Finding True North

First-Hand Stories of the Booms that Built Modern Alaska

Molly Rettig

• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781602234444
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Melting sea ice and rumbling volcanoes. Sled dogs racing through unnamed valleys.

These were the images that came to mind when Molly Rettig moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to work as a reporter at the local newspaper. An avid environmentalist, she couldn't wait to explore the vast, untamed spaces that had largely been paved over on the east coast. But when her 72-year-old neighbor, Clutch, invites her on a tour of his gold mine—an 800-foot tunnel blasted into the side of his house–she begins to question many of her ideas about Alaska, and about herself.

In Finding True North, Rettig takes us on a gripping journey through Alaska's past that brings alive the state's magnificent country and its quirky, larger-than-life characters. She meets a trapper who harvests all she needs from the land, a bush pilot who taught himself how to fly, and an archaeologist who helped build an oil pipeline through pristine wilderness. While she learns how airplanes, mines, and oil fields have paved the way for newcomers like herself, she also stumbles upon a bigger question: what has this quest for Alaska's natural resources actually cost, and how much more is at stake?

This is a book about all the ways wild places teach us about ourselves. Rettig writes both playfully and honestly about how one place can be many things to many people—and how all of it can be true.

PART ONE

GOLD

Sourdough:

Sour on Alaska, not enough dough to get out.

Also refers to the early gold miners in Alaska, who wore a leather pouch of sourdough starter around their neck to keep it from freezing.

1

A Gold Rush Town

The tunnel is darker than a moonless night, the type of darkness that reaches inside of you, sucking out everything except your fear. I fumble with my headlamp and finally press the button, creating a cone of light that shatters the spell. The walls are not black at all. In fact, they’re made up of brown, shimmering schist. As I walk through, slightly hunched over, I think of the treasure contained in these walls, dragged out of here nearly a hundred years ago, one bucket at a time. The chunks of quartz glittering with gold that the whole world desired. This isn’t an empty void but a trail to treasure. It’s hard to believe I’ve probably skied over it a hundred times without even knowing it was here.

Ahead of me an old man shuffles down the tunnel, his gait stiffened by years of mining. His baritone voice echoes off the dank walls.

“Some people follow these veins forever and never find any gold.”

Clutch Lounsbury practically grew up in this tunnel. With a round belly and a white bushy beard, he could easily be mistaken for Santa Claus, if it weren’t for the chocolate-brown Carhartt bibs and Alaska Miners Association cap.

As we head deeper into the void, Clutch tells me how this tunnel was formed. How hot fluids surged up from the earth’s core millions of years ago and deposited a thick vein of ore in this crack. How researchers installed sensors down here during the Cold War to monitor nuclear activity in Russia. The time they filmed an episode of the reality show “Gold Rush Alaska” in this very spot. Stories are Clutch’s currency, and he never seems to run out. He flows from one subject to the next like a wide, braided river, always changing direction but never running dry.

The hill we’re walking through is one of many rising up from the Tanana River Valley in interior Alaska. Not quite a mountain, Ester Dome is one of the most prominent hills around Fairbanks, a spot so rich in gold that it has been mined almost continuously for more than a century. Most of the mine shafts that once crisscrossed underneath the dome have collapsed, taken out by time or explosives. But after eighty years, this one still stands, an underground tribute to the last great gold rush.

Not that the neighbors would ever know it was here. Less than two miles from my house, I’ve flown by it countless times on skis and bikes and snow machines without ever having a clue. There’s no scaffolding, no safety tape, no “Active Mining” signs. In fact, you would never suspect anything at all unless you walked through the trees, down the hill, and right through the front door of Clutch’s cabin. At first glance, the Arctic entryway would resemble any old house in Fairbanks. To the right—a living room, with an old floral sofa and a small wood stove, a stack of kindling ready to go. Then you would look to the left and see a wall of yellow spray foam, as bumpy and porous as exotic sea coral. And a gaping black hole shooting into the side of the hill, like a portal to another world. A Dall sheep head guards the entrance to the mine, next to a sign that says, “If it can’t be grown it must be mined.”

