal trough that came off a huge bin that the earth was unloaded into by dump truck. After I broke the dirt up with the giant hose, it washed down the sluice box . Any gold particles, 13 times heavier than water, would work their way down to the bottom and be trapped in the carpeting under metal screens that lined the bottom of the sluice boxes. The mud that hadn't broken up yet would smash into a metal grate where the sluice box angled down in the opposite direction. All the while, any gold would be dropping to the bottom. At the end of the day, we'd shut the water off, take off the metal screens from the bottom of the sluice boxes, and wash the gold flakes out of the carpeting. And we'd find maybe a few small nuggets in there, too...typically the size of the eraser on the end of a pencil. The majority of the take was in gold dust.
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