Remains From Juneau's Mining Past Crumbling

JUNEAU, Alaska - Gary Gillette squats on the river bank and picks three flecks of gold from the black silt.

"Wish we could find a bunch of that," he says, holding out a palm freckled with the grains. "Then we'd have some money to do some work."

During his decade as caretaker of the Last Chance Basin mining ruins, Gillette has explored nearly every other option for preserving what is left of the site. Lately, he's had about as much luck as the tourists panning for gold along the shores of Gold Creek.

There used to be a bridge across the creek and a road right up to the old Jualpa camp - once the heart of the world's largest hard-rock gold mining operation. When the mine closed in 1944, the Alaska-Juneau Mining Co. salvaged what was worthwhile of the equipment and left the rest.

In the 1960s, a train brought tourists from town to the camp to watch a melodrama called "Hoochinoo and Hotcakes." Later, the city turned the largest building into a rustic museum.

Even after the museum closed and a wayward stream turned the road into a gully, people still crossed the bridge and hiked up the hill to poke around the rusty remnants.

"It's just such a neat place," says Gillette, who lives in a small apartment in the 80-foot-long air compressor building.

Polished relics in display cases are fine, but here there is a sense of place that museums rarely can duplicate. "This is where things actually happened," Gillette says. "There is still grease on the floor and the machinery."

At its peak in the late 1930s, the mine employed 1,000 men and operated around the clock, except on Christmas and the Fourth of July. The Jualpa camp - short for Juneau, Alaska and Pennsylvania, the company's home state - made the mine nearly self-sufficient.

Camp construction began in 1911, and eventually included a dormitory, mess hall, a building for the main air compressor and another for the transformers that supplied electricity.

Crews laid two miles of railroad track through three tunnels connecting the mine to the Gastineau Channel rock mill, still visible on the side of Mount Roberts. Railcars were forged at the camp and there was a repair shop for the electric locomotives.

These days the compressor building has the closed-in, dirty smell of a mine shaft. Spiders have anchored webs to what is left of the artifacts brought here during the building's museum days: a small gold bouillon safe, some tools, a row of drill bits and a grinding wheel.

Looming over it all is the 11-foot wheel of the Ingersoll-Rand air compressor, joined to a smaller motor wheel by several continuous loops of 1 1/2-inch-thick rope. In its day, this was the largest air compressor in the world. A series of large pipes fed the compressed air to drills and other mining equipment.

A few years ago, Gillette went to the library and looked up the Ingersoll-Rand Co. address, on the chance the company might help save what was left of the giant's glory days.

"I didn't even get a letter from the public relations people - I got a check for $1,000," he says. Some of that money was used to build a shelter over a smaller compressor at the foot of nearby Perseverance trail.

More often, though, private and public groups have turned down requests for money to restore or even maintain the half-dozen standing camp buildings. "It would be a never-ending - never, never, never-ending cost," says Mary Pat Wyatt, curator of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum.

Corrugated metal siding and roofing has blown off some of the buildings, exposing the wood to weather and gradual rot. Snow sheds that once covered the railroad tracks lie in splintered piles along the steep hillside. Still lined up on the track, miniature railroad cars and locomotives are rusting.

Still, Juneau historians hoped to salvage what was left of the camp and maybe even reopen the museum. Those efforts were derailed in August.

Riled by record rainfall, Gold Creek suddenly jumped its banks and went around the wooden bridge, leaving it high and dry on the town side. Gillette was stranded on the out-of-town side.

Gillette has since rigged a pulley on a cable across the creek.

He gets his apartment rent-free in exchange for keeping an eye on the place. The loss of the bridge may help cut down on vandalism.

Twenty-five years ago, vandals burned down the mess hall and the dormitory that once housed 100 bachelor miners. Five years ago, firemen packed in water tanks and doused a smoldering fire under the locomotive repair shop.

In spite of the threat of vandals, Gillette is lobbying hard for a new bridge. Without one, firefighters may not be able to put out the next fire.

In any case, the buildings aren't likely to be around much longer, he says. "It would be nice for people to see 'em while they're here."

The mine closed down after the government fixed the price of gold at $35 an ounce and unions demanded higher wages and safer working conditions. That was almost 50 years ago, but Gillette still gets calls from retired miners who want another look.