First of course, you meet at the parking lot where you board your train.
You and 249 or so of your "friends" board the train where Earl serenades you for a while until the train is fully loaded. He sings songs such as North to Alaska and I've Been Everywhere - course he changes the words to that to I've Fished Everywhere. Once everyone is boarded, the train leaves the station and they show you a few mining scenes along the way. Including this replica of a piece of the Davidson Ditch.
Of course this is a small replica since the actual large pipes of Davidson Ditch are about 36" in diameter.
Above is an actual boarding house that has been moved here. They placed it quite close to the dredge which they would not do in an actual mining location.
This is the dredge - it is kind of old as they quit using it in 1959.
They talked about the dredge for a while and then showed us how to pan for gold. The young man above has a half dozen or so flakes of gold in his pan. You can see them near the top of his pan.
The dredge was huge. And once they told us about it, we moved on around the bend and got off the train so we could receive our poke. (a small bag of dirt with hopefully a few flakes of gold in it)
After we received our poke, we walked over to one of the many many tables and emptied our dirt into a gold pan and set to work separating the flakes from the dirt.
Look at those hard working miners.
After we got all of the dirt separated from the gold, we put the flakes into a little film canister and went into the cook shack to get it weighed. Morris had the most 3.5 grains worth about $18 - $20. The rest of us each had about 1.5 grains.
We looked around the store a bit, had some cookies and hot chocolate and then we went out to check out the dredge a little.
We were able to go inside the building and Suzy found lots of old tools in there she wanted to take to hang on her wall.
We weren't in there very long before they said our train was starting to board so we went to the train which took us a few hundred yards back to the parking lot. Morris quickly estimated that 4 trains a day times 250 people on each train and about $35 each meant the income for the train ride is about $35,000 a day - then they keep you trapped at their store for about an hour so this is definitely a "Gold Mine" for someone. We drove back to the house and ate some halibut sandwiches and then John and Morris went hiking while Suzy and I drove to Fairbanks since I had to take care of a little business at the bank.
We all got home and then the guys headed out to Murphy Dome and down to the Chatanika River while Suzy and I made plans for the next 4 days. They got home about 6:30 and we ate dinner, watched some TV and went to bed.
June 29th, we got up about 6:00 this morning to pack for our trip south. We didn't do a lot of stopping - the clouds were covering the mountains so we didn't even get a tiny glimpse of Denali. We stopped at Hurricane Gulch to get a picture of the $1.2 million bridge and the 265 foot drop to the creek but as usual...
too blasted many trees spoiling the view.
We drove on to the south view point for Denali and stopped to eat our lunch. While there, we chatted for a while with a young man who had spent the last 13 days riding his bicycle from Prudhom Bay. He had spent a couple of days in Denali Park and is now riding on to Anchorage so he can fly home and go back to work.
A little north of Willow, we turned east on the Hatcher Pass road so we could drive up to the historical mining area there and look around but the road is still closed at the pass due to snow. Since we couldn't go across and since Suzy was feeling a little rough today, we decided to just go ahead and check into our hotel to rest up a bit before tomorrow's adventures. Logistically, it was best to stay at Lucille Lake - so here we are once again a few hundred yards from the home of Sarah Palin - I wonder if we should go over and knock on the door. Probably not, huh.
Soon, we'll go and get a little dinner then some sleep and tomorrow we'll head east to Matanuska Glacier - going walking on the ice.
You guys are quite the tour guides! Never a dull moment..M & S are going to be so worn out when they get home they'll need a vacation!!
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