Our first busy weekend of summer - Part 2

After a wonderful trip up the river on Saturday, we came home and immediately decided that on May 15 we would drive back up to Davidson Ditch and take the RZR out.  Hoping to catch up with the dall sheep again and see the new babies.

We grabbed some jerkey, string cheese, chips and headed north up the Steese Highway toward Circle.  58 miles out of Fairbanks we got to the turnoff into the White Mountains and Davidson Ditch.  Another 10 - 12 miles in and we were at the Quartz Creek Trail Head. 

Our excitement at getting there was soon extinguished however when we saw that the trail was still covered with that cold white stuff. 

We could see that someone else tried to make it up the trail and was unsuccessful.  There was no way we would be going up this trail today.

JW turned the truck around while I snapped a few pictures.  Then we ate a little jerkey and enjoyed the view before heading back to Fairbanks.  Not really anything too spectacular to see but you could see forever.

At Chatanika, we stopped to take a picuture of an old dredge. 

In the 30's and 40's there was a lot of gold mining in this area.  Basically dredges like this one scooped up dirt and rocks to search for placer gold.  For miles and miles in the valley near Chatanika, you can see stirred up piles of rocks as shown in the picture above.

I found an old photo of this dredge taken sometime between 1932 and 1947 with this note:  This dredge, although no longer operational, is still remarkably intact and can be seen where it ceased operation in the Chatanika Valley, across the Steese Highway from the Chatanika Lodge, about 27 miles north of Fairbanks.

We got back into Fairbanks and made a pit stop at the house.  Then we headed on up Murphy Dome road thinking we would take the trail down to the river.  I wanted to see how bad that road was because JW has ideas about heading down there and putting the boat in the Chatanika River.  I am not in favor of that idea so we'll see what happens.
 
We stopped about 5 miles from Murphy's Dome and offloaded the RZR.  JW drove it on up near the dome and then headed down the trail to the river.
 

More snow.  We drove on through the snow as far as we could until finally the snow got too deep.  When we saw that even an ATV with tracks on got stuck we knew it was time to turn around.  We returned to the truck and then went down an old logging road.  This road in contrast to snow and mud was extremely dusty.
 
We drove for about 12 miles until we came to the end of the trail. 
 

 
There are more trails in this area to explore when we have a few hours here or there.  A short drive to spend some time in the 4 wheeler.  It's been good to get back to the outdoors - even if the day didn't turn out quite as expected.