Mapping Alaska — Goldmining Ditches

For the past few years, I've been spending quite a bit of time adding Alaska landform features and backcountry details to Open Street Map (OSM). This post will the first of several that describe this work.

As many of you know, I'm heavily involved with, many would (rightly) say addicted to, OSM mapping. I do ground surveys, make mapping expeditions by motorcycle and car, and follow my curiosity about where things are located wherever I travel and later add that data to OSM. It might be Places of Interest (POIs), like fuel stations, restaurants, bars, schools and temples, or street names, route numbers, campgrounds or picnic tables, Those surveys might take place in Thailand or Alaska or anywhere else I happen to be. It's all grist for the mill and worthy of addition to the Open Street Map of the world.

I've added data for Thailand, of course, but also Fiji, Iceland, Turkey, Austria, New Zealand and Laos, Cambodia and Eugene, Oregon, Africa, North Carolina, Buffalo, NY,  and the Adirondack Mountains of that same state. But my main focus for the past couple of years has been adding geographical features in Alaska. I can do this from my office here in Thailand because OSM offers fantastic computer mapping resources over the Internet. I can access a fine selection of high-resolution satellite imagery that covers most of the planet. And in the U.S., we have available the excellent USGS Topographic maps, the ones I used to collect and revere years ago, that can be overlaid on top of the satellite imagery to help position, outline and attach officially recognized names to the features I'm adding. When I first got involved with the project, most of Alaska's roads were already present in the OSM database but almost none of its rivers, lakes, glaciers, wildlife refuges, or campgrounds. The highway data that was present was often fairly inaccurate because it was based on poor but copyright-free U.S. government TIGER™ data. There are very few OSM volunteers that live and map in Alaska so improvements to that poor highway data happen only slowly. Luckily, as a retired person, time is something I have plenty of. Although it would be virtually impossible for one person to completely map Alaska's vast area, I took it as a personal challenge to work towards achieving both those goals. Check out the OSM map of Homer, Alaska, my hometown, to see the result of a very small part of what I've been doing.

Homer, Alaska on OSM

The map is zoomable (with +/- keys) and can be panned by left-clicking and dragging with your mouse.

Sometime last year I happened upon a blog post about the Iditarod, Alaska's iconic dog sled race, written by a fellow named Aiden Harding. Harding had traversed the entire Iditarod Trail in cold winter on a fat-tire bicycle — a truly amazing feat. In his blog, he mentioned that he had recorded GPS traces of the journey. I dropped him a note asking if I could use his traces to help sketch in the Iditarod where it passes through otherwise unmarked, roadless territory. He responded enthusiastically and provided the traces. Then during the next week or so I added the trail to OSM. Is the data I uploaded positioned perfectly? No, but that doesn't really matter so much considering that the actual route changes from year to year depending on snow and weather conditions anyway. My goal was to add it to OSM so anyone with a desire to see where the trail traverses Rainy Pass or where it passes the Carlson Crossing Safety Cabin can do so.

My workflow while mapping the Iditarod involved adding sections of trail using Aiden's traces as a guide and adding details derived from the USGS Topos in the areas adjacent to it. Using OSM's editor JOSM, I was able to "see" the trail from my office computer on Digital Globe's high-quality satellite imagery in places where it was also being used in the summer and therefore visible, and with the help of Harding's GPS traces position it in places where it wasn't visible due to trees or cloud cover. I added river crossings and other features that I dug up on the Internet, things like rescue cabins and checkpoints, and added names to nearby streams and rivers based on the USGS Topo maps that can be overlaid above the satellite imagery in JOSM.

Anyway, as the Iditarod got close to Nome I began noticing some strange features on the topo maps. There were these thin blue colored lines drawn exactly as a stream would appear on such maps, but rather than flowing downhill as would a normal stream or river, they followed the contours (lines of equal elevation) of the hills and valleys they traversed. How strange — what are these things? I wondered. A closer exploration of the USGS Topographic Maps eventually turned up a name for one of these "streams", Fairhaven Ditch (Wikipedia), and that led me to ferret out some interesting facts about Alaska's gold mining past. The photo below is oriented with North at top and represents an area of about 2.7 by 1.5 miles.

