Steven’s been a fan of the Discovery Channel show Gold Rush (which is set in Alaska) for a long time, so when we found out we were going to Alaska, we knew we had to make plans to pan for gold!

We researched a few places, and ended up going to Crow Creek Gold Mine in Girdwood on Monday. The set-up is neat – it’s a mining area that was active starting in 1897 and well in to the 1900s. There aren’t records for all of the years mined, but during the mid 1920s to 1940s, the mine averaged 700 ounces a month, which in today’s prices equates to over a million dollars earned a month! The largest nugget ever found there was the size of a chicken’s egg and weighed four and a half ounces. (<– this information is from the handout I grabbed on site.)

Crow Creek is now a national historic site, and the Toohey family has been taking care of it since 1969. Some of the original mining buildings still stand, and some of the buildings are replicas. The grounds are well maintained with beautiful flowers (we couldn’t believe how many different flowers we saw in Alaska!). And of course, there are stunning views of nearby mountains.

But we weren’t there for history or beauty. We were there to get RICH! Ha!

Quite a bit of our group went. Monday was the day we all started to split up and do different things depending on people’s interests and when they were leaving town, but I am not surprised we had a big group – who isn’t interested in finding GOLD?! I was surprised Alyssa (my new(!!!) sister-in-law) had never panned for gold before! I asked her if that was really dorky and if her local Alaskan friends would make fun of her for going. No comment, ha!

From L to R: Aunt Sue, Mom, Steven, Me, Snistina, Will, Jacob & Katie. Missing: Nick, Alyssa and the boys.

The mine is open from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm and it costs $20 to pan (they provide all of the equipment and a lesson) or $10 to get in and tour/watch others pan. You have to have a car to get there – it was a bit of a drive through a beautiful (of course) forest to get there.

After paying and eating the lunches we brought, we got our lesson in panning. There are four steps:

1. After putting your “material” (soil) in the pan, swirl around water and empty it out. Repeat until the water is clear.
2. Pick the “big” (size of a fingernail) rocks out of your material.
3. Tap the side of the pan to make the gold go to the bottom. Gold is heavier so that’s where it will settle.
4. Swirl around water in your pan, carefully removing the non-gold material from the top until all that’s left is the gold on the bottom.

Our teacher showing us the four steps of gold panning.

We were all given a small bag of material to practice with, that was guaranteed to have three to five gold flakes in it.

And sure enough, I found three in mine!

After your lesson, you do a short (less than ten minute) hike down to the creek to pan on your own. They have shovels, buckets and sluice boxes you can use if you want, or you can just use your pan. When we were grabbing our shovels, the worker gave a few of us an advanced lesson, showing how we could start working with more material in our pan than what we practiced with.

Steven got to work right away, finding a “good” spot to get a bucket of dirt from to pan. And it must have been good – he actually found two tiny specks of gold!

And… I think he’s the only one who did find anything  (correction:) Steven and Will were the only ones to find anything, beyond what was given to us to practice with. But we all had a lot of fun panning, and playing in the dirt and water.

We ended up panning and checking out the buildings for quite a few hours. When my mom and I were walking back from the river, we noticed the Alyeska ski lodge way off in the distance. I remembered seeing an ad for riding the tram up there and decided to call and see how much it cost – $25. Kind of steep, but I figured the views would be neat from up that high, so after we finished panning, Steven, myself and my aunt rode the tram.

Red arrow pointing to the ski lodge in the mountain

From the lodge you could see the river and little mining village where we just were! You could also see some of the glaciers in the mountains (neat!) and Turnagain Arm. And, a bit of snow! Ha, we were NOT dressed to be so high up in a mountain, but it was fine, because we didn’t stay up there too long.

On the ride down, we saw a lot of people hiking the switchback trails up the mountain. I’d definitely like to do more hiking the next time we’re back! And more panning. Maybe we should just spend a month doing both! Hike and pan a little, hike and pan…