That’s where Clutch had handed me a yellow hard hat and asked if I was claustrophobic.

I’m not, but as we go deeper, I can feel my stomach tighten. I’ve never been in a gold mine before, let alone an eight-hundred-foot tunnel blasted into a Subarctic hillside. As a starry-eyed grad student, I came to Alaska to live in the woods, surrounded by trees and wildlife. To write stories about melting sea ice and hungry polar bears, showing the effects of climate change to the outside world. When I first arrived, I marveled at the wilderness that stretched in every direction, the moose browsing through the woods in the backyard and all the little footprints etched in the snow. A slice of nature in the raw, just as I’d imagined. This was before I learned my next-door neighbor had a gold mine in his living room.

As I look up, I notice there’s no wooden cribbing around the tunnel anymore. After the first sixty feet, the entire support structure has disappeared.

“This is all freestanding ground,” Clutch says breezily, waving a hand at the ceiling.

Great, I think, eyeing the jagged edges of schist just a few inches from my head. Above that, fifty feet of rock and soil separate us from the forest floor, and the fresh and airy world I’m used to. I try not to think of the weight of all that earth, held up by nothing but its own internal strength. This tunnel was gouged out of the rock with a chisel, a hammer, and a healthy dose of dynamite. By a single man with a carbide headlamp, chasing a childhood dream.

Clutch stops and places a large, meaty hand against the wall. This must be the spot.

“See that white milky stuff?” He rubs his thumb along a pale streak of minerals. “That’s what you’re lookin for when you’re mining.”

The stripe of quartz is only a couple inches wide, so subtle I wouldn’t have noticed it without the extra lumens of Clutch’s flashlight. The flecks of gold lodged inside are too miniscule for my eye. Only a miner would know they were there. I touch the rock gently, as if it’s a piece of my mom’s china.

“Where did it come from?” Even to my own ear, I sound like an awestruck kid on a geology field trip. And just like my fifth-grade teacher Mr. Dickson would have done, Clutch seizes the question like a loose football, setting off on a rambling explanation that I try my best to follow. He describes faults in the earth’s crust that sometimes move, like earthquakes, sliding his palms against each other roughly in opposite directions.

“It’s a lotta heat and pressure. Grinds the rock right into a clay, see?”

He rubs a reddish powder between his thumb and forefinger, and I think of rouge eye shadow. As the earth’s plates shift, it gives hot lava an opportunity to flow upward, dissolving minerals like gold and quartz from the rocks and carrying them toward the surface. As the molten liquid cools, it looks for a place to settle—in the various faults, cracks, nooks, and crannies under our feet—creating bodies of ore that have tantalized humans for thousands of years.

Buried in the quartz is a small hole, about the size of a silver dollar. Clutch leans toward it, as if peering into the past.

“That’s where I drilled a hole, 115 feet, lookin for values,” he says.

Using his dad’s old generator and a diamond-tipped drill bit, he took core samples of this entire tunnel, sending out feelers for gold in every direction.

“Got a ninety-eight percent core recovery on that.”

I have no idea what that means, but can tell by his tone that it must be quite a feat.

“Wow.”

A few hundred feet in, Clutch flicks his flashlight above our heads. I look up at a little hatch in the ceiling.

“What’s that? An escape tunnel?”

“Nope. It’s not a way out,” he explains. “It’s a way in.” Above the wooden door is a chute. The chute runs up, like a man hole, through thirty feet of rock, and terminates at a very special pocket of ground. The type that keeps miners awake at night—quartz speckled with high-grade ore.

“This was really rich in here, 26.9 ounces to the ton,” he said, a number that must speak for itself among miners. I nod to show I’m impressed.

As we continue walking, the tunnel feels like it will never end. Halfway to China, as Clutch likes to say. But we finally run into a wall of solid rock. The end of the vein, and of the dream that ran alongside it. This mine has lived through nearly a hundred years of history—through booms and busts, through wars, earthquakes, and floods. It was built right after the Great Depression, when people were hungry for opportunity, not above burrowing into the frozen earth looking for pay. Thousands of tons of ore were shuttled out of here in a hand-pushed cart, crushed, leached, and melted into gold sponges, then sold to the U.S. Treasury, which was collecting all the nation’s gold in a desperate attempt to resuscitate the economy.