The Fairhaven Ditch as shown on a USGS Topo map
(arrows on streams point downhill, the ditch runs northerly)

Closer view (satellite image) of the area at location "28" above
(65.6304, -163.0462)

In the satellite photo above you can see the remnants of the ditch, which is actually a canal, from fairly close-up. There is no water flowing in the ditch these days but you can easily discern its path. In this section, the canal is flowing north while skirting the headwaters of the small unnamed stream flowing northeasterly just as many roads follow the contours of valleys in the same way.

When most people, including myself, think of Alaska we imagine a huge, wild, and unspoiled wilderness, which it is relative to most other places on the planet. However, the hand of man is evident almost everywhere — Alaska's been completely explored and in many places literally ripped apart by people searching for riches like gold, metal ores and lately, oil. These ditches or canals were built back around the turn of the last century to carry water from high mountain streams down to where miners were working the streambeds in search of gold. By "working the streambeds" I mean using the high-pressure water delivered by these canals to blast away overburden and move the now exposed gravels to huge sluice boxes where the gold was separated from the gravel in a process known as placer mining. In those days, there was no conservation ethic or EPA to prevent people from doing whatever it took to get that gold. Wilderness was the enemy. Overburden, the sand and soil that covered the gold-bearing gravels, was simply blasted away and allowed to run downstream where it suffocated fish and fouled everything mightily. Even the term used, overburden, in our modern age suggests disrespect for the environment. Much of this overburden was deposited during the Pleistocene (between about 12,000 years and 1.8 million years ago) and contains the remains of extinct species such as mammoth and steppe bison. Oh, well. That was then and this is now.

Unfortunately, our habits around gold and other valuable minerals haven't changed all that much. There is still a push for rapacious development of mines and oilfields in Alaska, a state that has no income tax and provides a huge yearly dividend to every Alaskan man, woman and child. Alaska can do that because it derives almost all of its revenue from resource extraction in the form of oil. The Alaska state government has always been notoriously pro-development and it remains so to this day. The recent announcement by the Trump administration that it would seek to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil exploration came as a blow to many Alaskans but the move was advanced and applauded by the entire Alaska Congressional delegation, good Republicans that they are.

The amount of effort and energy put into constructing these ditches was massive. The Fairhaven Ditch (ca. 1907) was no small project. It stretches about 37 miles in total and runs from Imuruk Lake at an elevation of 311 meters (1021 ft) above sea level to the gold fields near Logan Gulch achieving a head of 530 feet (225 psi) over that distance. The ditch was 11 feet wide at the bottom and was constructed in the wilds of Alaska without any heavy equipment, only men and horses, over the course of two summers. Here's a summary of the building method I excerpted from Water-Supply Paper 814, Surface Water Supply of Seward Peninsula, Alaska, by F. F. Henshaw and G.L. Parke (1913):
"Ditches are constructed by several different methods, according to the conditions of the ground encountered. Horses have been used for the work wherever possible. In one method the ground is first prepared by removing the moss and turf from a strip 40 or 50 feet wide on either side of the ditch. This should be done, if possible, the summer before actual construction is begun, in order that the ground may thaw more readily. Actual construction begins with plowing, after which some of the material is moved with a grader from the upper side of the ditch to the lower bank until a practically flat bench is produced. The cut is then excavated with horse scrapers down to grade, and the material piled up on the lower bank. The ditch is finished by hand, and both bottom and bank are trimmed to an even grade and alignment."

The ditches are usually lined with sod which was removed from the surface of the ditch route earlier:

"The sod is cut with mattocks into pieces 1 to 2 feet square and placed in the ditch, bottom up. Two layers are usually placed in the bottom, breaking joints as well as possible, and the whole is carefully and solidly tamped into place. The sides of the ditch are made tight with a sod wall, the pieces being laid one above another, bottom up. Where the sod is above the water line part of the time, the grass usually continues to grow and its living roots bind the material more closely and firmly together."

Teamsters contructing the Pioneer Ditch near Seward

Below are a couple of photos, (ca. 1901) of the Miocene Ditch on the Seward Peninsula. One of the first ditches constructed, it was 31 miles in length. Its feeder streams added another 31 miles to the total project. Pictured is a section that was cut through a rock outcropping known as "Cape Horn".

