Crow Creek Mine

Eight partners worked this creek in 1904 and the locals called them the Crow Creek boys.

Crow Creek runs about five miles through the Chugach Mountains of Alaska, the only notable tributary of Glacier Creek, which enters Turnagain Arm from the north. Gold has been mined along it since the late 19th century, and the US Geological Survey still lists Crow Creek as a gold prospect, recording its older names: Gold Creek, Milk Creek, Glacier Gulch and Johnson Creek.

The first claims were staked in 1897 near the mouth of the stream, on the site of the present placer workings. Up to 1903 the work was pick and shovel on whichever gold-bearing gravels were easiest to reach, including the Eagan bar near the mouth and the surface gravels above the canyon. Hydraulic methods came in during 1903 and 1904, but reaching bedrock above the rock canyon proved difficult. Late in 1904 the diggers found an old, deeply filled rock channel lying northeast of the present canyon, and from 1905 to 1914 the companies here spent much of their effort clearing the gravels out of it, trying to open a bedrock drain for the gravel basin upstream.

The landscape explains the gold. Crow Creek falls over a thousand feet in the first mile below Crow Creek Pass, running in waterfalls and rapids, fed by several small glaciers that turn the water cloudy through summer. Below that it leaves its narrow gorge into a gravel-filled basin, dammed at the lower end by a terminal moraine from a side valley. That moraine is why the gravel is there: the gradient slackens behind it and the stream drops its load.

The pass itself is a route as well as a watershed. At about 3,400 feet, Crow Creek Pass divides the water flowing to Turnagain Arm from the water going to Knik Arm, and gives a reasonable crossing over to Raven Creek and the Eagle River.