by Jerold Last
“And with zero cost of living and nowhere to spend the money,” continued Desiree, “we can save almost all we earn over summer vacation, so the job pays for a large part of the cost for us to attend college the rest of the year. It’s a good deal for everyone working here because room and board are included as a benefit. And the food’s OK.”
Cathy asked us, “What did you two do this afternoon?”
“We rode over to Wonder Lake and the campgrounds on a couple of your mountain bikes,” replied Suzanne. “The scenery was wonderful! We both needed the exercise after that bus ride, which felt like it took forever.”
Cathy smiled. “It actually does take forever, you know? Do you have any plans made for tomorrow yet? I’d recommend the fishing and one of the guided bike tours with Lloyd some time while you’re staying here. How ‘bout you, Desiree? What’s your favorite activity to recommend for a tourist here at the Lodge?”
Desiree considered the question for a moment. “I’d spend all my time hiking and biking in the woods and around the creek if I didn’t have to work. This wilderness always has something new and different to show you if you just keep your eyes open.”
The three guest couples nodded their agreement with these suggestions. They all told us what they’d seen in the last couple of days and how they wished they had more time here than a few days, since all three couples were planning to leave Denali in the next day or two. The Spotswoods were taking a bus ride tomorrow morning to connect with a luxury cruise ship in Seward for the second half of their planned vacation. The other two couples would take the train back to Anchorage tomorrow where they had planes to catch as they returned home from their vacations.
Cathy apologized to me for the party being so quiet. “We usually do a lot better, but tonight’s our slow night every week. We’ll get a new batch of tourists in tomorrow, and the regulars from the Park and concession staff will be out here to share some beer and nibblies so you’ll get a chance to talk to all the summer and all-year-round Park inhabitants. I think you’ll enjoy that a lot. In the meantime, please excuse us. I have to do some laundry and wash my hair, so it’s going to be an early night for me. See you all tomorrow!”
Cathy and Desiree walked off. Shortly afterwards we headed back to our cabin.
“What do you think, Roger?” asked Suzanne. “Can we take everyone we just talked to off of the suspect list?”
“The tourists, yes. But I don’t think I’m ready to rule out Cathy or Desiree as suspects yet. If either of them had a motive they’re certainly strong enough and might have had access to the dart rifle. Let’s just say both are still on the list, tending toward the lower half at this time.”
Chapter11. There’s gold in them thar’ creeks
The next morning began with a big early breakfast before we hurried off to our first scheduled activity, panning gold in Moose Creek a few hundred feet away from the front door of the Roadhouse. It would be a busy day, with several guided tours planned.
Eight tourists, two of them us, stood listening to our guide. The creek was about 20 feet wide at this point, featuring fast flowing clean blue water between gently sloping grassy banks. Occasional trees sprinkled at random along the creek added depth and texture to the lush green banks. Frequent splashes indicated fish grabbing insects for breakfast as they swam by. The sky was typical of northern Alaska mornings, grey and looking like it promised rain later in the day. It was cold enough for everyone to be wearing layers of clothing at this early hour. The Lodge staff had assured us we’d have bright blue sky and sunshine before noon.
“Look around you. You’ll see tourists all along the creeks and rivers panning for gold. Most of them will find some, especially if they stay with it for a while.” Speaking to us was our tour guide today, Joe Corti, the local expert on gold mining in Denali National Park, both historically and in the present. Corti was about five foot nine, a hundred and fifty pounds of lean muscle, and good looking. Deeply tanned, with wrinkles by his eyes from squinting into the sun, he looked exactly like Hollywood’s image of the western outdoorsman. His dark hair was long and shaggy, with a matching mustache, well trimmed. Suzanne thought he looked like Wyatt Earp, at least the Hollywood version of the legendary old-west lawman. He didn’t have any regional accent, and could just as easily have been a Californian as an Alaskan. He smiled easily and frequently, seeming to enjoy his work.
Quick and agile, he moved effortlessly as he demonstrated gold panning to us. “Gold panning is easy, it doesn’t take a big capital investment to get started, and anybody can do it. On the other hand, it’s not efficient. If you’re serious about gold mining you want to use equipment that handles much larger quantities of gravel to get your hands on enough gold to make all the work pay off.”
The guide picked up his pan and leaned towards the bottom of the shallow creek. “The principle of gold panning is simple. Gold is denser than water and is also denser than the stones that make gravel. You begin by scooping about half a pan of gravel and water into the pan, just like this. If you swirl the pan the way they showed you in the demonstration before we left the lodge, and I’ll show you again now, the gravel gets suspended in the water while the denser gold and some of the large stones stay in the bottom of the pan.”
Corti turned back towards us and stood up so everyone could see what he was doing. “If you tilt the pan like this, and tap the edge of the pan just like this, you’ll see quite a bit of water and some of the sand and gravel spills out of the pan. Just keep on doing it. Add more water as you go along if you have to until you reach the point of diminishing returns. The longer you do this, the more efficient you’ll get at it.”
He repeated the sloshing and spilling several times, adding more water twice, removing more and more of the sand and gravel from the pan. Then he passed the pan around for everyone to look at.