Building the Miocene Ditch at "Cape Horn"

The Miocene Ditch carrying water

Sometimes it wasn't practical, either because it was too expensive or simply too great a distance, to run these ditches far enough upstream to cross on grade as you see on the topo illustration above. The clever mining engineers built gigantic siphons (more correctly, inverted siphons) to move water across many a creek or valley. The first large siphon built, that of the Miocene ditch across Manila Creek, is about 1,000 feet in length and is composed of 40-inch steel pipe with joints riveted throughout. Water from a ditch enters the "top" of these siphons, flows downhill inside the pipe, and emerges at the downstream side to continue its journey to the goldfields.  As long as the exit is slightly lower in altitude than the entrance, water will flow. I came across a remnant of a siphon on the Davidson Ditch (Wikipedia) that runs along the entire length of the Chatanika River. The Davidson Ditch is 90 miles long and crosses many valleys, some fairly large, on its journey to Fairbanks.

The Davidson Ditch crosses U.S. Creek in this giant siphon
(65.2698, -146.7282)

I spent a rainy night camped in my RV in the pulloff at the Davidson Ditch Historical Site on the Steese. This photo shows the massive pipe used to carry the water across the valley of the U.S. Creek. Credit goes to Wikipedian JKBrooks85 who released his photo to the public domain. If moving steel pipe into the wilderness proved too expensive or otherwise impractical, the siphons were built on-site using wood staves wrapped with steel  strengthening bands much like a wooden barrel is made.

During my reading I was continually amazed to learn how much effort was made, how much ingenuity was brought to bear, in overcoming the problems of mining in such a remote and inhospitable region. In some cases hundreds of horses and hundreds of men were put to work for several summers in these mammoth-for-the-time construction projects. As soon as the ground froze, usually sometime in September, work would be suspended until the following spring. As I pan around as a virtual explorer examining high quality satellite imagery in backcountry Alaska, I can see remnants of these old placer mines and the many roads that serviced them almost everywhere. These scars on the landscape will be visible for decades or centuries hence.

I hope you enjoyed this jaunt through Alaska's goldmining past.


Addenda

Living in a remote camp has many challenges not the least of which is, where do I put my gold after I take it out of the ground? I came across a note somewhere that said miners used to send gold ingots to the U.S. Mint via Registered Mail.
This sort of thing continued to happen in Alaska not so long ago. A good friend told me stories of his days setnet fishing in Bristol Bay back in the 1980s. Because there were no banks nearby they used to buy USPS money orders with the cash they received from selling their fish. The money orders were a lot safer than cash and much easier to hide.

Click on the link for a full copy of the Surface Water Supply of Seward Peninsula paper referenced above (PDF). I found much of it interesting reading.
https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/wsp314

U.S. Census data TIGER: https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html

I'm back in Chiang Mai with Nut

First bike ride this fall - McKean Hospital grounds

It's so good to be back! As I flew across the Pacific from the U.S. to Thailand on a Korean Air 777 watching the flight attendants scurrying about waiting on people almost constantly for the eleven and a half hour flight, I could feel a distinct cultural shift, one I rather enjoy. The way the Korean Air attendants treat customers is pretty much the way I'm treated here in Thailand. While the time I spend in Alaska and with my family each summer is always exceptional, my return to this less competitive environment is a welcome switch from the dog-eat-dog mentality of American government and business. I am forever amazed at just how friendly the Thai people are to foreigners, "farangs", like me.

Of course, by the time summer begins winding down I'm getting anxious to reunite with Nut. We're still living harmoniously together after more than 8 years. That in itself is, for me, something of a miracle. In hindsight, it seems my other relationships, and there were more than a few, were destined for failure after only a few years or sometimes only a handful of months. I'm sure being apart for four months every summer has a lot to do with our success. She's the perfect partner for a guy like me and seems able to tolerate my self-absorption, preoccupied as I am with my mapping and tennis. We have our individual lives and pastimes but neither of us resents that at all. As the old aphorism teaches, absence makes the heart grow fonder. It's been working that way for us.

