Alaska Controversy : Gold Mining Restrictions Dim Glitter in Denali National Park

The day a park ranger told the miners they had to stop digging for gold in the hills around here, two of the boys drove over to the ranger station and turned the American flag upside down.

It made them feel better, but it didn’t do much else. The flag soon was flying upright, and the mines were still where everybody, including the miners, would rather not have them--in the heart of Denali National Park.

These are trying times for gold miners in Alaska, as they struggle under stepped-up enforcement of environmental laws that for years were widely ignored. Here in Denali, the conflict is magnified.

The 6-million-acre park is cherished for its natural wonders: glaciers by the dozen, towering Mt. McKinley, and caribou, grizzly bears and moose that wander within snapshot distance of tour buses along the 90-mile park road.

But the rolling hills at the end of the road hold another kind of wonder--some of the richest placer gold deposits in Alaska. Since 1903, the earth here has yielded gold worth nearly $24 million. Geologists estimate that it still holds up to $1.2 billion in gold, silver and antimony.

Biggest Fear

Miners fear that most of that precious metal will never see daylight.

“What you have in Alaska is a whole industry being shut down,” said Roberta Wilson, owner of the Kantishna Roadhouse, a tourist lodge and miners’ hangout. “What we have in Kantishna is the best mining in Alaska being shut down.”

For decades, the Kantishna Hills mining district was a boisterous neighbor to Denali National Park, which was established in 1917. Then Congress enlarged the park in 1980, swallowing up Kantishna’s 196,000 acres.

Though placer mines hardly fit the image of a pristine park, they were there first and were allowed to remain as existing rights. New claims were prohibited.

During the first few years under park service control it was business as usual. Gold prices were high and long-idle mining claims sprouted bulldozers and sluice boxes.

Park officials did little to enforce environmental laws, even though their own studies showed that many miners were exceeding standards for the muddy water that flowed from their sluice boxes into the creeks.

“During the first couple of years, we weren’t able to get the money or manpower that we would have needed to comply,” said Dick Stenmark, deputy regional director for the park service in Anchorage. “The miners were having what amounted to a free lunch. We told them that sooner or later the process would catch up with them. Of course, it caught up with all of us.” A coalition of environmental groups sued the park service, claiming that the agency had not studied the environmental damage wrought by placer mines.

In July, 1985, a federal judge shut down all mining--30 mines in all--in Alaska’s 13 national parks, preserves and monuments, a total of 54 million acres.

He said a mine could operate only after its environmental impact had been assessed. In Denali and two other parks, mining was halted until detailed studies of cumulative impacts could be done.

The park service suddenly came up with money and manpower, turning a two-man Alaska mining program into a division with 20 employees and a $2.7-million annual budget. Even so, park officials say, the studies won’t be complete until July, 1989.

Meanwhile, the miners of Kantishna wait. Some have gone elsewhere, and some have gone bankrupt. Four years ago, 150 people worked 17 placer operations in Kantishna’s valleys. This summer, two miners live there, watching their equipment rust. A ghost town, then?

Not quite. Two flags fly at the Kantishna Roadhouse. One depicts a coiled snake and the slogan, “Don’t tread on me.” The other is a Confederate battle flag.

“They try to sweep us under the rug, but we’re still alive and kicking in Kantishna,” Wilson said. Her roadhouse, filled to capacity all summer with tourists, also serves as headquarters for disgruntled miners. Though they can’t mine, they visit frequently to check on equipment and complain about their common enemy.

The roadhouse, a modest wooden building wearing moose antlers over the front porch, sits on a five-acre mining claim in what Stenmark calls “beautiful downtown Kantishna.”

There is the tourist Kantishna, with log cabins for guests, a sauna by the creek and huskies chained up in the yard.

Then there is the old Kantishna. Out back, behind the cabins, sits the original roadhouse, a decaying log building surrounded by the remnants of 80 years of mining--burned-out generators, stacks of old bus seats, five trucks, a bulldozer, rusting fuel tanks, steel drums, metal scraps and sticks of lumber.

Since 1974, this corner of Denali has been home to Wilson, 33, one of Kantishna’s few year-round residents.

A diminutive woman with a soft but high-pitched voice, Wilson has adapted to the rigors of living where there is no road access seven months a year. It is a snowy, storm-racked place. Since 1974, there have been 12 plane crashes in the Kantishna Hills. Wilson has been in three of them.

“There are a lot easier places to mine gold,” she said.

This day, Wilson has escaped her roadhouse duties to give a visitor a tour of the Kantishna Hills. Bouncing along mining roads on an all-terrain vehicle, she narrated the natural history of a part of the park seen by few visitors.

Travel by private vehicle is restricted in the park, and most of the half-million visitors each year stay on buses, which turn around six miles short of Kantishna at Wonder Lake.

Cozy Valleys

The hills here are lower than the snowy peaks of the park’s southern tier, and the valleys are cozier, blanketed with spruce and willow. More than 100 species of alpine wildflowers bloom on the tundra-carpeted hills, and Wilson calls them out as the four-wheeler chugs along--mountain avens, arctic bell heather, woolly lousewort.

A 1984 park study concluded that 70% of Kantishna Hills is suitable for wilderness designation. The other 30%, the mined part, is a blot on the landscape or the element that adds character, depending on your point of view.

In either case, placer mines are not subtle. Miners work by separating gold flakes and nuggets from stream-bed dirt and rock that has eroded down from ore-bearing veins in the hills. To get his “color,” a miner must sort through tons of rock.

Bulldozers and front-end loaders dig up a stream channel and its flood plain, mix the earth with water and flush it down a long metal sluice box. The heavier gold sinks and is caught in riffles along the bottom of the sluice, while lighter gravel washes out the end.

The creek, which once may have meandered through a willow-covered valley, becomes a trench through a swath of gravel. The muddy sluice water, if not recycled or allowed to settle, rushes into the creek where it can foul drinking water and harm fish and other aquatic organisms for miles downstream.

Access roads, airstrips, bunkhouses, heavy equipment and storage shacks also despoil the landscape.

With settling ponds, filters, recycling and proper reclamation, placer mines can run cleanly--and increasing numbers of Alaska’s 400 or so miners are doing so.

At Kantishna, some miners thought they could win an exemption to the injunction by showing that their mines would not add to the cumulative environmental impact. But only one plan of operation was deemed complete enough for a response, and even then park officials said they couldn’t assess the mine’s effect until they finished their cumulative study.

Other miners have tried to sell out, but the park service doesn’t have the money, Stenmark says. Appraisers have estimated that it would cost $157 million to buy all the claims in Kantishna.

The park service has other ways of acquiring claims. If a miner misses annual deadlines for filing paper work, then the claim reverts to the government. Validity studies now being done will judge some claims to have too little gold for an economic deposit and the government will resume control.

Already, the number of mining claims in Alaska’s national parks has shrunk, Stenmark says. In 1978, there were 5,000 mining claims, most of them inactive. Today there are fewer than 2,000.

Someday, Denali Park Supt. Bob Cunningham said, Kantishna’s mines could be part of the park’s “interpretive theme.” Someday--when the miners are gone.

“It’s not a practical theme now because it’s a working area,” Cunningham said. “The miners themselves don’t want tourists poking through their operations.”

They also don’t want the park service poking through their operations, but that is wishful thinking. As long as the mines of Kantishna remain active, they will be among the most closely watched mines in Alaska. And that, in the end, may be what bothers Wilson and her independent friends the most.

Said Wilson: “Where else can you live 90 miles from the highway, at the end of a dirt road, 200 miles from a city, and have the government out on your doorstep every blooming day? I mean, leave me alone!”