Alaska Man Monday: Gold, Fires, and the Value of Touching Grass

Gold is in large part what made Alaska. The discovery made Alaska go, overnight, from “Seward’s Folly” to the frantic destination for thousands of gold-seekers, from the Yukon to Nome. A lot of people died on those rugged trails, from Chilkoot Pass to the Yukon River and everywhere gold was found, or was rumored to have been found.

When you’re mining gold, you’re basically digging money out of the ground. Alaska still has gold, a lot of gold. And now we’re still finding more.

Freegold Ventures Ltd. June 17 reported that the final assays from 2025 drilling and results from the first three holes of the 2026 program continue to demonstrate the grade and scale potential across the roughly one-mile-long trend of continuous mineralization at the Dolphin-Cleary deposit on the company's Golden Summit project in Interior Alaska.
Freegold has outlined a roughly 1,700-by-700-meter body of gold mineralization that encompasses three primary zones – WOW, Dolphin, and Cleary Hill – that contain more than 30 million oz of gold in three categories:
• Oxide (at a 0.15 grams per metric ton cutoff grade): 63.71 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 0.45 g/t (920,000 oz) gold; plus 18.84 million metric tons of inferred resources averaging 0.47 g/t (287,000 oz) gold.
• Primary (0.5 g/t cutoff): 431.95 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 1.24 g/t (17.24 million oz) gold; plus 357.61 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 1.04 g/t (11.96 million oz) gold.
• Under-pit (0.75 g/t cutoff): 2.21 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 1.12 g/t (79,000 oz) gold; plus 18.01 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 1.35 g/t (782,000 oz) gold.
The roughly 40,000 meters of drilling completed at Golden Summit in 2025 and the 50,000 meters planned for this year are focused primarily on upgrading the resource with infill drilling – particularly in areas of higher grade gold mineralization – and advancing the technical work needed to complete a prefeasibility study that details the technical and economic parameters of developing a mine at Golden Summit.

That’s a lot of gold. That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of American money. It’s good for Alaska and it’s good for the United States.

Alaska Man score: Five gold nuggets.

In other news, it’s wildfire season in the Great Land, and a busy one, since our winter snowfall was lower than normal. The big difference between Alaska and many of the fire-prone states in the Lower 48 is that a lot of Alaska is empty of human habitation – but fires can and do still displace some folks.

More than 4,000 lightning strikes were recorded across Alaska on Friday as thunderstorms moved through the Coastal Region, sparking several new wildfires in the Susitna Valley, according to the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Forestry officials said Friday night that aircraft were being used to locate smoke reports when weather conditions allowed. Fire managers are assigning crews and aircraft based on threats to homes, roads and other infrastructure.
As of 9:30 p.m. Friday, six fires had been confirmed near the Susitna Valley.

None near us, fortunately. Let’s hope that Alaska comes through this beautiful summer without any of the fires causing harm to humans or their property. We can do without that.

Alaska Man score: No score. This is just nature, doing its thing.

Now, let’s touch some grass. It’s summer. We would all do well to get outside more. I know I do.

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