Old bungalow on the McKean Hospital grounds

Ah, Thailand, so friendly, so foreign, so familiar. The neighborhood we live in is quiet, we have good neighbors, and I take delight in the constant murmur of the doves cooing away the daytime hours. As I take my morning rides, I'll be biking through wreaths of smoke from the many charcoal braziers lining the streets.  People on their way to work or school pick up skewers of grilled pork or chicken with sticky rice from the street vendors— it's Thai breakfast food. Later as the evening light fades to darkness, I'll hang out on our patio with a beer and listen to music for a few hours. I was in the habit of doing that in Homer too but here I'm dressed in shorts, no shirt, and sitting in front of an electric fan. In Homer, I'm often zipped up in a polypro jacket to keep the wind and chill at bay.

While I was in Alaska, Nut took it upon herself to buy a share of some land her daughter and husband recently bought with the goal of building a home. She sold the gold jewelry I've gifted to her over the years in order to buy a stake in their future homestead. I've always wanted to do something for her, to set her up for a future without me, maybe help her start a business, something, but I really didn't want to buy another house. Been there, done that. I'd rather rent. Nut worries about her future because she has no safety net like my Social Security or state pension. If I suddenly pass away, she'll eventually be out on the street looking for work. Still, when she told me what she'd done I was like, what? you bought land? Even though we had discussed the idea during the summer, at first I was a bit put off by her news. But I quickly realized that she has essentially ended my long-running dilemma about how to help her achieve some degree of assurance about her future. To further facilitate that goal I decided I will buy a chunk of gold as a birthday present each year so that by the time I pass away, she'll have enough stashed to build a small home on her daughter's property. Problem solved.

To change the subject entirely, I've been living here for almost 9 years and have always lamented the beer situation. There is a lot of excellent coffee available almost everywhere but up to now, no good beer. There were only Leo, Tiger, Chang and Singha to pick from; they're lagers, and all of them fairly lackluster. I'm a beer snob and make no bones about it. To my pleasant surprise, I learned that in my absence Chiang Mai has discovered IPA and it's available in several supermarkets and at least two nearby bars, Nampton's House, which is where I purchased the two IPAs shown in the photo below and a place called The Beer. Nampton's has a full menu of craft beers on tap and a cooler stuffed with a large selection of fine beers from around the world.

Some beers sold at Nampton's House Bar

By the weirdest of coincidences, I was drinking Ballast Point Sculpin IPA in Homer this summer! The other beer, from Knee Deep Brewing, was also quite tasty. Both are from California breweries. They're delicious but definitely not cheap. A bottle of the Sculpin IPA cost me about $9 USD while the Knee Deep Lupulin River IPA set me back about 8 bucks. The same bottle of Sculpin costs about $3 in Homer, Alaska, so it's not exactly cheap in either place. (Also shown in the photo is the head of a deep fried fish just before Nut munched on its eyes, her favorite part of any fish.)

The Beer is a more upscale bar and tap room on Mahidol Road. Tonight at The Beer I bought a bottle of Gancore IPA from, of all places, Cambodia! And a few days ago we went shopping at our local Tops Market where I found an IPA brewed in  Phuket, Thailand, called Full Moon Chatri IPA. It's pretty good and costs only $3 USD for a bottle. So, it turns out I can drink my favorite IPAs here in Chiang Mai on ocassion. The downside is the cost — I'll have to treat them more like one does a good bottle of wine.

Car Story

Okay, I'll admit that buying a car might imply that I'm "settling down", as some friends put it, but I haven't given up the motorcycle yet and don't intend to. However, when it's brutally hot or raining, or for those times when we need to carry things, a car makes sense and it seems a smarter, safer method of travel at this stage of my life.

When I got back to Thailand in September my plan was to buy an older used car for three or four thousand bucks. I looked and looked but didn't see anything affordable that I liked until this little Honda CR-V showed up at a small used car lot near here. I pulled the dipsticks on both the spotlessly clean engine and the transmission and found the oil and fluid clean and without any burnt smell. I didn't want to buy from a dealer and the asking price was more than I wanted to spend but this car was so clean, immaculate really, that I began the process of rationalization I generally employ before making a buy. The dealer told me "Only one owner and low kilometers!" Sure, I thought. There are no consumer protection laws in Thailand whatsoever and turning speedometers back is, from what I could learn, a fairly common practice. Was the 137,000 km showing on the clock real or someone's idea of reasonable mileage for a 14 year-old car? After a test drive and quite a bit of hemming and hawing I decided to go forward with the purchase and when we went back to do that, Nut requested and got a 5K baht discount. We signed the papers. When I saw the Blue Book (registration) there was, surprise, surprise, only one owner listed and there were dated receipts in the glove box for oil changes that fit nicely into a 137,000 km total mileage scenario.  At this point, I had spent about $7,000 USD for what has turned out to be a pretty nice ride.