As we walk back toward his living room, Clutch tells me how his father chased this vein into the mountain, following the gold flecks wherever they led. Like the old pans and iron pipe scattered around Ester Creek, Clutch is a product of the Gold Rush—an example of just how far people would go for something shiny.

I first met Clutch at the Golden Eagle, a smoky saloon slouched under the birch trees outside of Fairbanks. It sits at the foot of a hill like a ski lodge, except one corner of the porch is sagging, and the bathroom stalls don’t have doors. On the other hand, the beer is cheap and you can cook your own burgers the way you like them on the grill.

On a warm evening during my first summer in Alaska, I climbed the rickety wooden stairs. A group of bearded locals chatted on the porch, looking up to see if they recognized me. Three sled dogs rushed over, greeting me with a few quick sniffs before returning to their spots in the sun. It wasn’t every day a new person showed up, I guessed, especially a female. As I reached for the heavy pine door, I felt the buzz of finding myself somewhere new, of not knowing what was inside. An acrid smell hit me first. I saw the culprit in the middle of the room, a pot-bellied coal stove coated in black dust. There was a pool table in one corner and a piano in the other, the walls collaged like a teenager’s bedroom in pictures of dances, plays, and community parades. The wooden bar ran the length of the building, sturdy and no-nonsense, like the ones from old western movies. At the far end, two men with bushy beards huddled over their beers. I could almost see the stories on the tips of their tongues, just waiting for a fresh ear to sit down beside them. A woman with blond dreadlocks refilled a pint from the tap and handed it to a man who looked like Paul Bunyan.

Behind her, sunlight filtered through the windows stained yellow from cigarette smoke, illuminating rows of bottles like colorful Christmas lights. Though it appeared to be held together by little more than string, this bar had more character than the ones from my favorite TV shows.

The bartender turned to me.

“What can I get ya?”

Copying the customer in front me, I ordered a $2 “mystery beer.”

I hardly knew anyone in town yet. After finishing journalism school in Colorado, I had landed a job at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a small newspaper in the center of Alaska. Though it was thousands of miles away from any major media market, it seemed like the perfect place to cut my teeth as a science writer. As I’d sat in an organic coffee shop in downtown Boulder filling out the application, I daydreamed about the stories I would find in Alaska—stories of caribou herds and Indigenous hunters, climate change and offshore drilling. As I updated my resume, searching for different euphemisms for the word “intern,” in my mind I was already soaring around in bush planes and chasing sled dog races across the tundra. After a childhood of building lean-tos and snow forts in central Pennsylvania, this was a chance to experience the real thing. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became: I had to go to Alaska, for all the reasons I’d wanted to become a journalist in the first place.

I knew it would be a sharp contrast to Boulder, a college town at the foot of the Rockies, where a group of nature-lovers had created a bubble of wilderness around themselves. But after three years Boulder was starting to feel too perfect, too insulated from the problems of the outside world by Priuses and Patagonia puffy jackets (incidentally, the city had just passed the United States’ first self-imposed municipal carbon tax). I expected Alaska to be the opposite—a vast, all-encompassing wilderness dotted with a few outcrops of civilization, where people battled against the elements to scratch a living from the land. I knew I could handle the sunny slopes of Colorado, but would I be able to hack it in Alaska?

It would only be for a year, I figured, as I packed up my red Subaru wagon and loaded three pairs of skis onto the roof. I was aiming for an adventure just long enough to rack up some bylines and exploits before moving on to bigger and better things. As the ferry cut through the whale-laden waters of the Inside Passage, I thought of the stories that awaited me, stories of whale hunting and polar ice expeditions. It was early May when I cruised into Ester, a quirky village about ten miles from Fairbanks, where I’d be sharing a house with two biologists from the National Park Service.

