DrewE's Alaska Trip Travelogue
I returned about a week ago from a marvelous ten-week trip to and through Alaska (and back) with my dear mother. I went in a 32' class C, actually about 35' overall with a bicycle rack on the back, w...
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August 21st -- The day was spent exploring McCarthy and Kennicott. This was a very interesting stop for me. Kennicott was a company town, or perhaps more a camp, for the Kennecott copper mine. (The two have different spellings; the mine company got it wrong originally, and has never changed.) McCarthy, a few miles away, was a town where the miners went to do everything unwholesome that the company would not allow in Kennicott: drink, gamble, cavort with loose women, etc. Today, somewhat of the same distinction pervades, though toned down, and both are more or less kept alive for the sake of visitors and tourists. Much of Kennicott is maintained and operated by the National Park Service as a historical park.
Access to McCarthy is via a footbridge and a half mile or so walk (or shuttle bus ride). We elected to walk, not entirely realizing that it involved fording one or two spots of water.
McCarthy does have a nice little historical museum with some local artifacts and information about the mine. There's a reading room attached to the museum where you can spend time with books of local interest; some of them looked rather fascinating, but we didn't have limitless time to spend.
Downtown McCarthy has a number of little businesses, shops and restaurants and tour companies mostly. Here we took the shuttle to Kennicott, a $5 per van ride affair. (The shuttle runs between the footbridge from the camping area, McCarthy, and Kennicott, and the cost is the same regardless of where one gets on or off.)
Kennicott is surprisingly well-preserved. Mining operations stopped in the 1930s as the ore was largely depleted, but many of the buildings and their equipment are standing and appear in usable or nearly usable shape. The town is dominated by the massive (fourteen story) hillside concentration mill building. Ore would enter the mill at the top via aerial tramways, and the high-grade copper ore gets separated mechanically and, across the street, chemically from the matrix rock. Much of the ore mined was astonishingly rich, some containing up to 85% copper (whereas 5% to 10% is typical). The Museum of the North in Fairbanks has a very large copper nugget, weighing a few thousand pounds, from the area on display. All told, the mine produced nearly 600,000 tons of copper and quite a tidy profit for its backers.
Click For Full-Size Image.
The Kennecott mill building (and other buildings)
Click For Full-Size Image.
The building with the smokestacks is the powerhouse; beyond it the machine shop and ammonia leeching buildings. In the foreground are two of several cottages for managers and their families.
Click For Full-Size Image.
Buildings along National Creek: on the left, the hospital and the remains of the assay office (destroyed by flooding in 2006). On the right, some of the bunkhouses for the majority of the workers.
Click For Full-Size Image.
Kennicott was built right next to the Kennicott Glacier. This glacier has shrunk in height (though not so much in width or length) over the years; it is now some distance below the settlement, while it was on a level with it when Kennicott was built. The glacier is covered in a moraine, so has the appearance of being piles of gravel rather than an ice sheet.
I paid for a tour of the mill and associated buildings, which is the only way to see the interior of many of them.
Click For Full-Size Image.
The top of the mill building, with the terminus of the two tramways that carried the ore. (The tramways are a sort of cargo version of a chair lift.)
Click For Full-Size Image.
One of several roller mills, which crushed the rock between two steel wheels.
Click For Full-Size Image.
This gizmo is the key first-level sorting machine, where through agitation in water the ore is sorted out based on size and density into the various take-off hoppers/spouts on the right to be directed for further processing. The metal bars are what agitate the slurry.
Click For Full-Size Image.
A few floors of the mill complex were taken up by these sorts of shaker tables, which separate the ground ore by weight. Lighter (waste) material goes over the bars more easily, while the heavier copper bearing ore tends to stay behind and gets directed elsewhere. The wooden troughs at the far end of each table distribute water across the table to keep the material in motion.
Click For Full-Size Image.
Across the road in the ammonia leaching plant, low-grade ore was separated and concentrated chemically by dissolving the copper out of the rock with concentrated ammonia. Gauging from the evidence of leaks (and the associated copper residue) on these leaching tanks, I suspect it was not the most pleasant place to work.
Click For Full-Size Image.
The four massive boilers in the power plant. These were set up to burn either wood, coal, or oil; as it turned out, oil was nearly exclusively used.
We stayed a second night at the Root Glacier Base Camp. I would have liked to have spent another day in the area and hiked to the root glacier.
Access to McCarthy is via a footbridge and a half mile or so walk (or shuttle bus ride). We elected to walk, not entirely realizing that it involved fording one or two spots of water.
McCarthy does have a nice little historical museum with some local artifacts and information about the mine. There's a reading room attached to the museum where you can spend time with books of local interest; some of them looked rather fascinating, but we didn't have limitless time to spend.
Downtown McCarthy has a number of little businesses, shops and restaurants and tour companies mostly. Here we took the shuttle to Kennicott, a $5 per van ride affair. (The shuttle runs between the footbridge from the camping area, McCarthy, and Kennicott, and the cost is the same regardless of where one gets on or off.)
Kennicott is surprisingly well-preserved. Mining operations stopped in the 1930s as the ore was largely depleted, but many of the buildings and their equipment are standing and appear in usable or nearly usable shape. The town is dominated by the massive (fourteen story) hillside concentration mill building. Ore would enter the mill at the top via aerial tramways, and the high-grade copper ore gets separated mechanically and, across the street, chemically from the matrix rock. Much of the ore mined was astonishingly rich, some containing up to 85% copper (whereas 5% to 10% is typical). The Museum of the North in Fairbanks has a very large copper nugget, weighing a few thousand pounds, from the area on display. All told, the mine produced nearly 600,000 tons of copper and quite a tidy profit for its backers.
The Kennecott mill building (and other buildings)
The building with the smokestacks is the powerhouse; beyond it the machine shop and ammonia leeching buildings. In the foreground are two of several cottages for managers and their families.
Buildings along National Creek: on the left, the hospital and the remains of the assay office (destroyed by flooding in 2006). On the right, some of the bunkhouses for the majority of the workers.
Kennicott was built right next to the Kennicott Glacier. This glacier has shrunk in height (though not so much in width or length) over the years; it is now some distance below the settlement, while it was on a level with it when Kennicott was built. The glacier is covered in a moraine, so has the appearance of being piles of gravel rather than an ice sheet.
I paid for a tour of the mill and associated buildings, which is the only way to see the interior of many of them.
The top of the mill building, with the terminus of the two tramways that carried the ore. (The tramways are a sort of cargo version of a chair lift.)
One of several roller mills, which crushed the rock between two steel wheels.
This gizmo is the key first-level sorting machine, where through agitation in water the ore is sorted out based on size and density into the various take-off hoppers/spouts on the right to be directed for further processing. The metal bars are what agitate the slurry.
A few floors of the mill complex were taken up by these sorts of shaker tables, which separate the ground ore by weight. Lighter (waste) material goes over the bars more easily, while the heavier copper bearing ore tends to stay behind and gets directed elsewhere. The wooden troughs at the far end of each table distribute water across the table to keep the material in motion.
Across the road in the ammonia leaching plant, low-grade ore was separated and concentrated chemically by dissolving the copper out of the rock with concentrated ammonia. Gauging from the evidence of leaks (and the associated copper residue) on these leaching tanks, I suspect it was not the most pleasant place to work.
The four massive boilers in the power plant. These were set up to burn either wood, coal, or oil; as it turned out, oil was nearly exclusively used.
We stayed a second night at the Root Glacier Base Camp. I would have liked to have spent another day in the area and hiked to the root glacier.