Our 2003 Honda CR-V

The CR-V is a mini-SUV and that means a fellow my size fits inside it pretty well. The downside is that it's a bit large for the standard residential streets in Thailand. (I'll have more to say about that in a moment.) It has a puny 2,000 cc engine but does have on-demand all-wheel drive. It has good air conditioning (mucho importante over here), a hatchback opening into a spacious interior, and an automatic transmission. Nut is learning to drive and an automatic makes it easier by far. I just can't get my mind around shifting with my left hand either so an automatic is a good choice for me as well.

In Thailand, people drive on the left side of the road. In addition, everything one used to find on the right side of the steering wheel is now on the left, and vice versa. This makes for some interesting diversions while you drive — signaling a turn with the windshield wipers for example  —  I'm still doing this with disturbing frequency even after several months. I've been driving cars on the right side of the road for about 60 years and sometimes muscle memory just takes over. Also, learning to judge exactly where those left-side wheels are rolling and where my left fender is, has taken significantly more time than I anticipated. Driving on the left on Thailand's narrow lanes, usually crowded with motorcycles and pedestrians and often lined with markets, makes driving here a royal pain in the ass. Here is an example of a "two lane" rural road in my neighborhood.

The center-line painted by the highway department is hopelessly optimistic, wouldn't you agree? Two vehicles cannot simply move past one another without slowing to a crawl and using the shoulders. To make matters worse, in Thailand a high wall around your property is a sign of status so in residential areas the streets are frequently lined with concrete walls that extend all the way to the corners. This means you must tentatively poke the nose of your vehicle far enough into the intersection to see what's coming before making a turn or proceeding through it. When I first started driving in Thailand, the sight of vehicles sticking their bumpers out into my lane as I approached was disconcerting to say the least. Even after driving here for 8 years, I impulsively grab the brakes on occasion when I see a car poking its nose into my lane.

On a motorcycle, the narrow roads and parked cars cluttering them present no big problem. You simply weave around them. However, in a car, they force one to make frequent stops to allow oncoming vehicles to pass. That means I'm seldom able to get going faster than 15 mph. Thais park right in the road too because there is never room for parking at curbside. Someone stopping to pick up dinner will just leave their car in the street forcing you to cautiously negotiate your way around it. It's a good thing Thai drivers are so patient because an American driver would blow a fuse if faced with such conditions at home. Luckily, Thais seem never to be in a hurry and don't get upset — there's zero road rage here. They wait in nice orderly lines at traffic signals and never ever use the horn. But it's taken some time for me to get used to the slow pace of automobile travel. I seldom go faster than 15 mph when driving in town so if I'm in a hurry I jump on the motorcycle and zip over to wherever I'm going in a fraction of the time.

On with the car story now: We went to Phayao back in October to visit Homer friend DC and his gal, Pai, and we thought it might be interesting to take the car instead of the bike. While the major highways appear wide and smooth from the seat of a motorcycle, in a car one soon realizes they're actually fairly narrow, very curvy, and loaded with little dips and bumps. And there aren't always shoulders so if your left wheel happens to drift off the pavement, well, things could get quite ugly in a hurry. Because of the curves and pavement issues the car lurches from side to side as you drive along at the outrageous speed of 55 mph. It all takes some getting used to. But we had music streaming from my phone via Bluetooth and later in hotter part of the day, air conditioning. One hardly needs a/c in Alaska and I've never owned a car so equipped before.  Over here, a/c is a must have.

We arrived at our guest house where we met DC & Pai, and some other fellow expat friends, Bruce & Lois, who split their time between Chiang Rai and Pennsylvania. When I tried to turn into the narrow, raised parking space next to our bungalow, I managed to crumple the left fender and smash the headlight. There were extenuating circumstances: the turn involved driving up a ramp; the corner of the bungalow next to us extended to the driveway at a height of about 3 feet above the ground; my friends were standing in the driveway on the right forcing me to make a wider turn than would be necessary otherwise. Because of my, for lack of a better phrase, right-sidedness bias, I couldn't judge where my left fender was and when the ramp went up, all of a sudden the corner of the bungalow appeared. I drove right into it. The car, virtually unscratched when we bought it, was now seriously crunched and I had done it all by myself! I took one look at the damage and guessed it was gonna cost at least a thousand bucks to fix. Neither of us slept well that night.

