hatcher pass gold is back

and the same tunnels the war shut down are drilling again.

Eighty-some years ago, a wartime order closed the gold mines up Hatcher Pass. This summer, a mining company paid almost nineteen million dollars for them.

The names alone are worth the story: Lucky Shot. War Baby. Coleman. Between nineteen twenty-two and nineteen forty-two, those tunnels produced roughly a quarter million ounces of gold, until the government halted gold mining nationwide to push everything toward the war effort.

Now two drill rigs are running underground, and about thirty people work the site year-round. Some of the core samples coming up are what the industry calls bonanza grade. The company held an open house at the end of July, complete with a rock-breaking ceremony.

Nothing is being produced yet. The real decision, whether to go into full production, is expected in about a year and a half. If it's a go, the ore would ride trucks down to Willow and then the railroad, either north toward Fairbanks or south to Seward.

For everyone who has driven the Pass and wondered about the old workings on the mountainside, that history stopped being a museum piece this summer. It's a payroll again, thirty jobs and counting, with the go or no-go call coming next year.