A husband and wife, tourists from Seattle, were the first of our group to examine the pan and its contents. Both wore western garb---jeans, boots, and flannel shirts. He was tall, thin, looked to be in his 50’s. She was shorter, about the same age, definitely not thin, wearing a cowboy hat that looked ridiculous in this setting. “Wow, there’s gold in the sand!” the wife exclaimed.
“How much money would the gold in the pan be worth?” the husband asked as he passed the pan along to another woman waiting patiently on his right for her turn to try panning.
The guide looked at the pan’s contents. “Maybe a dollar or two,” he answered. “It depends on how much more of the sand you could remove without losing any of those little flecks of gold.”
The rest of us looked at the pan’s contents as it was passed around while our guide continued telling us about mining gold. “A highly skilled miner panning gold like I just showed you might be able to process a cubic yard of gravel a day, and he’d have a very sore back to show for it if he did that much. The first miners here could find anywhere between $5 and $25 worth of gold in a single pan full of gravel if they were lucky. And that was a lot of money in those days. The gold was pretty concentrated and you could find the deposits just by looking at the gravel in the creek. Sometimes you’d find a nugget that weighed a few ounces that way. Getting rich was easy in the beginning of the gold rush. In less than a year all of the concentrated pockets of placer gold were gone and the miners had to find ways to process much more gravel every day to make mining worthwhile.
“The next step up was a rocker, which worked the same way a pan does but on a larger scale. You shoveled the gravel in with water and rocked it rather than sloshing it. Now a single miner, or more usually a team of two, could process 3-4 cubic yards of gravel a day. The next step up was the sluice box, which let the normal flow of the water do most of the work. With a sluice box the miner could process 7-8 cubic yards of gravel a day. Of course, all the gold had to be shipped from here by dog sled. The miners had to get the ore to a river where a boat could pick it up in the spring or summer to take it to an ocean steamer. The nearest smelters were in Washin
gton State or Oregon.”
One of the tourists from Northern California, an older gentleman wearing brand new yuppie western clothes from L.L. Bean who looked like he’d be much more comfortable in a suit and tie asked, “Did they do any industrial scale hydraulic mining here like during the California gold rush?”
“Yes, they did,” replied the guide. “With hydraulic mining they could process an average of about 75 cubic yards of gravel per hour with a crew of 10 men working. That’s about 750 cubic yards in a 10-hour workday, ten times more per man than they could process with a sluice box. But the process used a lot of water and really polluted the National Park, so was the beginning of the end for commercial mining in this region.”
The guide reached into his backpack and removed a handful of pans. “Who wants to try getting rich today?” he asked. He had eager takers for his pans. The group spread out along Moose Creek and started panning for gold. Suzanne and I took advantage of the opportunity to meet the guide and try to chat with him a bit. He introduced himself to us. “I’m Joe Corti. I do several guided tours like this one every day, introducing tourists like yourselves to gold panning and fly fishing here in the creek.“
“Where are you from originally?” I asked so we could get the conversational ball rolling towards the more personal information we wanted.
“I’m from Anchorage, lived there all my life. During the summer tourist season I live out here part-time like most of the concessionaires,” replied the guide. “Where are you folks from?”
“California,” I answered.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never panned for gold!” he exclaimed. “Northern California is a great place for gold panning on the American, Yuba, and Feather Rivers in the old Gold Rush country east of Sacramento.”
“To be completely honest, I’ve never tried,” I admitted. “Growing up in San Diego, I was about as far away from the Gold Rush country as you can get and still be in California. Suzanne’s our expert on all things Northern California. Have you panned for gold before, Suzanne?”
“Yes, I have. Lots of times, when I was a kid.”
“Did you ever find any?”
“Of course we did. Finding gold isn’t the hard part. Finding enough to be worth the effort is!”
Chapter12. Fishing for information
Suzanne and I were scheduled for the fly-fishing demonstration immediately after getting back from gold panning. A group of eight of us, plus guide, assembled at the scheduled time along the same bank of Moose Creek we had panned for gold in the previous hour. Five of the eight tourists had been at the earlier gold panning demonstration. The older gentleman in the brand new outfit, the couple from Seattle with the woman still wearing her silly looking cowboy hat, and another couple about our age from New York City who were on their honeymoon had gotten there ahead of us. The newlyweds giggled and touched each other a lot. Both of them were cute and very obviously in love. Arriving later to eventually round out the group was the older gentleman’s trophy wife, looking as much out of place as her husband in expensive designer jeans and a lavishly styled hairdo.
Even the guide was the same. Joe Corti really was the creek activities specialist. Suzanne slid through the small group of fellow tourists to the front of the group by the creek, taking up a place as close to our guide as possible without being too obvious. An eagle screamed overhead, as if annoyed with our tour group for just moving into his favorite fishing spot. I stayed where I was to let Suzanne do her thing here, whatever it might be she was planning.
