There's Gold in Them Thar Hills!

August 1 was a day jam-packed with a lot of truly Alaskan activities. As much I enjoyed my visit to Rika's Roadhouse in Delta Junction, my peek at the Trans Alaska Pipeline, and the Alaska Salmon Bake and Palace Theatre at Pioneer Park, my afternoon visit to the authentic Gold Dredge No. 8 and the El Dorado Gold Mine nine miles north of Fairbanks was the most memorable.

Our visit to Gold Dredge No. 8 began auspiciously with a hearty miner's lunch of stew and biscuits. I had worked up an appetite just thinking about gold panning and was happy to sit down to a meal. I was even happier when I was offered a dish of gold nugget ice cream, a yummy flavor made with sweet cream, caramel and toffee.

After lunch we toured the dredge. Between 1928 and 1959, 7.5 million ounces of gold were extracted from this five-deck dredge which functioned as a gigantic mechanical gold pan. So if it takes many tons of ore to produce a single ounce of gold, can you imagine how much ore was processed through this dredge over 31 years? I don't know the answer and judging by the look of the innards of the dredge, a whole lot of dirt passed through there.

We then boarded the El Dorado Gold Mine Train out to the mine where we would seek our fortune. Our conductor, Earl Hughes, provided lively commentary about this land and the lifestyle of rural Alaskan families. Along the way we saw a small miner's operation similar to those which dotted the landscape during the gold rush and traveled through a short permafrost tunnel where we saw the kinds of mineral and rock formations in which gold was most likely to be found. I'm sure glad I entered this tunnel riding a train rather than riding down in an open permafrost shaft in a tailing bucket!

At the gold camp we were met by husband and wife mining team Dexter (pictured at left) and Lynette "Yukon Yonda" Clark, who looked like they could have been plucked right out of the gold rush era one hundred years ago. They were very funny as they demonstrated prospecting, panning and placer/sluice mining. About 99.9% of recovered gold is in the form of dust, called 'fines'; a mere 1/10th of 1% is in the form of nuggets. Yukon Yonda was wearing a gold nugget necklace and to show us how a nugget is defined she dropped her gold nugget in the pan and it went 'plink'. She explained that a nugget is a piece of natural gold large enough to make a 'plink' when dropped in the pan.

At the end of the demonstration we were all given a poke of dirt and a pan to try our luck. Would I or would I not hit 'pay dirt'? There is a real technique to gold panning and I needed all the help I could get. I wasn't jiggling my pan aggressively enough because I was afraid I would lose the gold with the dirt. Lucky for me I received a little help from an experienced staff member. Unluckily, Steve and I together only collected 42 specks or 'fines' of gold. Oh how I had wanted to hear that 'plink' in the pan! We had our gold weighed and our total take was worth $18. I guess I won't be giving up my Cruise Diva position any time soon.

More photos of our golden adventure and sites in and around Fairbanks