Unlike the hippy paradise I had come from, Ester was a potpourri of miners, artists, professors, and dog mushers. It retained a backwoods feel, a smattering of homesteads wedged into the hillside with neat cords of firewood stacked outside—long piles for long winters. Four wheelers and snowmachines zipped up and down steep dirt roads named for minerals: Sapphire, Amethyst, Azurite. My house on Stone Road looked like it had been clipped from a postcard, built from giant Lincoln logs and tucked into the trees. And, at the bottom of the hill, just a five-minute walk from home, was our very own pub.

So far, Alaska was living up to my expectations. And so was the Golden Eagle bar. I grabbed a stool and spun it around. In a corner next to the dart boards, a dozen people sat around a wobbly table made from an old cable spool playing folk music. It was a weekly tradition at the Golden Eagle, according to my new roommates. Every Sunday, locals showed up with guitars, banjos, and harmonicas, and jammed into the night, while everyone else ate moose chili or homemade blueberry pie and tapped their feet to the music. Mustaches, flowy skirts, Harley-Davidson T-shirts—they made quite the ensemble, moving from Led Zeppelin to Bob Dylan without skipping a beat.

Parked in the corner, one person stood out among the colorful band. Clutch wore a tie-dyed necktie over tan Carhartt bibs. He was playing an instrument I’d never seen before, an upside-down metal washtub with a string attached to a sawed-off hockey stick. He held it upright on top of the tub, keeping the string taut like a bow. Sitting on a stool with both feet resting on the tub, he plucked the cord with his thumb, sipping Scotch on ice with the other hand. His fuzzy white beard framed a bulbous nose and round face tipped slightly into a smile, as if cooking up a new joke. He looked like a gold miner from a cartoon that had sprung to life. He looked. . .Alaskan.

During a break in the music, the group drifted to the bar and I wandered over to get a closer look at the washtub. It was painted blue with “Ester City Limits” blazed on the side in bright yellow. Clutch reappeared with a fresh Johnnie Walker.

“Do you play tub bass?”

He sounded so hopeful I felt bad saying no, I had no musical ability whatsoever.

“Oh, there’s nothin to it,” he said, setting his glass on the table and picking up the hockey stick. I could tell by the frayed grip that it had seen plenty of ice time.

“You set the pitch by changing the tension of the string. See? Like this.”

He moved the stick forward and backward as if shifting gears in a truck. When he strummed, the tub acted as a resonator, amplifying the vibration like the sound box of a guitar.

“There’s only one chord. You can’t mess it up.” And with that, he handed me the stick.

I started running into Clutch regularly on Sundays. His wife Lorna was usually there too, a petite lady with a head of white curls, a feisty fiddle player. Even without any musical skill, it didn’t take long to become part of the band. When Clutch saw me come in, he would hand me the hockey stick and head to the bar, returning with a glass of red wine for Lorna and a fresh batch of stories for me. His family had been mining in Fairbanks since the gold rush days, he told me. His grandparents came up by horse and sleigh, traveling hundreds of miles through the frozen, windblown wilderness, to pan the creeks for gold. His dad carried on the tradition, tunneling into the hillside to extract rich chunks of ore.

The mine was still there, carved into the back of his old cabin, not far from me.

“Wait.” I must have heard him wrong. “Inside your house, you mean?”

He chuckled, as if it were just the reaction he was going for.

“Yep, my dad ran a drift right behind the cabin. There was a little pinch of value and he just made a ninety and went up the hill and he did fairly good. There was some high-grade gold in there.”

Wow. Even for Fairbanks, that seemed pretty crazy. In Boulder, you couldn’t build a garage without a permit. Imagine what they’d say about a mine.

“Do you still mine it?”

“Oh, not anymore.” The glint in his eye faded. “It’s not really worth it.”

“Really? I thought gold prices were up these days,” I said, revealing everything I knew about mining in one quick burst.

“Well, first I’d have to get th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Gold
• Part Two: Air
• Part Three: Oil
• Part Four: Subsistence
• Index
• About the Author