Our once pristine front fender, customized by yours truly

We expats have a saying when attempting to explain why things work the way they do here in the "Land of Smiles": we merely say, This is Thailand. That phrase covers a lot of ground and sometimes it works in your favor, as in this case, and at other times, not so much. We had a nice weekend despite the incident and returned to Chiang Mai a couple of days later. Right away, Nut got on the phone with a neighborhood friend who knows her way around Chiang Mai and she gave us the names of several parts stores in town. (See below for more). She also recommended a reliable nearby collision shop. We were able to get a new generic headlight assembly for 2800 baht ($82 USD) but the big surprise was the fender. A new, primed front fender cost a mere 1200 baht, about 35 bucks!

We took those parts along with the car to a local collision repair shop where we left it for a few days. They charged 6,000 baht total (about $180 USD) for the repair total. The "shop" such as it is, did not inspire confidence. It was just a large roof with a few cars in various states of repair parked here and there beneath it. The collision guy's dad immediately began taking the front end apart while we watched. After three days they called to say the car was ready. The finished job is shown below.

Repairs and parts are much cheaper in Thailand than in the states but I'm always surprised by how much that difference amounts to. Including parts the complete repair cost about $300 USD. I can't imagine how much this repair would have set me back in Alaska.

We've been driving the car quite a bit because I'm teaching Nut how to drive. She's driven motos all her life but never a car. That's an interesting experience and she's been learning fast. I'm recalling and teaching some of the tricks I learned in my high school driver education class so many years ago. We drove the car to Chiang Khong in early December and to Chiang Saen the week before that —  Nut did most of the driving. When I checked the fuel mileage after the first week of driving I was disappointed because it only got about 20 mpg. But that was with a full load of passengers and running the aircon full blast. On the trip to Chiang Khong on main highways and in cooler weather, it turned in a respectable 28 mpg or 12 km/liter.

Recapping: Driving in Chiang Mai is a painfully slow and exasperating experience. Repairs and parts, should you need them, are surprisingly cheap.

---

Several good auto-parts stores in Chiang Mai:

Superhighway near Lanna Hospital: Siang Kong Car Parts (N18.81280° E98.98941°). Used parts.

Mahidol (Airport) Road: Daeng Klon Pratu Parts  (N18.76754° E98.98232°) This store is actually part of a giant auto-repair complex that does custom welding, bodywork, etc.

Near Chiang Mai Railway Station: Saha Alai Car Parts (N18.78316° E99.01834)
A huge parts shop selling new and used parts, used diesel and gasoline motors for Japanese cars.

Route 1006 between Superhighway and Second Ring Road: Rungrot Car Parts (N18.78141° E99.03527°). Used parts.

Merry Christmas from Thailand

Another year has come and gone and now the holiday season is upon us. At the ripe old age of 74 I don't get too excited about Christmas anymore but Nut trimmed the patio with lights and some tinsel and that put me in the mood for reminiscing and for reaching out to friends old and new. The holidays often also bring a spell of cool weather. For many of us who spend Christmas in the tropics, this sort of weather is as close to winter as it ever gets. Nut and I were surprised to find the temperature inside the house at a bone chilling 55 degrees the other morning. We brought the portable convection oven into the living room and ran it all morning until the sun had warmed the air outside. I know this must sound a bit silly to most of my friends and family who still enjoy (or suffer) real winter weather but my acclimatization to the cold ain't what it used to be and days I might have got through with only a long sleeve shirt and jeans in Alaska seem now to require a jacket and even gloves, especially when riding the bicycle or moto. It was only a brief "cold snap", hardly worthy of the name, and when they do come they're a refreshing interlude between the warmer days.

Anyway, here's wishing you a fine holiday season, no matter where you are or what your weather's like. Let's hope next year is better than the last and that we continue to enjoy peaceful and healthy lives.

Until we meet again.

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year