The Dome Creek Ice Mines
Scroll down for photos or jump to new photos from 2004
Scroll down for photos or jump to new photos from 2004
4-20-03
On Saturday I set out on my bike for the small town
of Fox and points north, the original plan was to find the Dome Creek Dredge
and camp there overnight, as well as possibly locating the Davidson Tunnel
under the intersection of the Elliot Highway and Old Murphy Dome road.
After getting into Fox I biked past Dredge #8 ( the tourist attraction
and historical monument), climbed a tailings pile and took some pictures,
then headed out another road past the back end of a “keep out” sign. I
also stopped briefly to photograph the Alaska Pipeline where it came out
of the ground, it burrowed under to the south to pass beneath some roads,
and to the north to go over and through a hill. I circled around the Steese
highway and Goldstream road to look at a closed “mining camp” tourist attraction,
they had part of a rail loop and some tour train cars, plus some kind of
tunnel. Then I continued up the Steese past the NASA station (a log-cabin
checkpoint with razor-wire fencing blocked the road to the big dishes)
to look for a turnout where I’d seen some kind of tunnel last year. After
biking a few miles up this I hadn’t seen it, so I turned around and went
back to the junction with the Elliot Highway. I took a few photos of Fox
on the way through, it just confirms my theory that the entire town is
composed of gravel pits, salvage yards, and open pit mines. The place must
have the most dead cars and old mining equipment per square foot of any
place near Fairbanks.
I stopped off briefly to fill up my water bottles at the Fox
spring, then follwed the Elliot highway (mostly walking the bike due to
my heavy pack slowing me down too much) up to the sharp left-hand turn
where my map showed the Davidson tunnel ended. I went down the bank and
followed a road a ways, but stopped when I appeared to be walking into
someone's front yard. Then I went back, biked farther up, and went down
through the trees to the road past the house, I saw the end of it from
this side and walked closer, it turned out to be a storage shed full of
junk. I then followed another road down to the real house (cabin really)
which seemed to be unoccupied judging from the lack of tire tracks in the
road snow. From here I followed a ditch, which the tunnel was supposed
to supply water to, around to a series of collapsed timbers and a promising
dark spot in the side of a small embankment. I found the tunnel, which
even had rails going in (I'd thought it was only a water tunnel) but it
was collapsed, with pits and subsidences showing its path towards the hills.
Dissapointed, I headed back up the hill to my bike and continued up to
the summit of the road.
At the top I passed Old Murphy Dome road, then another two miles
down the other side of the hill I spotted the probable road down to the
Dome Camp area (I’d lost my map printout that showed this area). I bounced
down this through the slush and mud to a gate at the bottom, which I easily
lifted the bike over (there were four padlocks in a chain arrangement,
apparently 4 different people have access to whatever is down there, but
none had bothered to put up any trespassing signs).
I’d seen some water and dredge-like ponds off to the left on
the way down, so I first headed in that direction, I got stuck in bushes
so I went back and followed the road farther. This brought me to
a gravel pit area with a tunnel into the hillside across a creek, I stashed
the bike just off the road and headed down to take a look. First I climbed
a tailings pile to check for the dredge off to the right (towards the Pedro
Dome radar site), but no sign of it. I checked out the tunnel briefly,
it had some freakishly huge ice crystals and a sloped floor coated in ice
that could have sent me skating to the bottom if I’d gone past the berm
partway up. (this separated the first, corrugated-metal section from the
excavated section, and trapped some frozen water in the corrugated part).
I didn’t go further than the berm, but I plan to come back sometime (although
it looks like this is an active mine at least part of the year, there’s
a cabin and some old sheds and a bus).
I then headed up the hill behind the tunnel, and after getting
nearly lost in a series of odd intersecting and crosshatching trails and
old roads I found a small cabin and another gravel pit. I followed the
gravel pit north, past another active open-pit mine and another cabin,
until the sun started to go down over the ridge to the west. I then gave
up on finding the dredge in that direction and set up camp in a small stand
of trees. I cooked my chili and went to bed, read for a while and then
went to sleep.
I woke up early and dozed in and out for a
few hours, it seems that my campsite had sprouted several sharp pointy
rocks directly below my tent during the night. Eventually I got up,
broke camp and headed back. I found the mine and my bike again withough
too much trouble after crashing through some more woods. I figured that
I had time to follow the dirt road past the mine a little farther, so I
dropped off the bike and most of my gear part way since it was weighing
me down, then kept walking past the apparent end of the dredge tailings
towards some dirt piles. Rounding one, I finally spotted the dredge in
the distance, I eventually reached it and found the hull and half the lower
deck entombed in ice. This didn’t stop my boarding and exploration, in
fact it made for some really cool photos. As I explored the upper decks
some pissed-off ravens screamed at me, I later saw their nest on the bow
gantry. I spotted another old bus parked near yet another gravel pit to
the east, up towards Pedro dome. It must be a law of nature that you can’t
go for more than a few miles up an Alaskan dirt road without finding an
old bus that some redneck, hippy, or miner has lived in.
After checking out the dredge pretty throughouly,
and running the digital camera’s batteries down, I returned to my bike,
pushed it back up the hill, and had lunch at Hilltop Truckstop (a "Gold
Dredge Cheeseburger" and enourmous slice of chocolate pie). I then rode
and pushed to the real summit of the highway, and spent the rest of the
day on the way back to campus.
Gold Dredge # 5 was moved to Dome Creek, north of Fairbanks, in 1955.
This was the 2nd move for this dredge, originally constructed in 1929 at
Cleary Creek and moved to Little Eldorado Creek in 1947. All parts of the
dredge were labeled, and it was then taken apart, moved, and rebuilt. The
markings labeling each piece are still visible on the hull and structural
components.
Dredge #10, with better photos of what these look like.
Number 5 now rests in a small pond, with the hull sunk into mud and
water, the stacker collapsed, and many parts missing or taken by salvagers.
In the winter the water runs over and through the lower level, turning
the floor into a big industrial ice rink.
The interior and upper deck (well patched). Lots of large parts are
mysteriously missing.
The bow and stern areas, the last two photos show the fallen and ice-filled
stacker conveyer.
Some sheds and remnants of the dredge's support camp.
If you go more than a mile up any dirt road in Alaska, you'll find
an old bus.
It's just one of those facts of nature (there were two old busses near
the dredge)
New photos from 2004:
These were taken a year after the photos above, when the slightly warmer
weather had started to melt the dredge ice early. We checked out some additional
nearby mines but found the ice mine tunnel sealed up for some reason.
Mmm... Ice....
Inside and outside
Local dredge wildlife. The raven nest was still in the bow gantry and
now features some blue eggs. The raven was pretty pissed off at us and
kept harrasing us the whole time we were there. Porky appeared while we
were trying to determine the origin of some apparent moose droppings inside
the dredge, it looks like something tried to grab his ass and got a mouthfull
of pain.
Mmm... macro...thingy...
Old Grafitti. Thanks for showing us yer shootin' skills Ed.
Nearby mines. The busses serve as cheap housing for workers. We felt
the need to rummange through their cabinets looking for interesting artifacts,
but the only thing we took was a 5-year old cookie from an open package
(I don't know why Nopantsmonkey felt he needed to eat that) and some stale
candy corns.
Old hydraulic-mining water canons. The thing in the second photo is
a big scoop that can be pushed up against a hill by a bulldozer, and then
used to guide the soil washed down by the water cannon into a sluice.