Joe started off by showing us the gear and explaining the principles of this popular form of fishing for insectivorous fish like trout (called Grayling in Alaska). What distinguishes fly-fishing from other forms of the sport, we learned, are the use of what are called “flies” as bait or lures, the super light gear, and the casting technique to present the fish with your fly skimming along the surface of the river or creek, just as insects do in real life.
Our guide explained, “Fly-fishing aficionados insist that the authentic experience includes using hand-made flies designed to impersonate the local target fish’s preference in what to eat. The experts collect fur, feathers, and fish attractants to “tie” their flies and swear by their results. Today, we’re going to be using some factory manufactured flies I purchased at the bait shop in town, and I can guarantee that some of you, at least, will catch fish today. We’ll be using a special type of fishhook that doesn’t injure the fish, and we’ll release any fish we catch back into the creek so we don’t have any negative ecological impact.
“More importantly,” he continued, “we aren’t “taking” the fish in the legal sense since we return the fish to the creek in good condition. Because of this little technicality, the State of Alaska is willing to let you all fish today without a license. Since the State of Alaska has no jurisdiction in a National Park and the National Park Service doesn’t have the manpower to enforce local Fish and Game laws, it’s a good compromise for everybody concerned.”
One of our tourists, the female with the silly cowboy hat from Seattle, asked a question. ”Couldn’t we use the same pan we used to collect gold in the last demonstration to cook a fish we caught if we wanted to?”
Joe Corti smiled. “You’re getting the idea. Whatever the miners needed to survive here in Alaska had to be brought in by riverboat and dog sled. Everything was expensive if you had to buy it and precious if you had to pack it in. If it could be used for several purposes, it saved you the need to carry a lot of extra junk on your sled or to waste your hard-earned gold making a shopkeeper, who was charging outrageous prices for goods, rich. The same pan that got you your gold during the day was very likely used to make dinner over the fire at night. It’s a little scary when you realize the pan may have had a bunch of mercury poured into it to help separate the gold just before you added the fish, but there wasn’t a lot of consumer protection around in those days, at least not up here on the frontier.
“OK, I need a volunteer,” he continued. “Who wants to try to catch the first fish today?”
Nobody volunteered. The odds seemed good that whoever went first would make a lot of mistakes and look like a beginner.
Joe had obviously done this before. He walked over to Suzanne, tapped her shoulder, and said, “You’re it. Put your boots on.”
A minute later Suzanne, her waders, and her fishing pole and lines were standing knee deep in Moose Creek with Joe Corti in waders standing just behind her. He demonstrated how to hold the fishing line in several loops, how to recognize the ripples where you wanted your fly to land after casting to entice a fish to try to eat it, and how to flick your wrist back and forth to play out the line and cast the fly. He showed us several casts and how to reel the line back in. He also emphasized how important it was to keep the tip of the rod up in the air and to reel in a fish gently but firmly. Then it was Suzanne’s turn.
She copied the guide’s actions, finally casting to almost exactly the same spot he had laid the fly on the water when he casted. She got a strike on the fly, which was attached to the hook, almost immediately. As she carefully reeled the fish back in there was a lot of splashing at the end of the line. Suddenly, the line came free as she lost her fish.
“Very, very good,” exclaimed the guide. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
“My father was an avid sports fisherman when I was growing up,” Suzanne replied. “He taught me fly fishing before I hit my teens.”
Corti looked at her appraisingly. “Maybe you should be acting as the guide this trip. You’re actually better at casting than I am. Show everybody another cast or two, as slowly as you can, so they can watch how you use your arm and wrist. Then let everyone else take a turn at fly-fishing and casting. I’ll buy you and your husband a beer when we get back to the Roadhouse in return for exploiting your skills.”
And that was what we all did.
An hour or two later the three of us were in the Roadhouse after a nice lunch sharing an excellent A
laskan microbrewery beer with the guide. I memorized the label of the local microbrewery for future reference. It was getting late and we were alone in the empty restaurant lingering over our beers. All of the other tourists and staff had gone on to whatever they were going to do this afternoon. “Tell me some more about where you learned to fish like that,” he asked Suzanne.
“As I told you, from my father in Northern California as a pre-teen and teenaged tomboy. I was the son he never had.”
“I’m really interested,” replied Corti. “I know that part of California east of Sacramento in the Sierra foothills pretty well. Which rivers did you guys like to fish and what did you usually catch? Your father taught you well. I don’t see your level of skill here among the National Park tourists very often.”
Suzanne thought a bit. I could see her thinking about the best way to answer the guide’s questions, which was my cue to sit back and let Suzanne handle this interview. If she told him the right things she’d open the door to asking Joe for the same information about himself and maybe learn enough to figure out where he belonged on our presently blank list of suspects.
“Let’s see,” mused Suzanne aloud, “I was born and raised in a college town called Davis, just west of Sacramento along the freeway. My father had a big import-export business, so he traveled a lot and we could live just about anywhere he liked as long as there was an airport close by. Sacramento was perfect for him: a big airport less than half an hour drive away and easy access to the great outdoors in three directions. It was about a 20-minute drive west to where we could fish for trout on Putah Creek. That’s where I learned to fish, especially fly-fishing where the creek is fast flowing, just under the dam up there.
