2. Miscellaneous

1983-09 Butte Creek Mine, Circle District, Alaska

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  • Bleak? You bet. Here, we've scraped off the overburden, pushed it up the hill to the left, and the Terex is ready to scrape a load of supposed paydirt up to the sluice. The box is on the left, connected by several hundred feet of hydraulic pipe to a pump in an ice-free eddy in the creek. The sluice itself runs down to the impoundment in Butte Creek on the right. And if it looks bleak, it's hard to describe how far things deteriorate when you add another sense. Placer mines stink. There are a lot of places where you can be overwhelmed by Diesel, but placer mines add a pervasive stench of thawed Pleistocene organic material that's been munched on for centuries by anaerobic bacteria. It's a memory that never leaves. Well, maybe never. It's one of the things I look forward to with Alzheimer's.

    Bleak? You bet. Here, we've scraped off the overburden, pushed it up the hill to the left, and the Terex is ready to scrape a load of supposed paydirt up to the sluice. The box is on the left, connected by several hundred feet of hydraulic pipe to a pump in an ice-free eddy in the creek. The sluice itself runs down to the impoundment in Butte Creek on the right. And if it looks bleak, it's hard to describe how far things deteriorate when you add another sense. Placer mines stink. There are a lot of places where you can be overwhelmed by Diesel, but placer mines add a pervasive stench of thawed Pleistocene organic material that's been munched on for centuries by anaerobic bacteria. It's a memory that never leaves. Well, maybe never. It's one of the things I look forward to with Alzheimer's.

  • Pierre Muskrat (in back), Rotten Dog, and I on the sluice. The borrowed Terex temporarily retired Jezebel, a front-winch cable-blade D7. Damn, I hated that thing. The biblical Jezebel was murdered by her eunuchs, and they tossed her body off the balcony to be eaten by the dogs in the street. Arranging the Caterpillar equivalent for 'my' Jezebel would've been too good for her. On 'sluicing days' (a term that still makes my flesh crawl after all these years), I got to drive the hydraulic D6 to doze the tailings away from the foot of the sluice, where it's always COLD and WET. Oh, yeah. And keep an eagle eye riveted on the sluice, ready at the first hint of a jam to park the D6 and run like hell the quarter mile to kill the water pump. Apart from the physical misery, pushing washed gravel around through a cascade of 32 degree F water with a hydraulic Cat was a dream compared to trying to scrape embedded spruce logs, loess, and loon shit (the technical term geologists use for what's left after permafrost thaws) with Jezebel. Did I mention she had brakes on only one track?

    Pierre Muskrat (in back), Rotten Dog, and I on the sluice. The borrowed Terex temporarily retired Jezebel, a front-winch cable-blade D7. Damn, I hated that thing. The biblical Jezebel was murdered by her eunuchs, and they tossed her body off the balcony to be eaten by the dogs in the street. Arranging the Caterpillar equivalent for 'my' Jezebel would've been too good for her. On 'sluicing days' (a term that still makes my flesh crawl after all these years), I got to drive the hydraulic D6 to doze the tailings away from the foot of the sluice, where it's always COLD and WET. Oh, yeah. And keep an eagle eye riveted on the sluice, ready at the first hint of a jam to park the D6 and run like hell the quarter mile to kill the water pump. Apart from the physical misery, pushing washed gravel around through a cascade of 32 degree F water with a hydraulic Cat was a dream compared to trying to scrape embedded spruce logs, loess, and loon shit (the technical term geologists use for what's left after permafrost thaws) with Jezebel. Did I mention she had brakes on only one track?

  • We aren't actually on break. Although many advantages came with the borrowed Terex over the 'little' D6, it enabled loading HUGE boulders and MIGHTY chunks of permafrost into the sluice box. (That apparatus on the back operates 6 foot tall ripper blades.) These had to be broken into pieces of the right size and shape to be hoisted out with chains rigged to the Terex's bucket. During the lifting, Pierre got to drive the Terex and I got to stand down down in the box, watch, guide, and contemplate mortality. In those times, I just couldn't clear my mind of the Robert Service lines in Spell of the Yukon There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair. Or rusty chains.

    We aren't actually on break. Although many advantages came with the borrowed Terex over the 'little' D6, it enabled loading HUGE boulders and MIGHTY chunks of permafrost into the sluice box. (That apparatus on the back operates 6 foot tall ripper blades.) These had to be broken into pieces of the right size and shape to be hoisted out with chains rigged to the Terex's bucket. During the lifting, Pierre got to drive the Terex and I got to stand down down in the box, watch, guide, and contemplate mortality. In those times, I just couldn't clear my mind of the Robert Service lines in Spell of the Yukon There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair. Or rusty chains.

  • Home, sweet Home.

    Home, sweet Home.

  • Rotten Cat (left) and Rotten Dog (right).

    Rotten Cat (left) and Rotten Dog (right).

  • Rotten Dog. Cute. But Trouble.

    Rotten Dog. Cute. But Trouble.

  • Happiest day of my life. Taking the Cats over the river to winter storage. I'm in the D6, and Pierre is on the D7. When I first arrived, the D6 had a proper electric start pony motor, which we could use to start it in the morning and jump-start the D7. Things deteriorated as the season went on, and at the end, we were hand-cranking the D7 alive and using it to jump-start the D6. Notice the bent crank handle. When we cranked the D7, Pierre always got the left hand side, where a kickback would just rip the handle out of his hands. On my side, the handle would come straight at the point where sternum meets clavicles. I had to be tensed to jump off backwards to keep from being disemboweled.

    Happiest day of my life. Taking the Cats over the river to winter storage. I'm in the D6, and Pierre is on the D7. When I first arrived, the D6 had a proper electric start pony motor, which we could use to start it in the morning and jump-start the D7. Things deteriorated as the season went on, and at the end, we were hand-cranking the D7 alive and using it to jump-start the D6. Notice the bent crank handle. When we cranked the D7, Pierre always got the left hand side, where a kickback would just rip the handle out of his hands. On my side, the handle would come straight at the point where sternum meets clavicles. I had to be tensed to jump off backwards to keep from being disemboweled.

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