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Paul Glavinovich

Today, with gold hovering at $1,000 an ounce, Paul Glavinovich, son of a former manager of Nome’s gold dredges, remembered Nome’s historic treasure-scooping boats, cousins to the Fairbanks dredges.

The son of a Balkan immigrant, Paul Glavinovich Jr.’s father, Carl Glavinovich Sr., arrived from Croatia to this country just before World War I. In the 1920s, a young medical student, Glavinovich Sr. heard about driving point for the Nome gold fields and went north for the summer. The following summer, he returned with his brother, Walter, in 1926, to live in the North.  “Nome’s gold,” Paul Glavinovich explained recently, “was concentrated along the perimeter of its ancient, buried beaches, located within several feet of bedrock. Drift miners sank deep shafts and hit that gold-bearing layer in some of those paleo-beaches!” By the early 1900s, small steam-powered dredges were mining the coastal plain. However the large frozen areas had to be thawed before the dredges could operate.

Cold water thawing technology around Fairbanks was just developing. As the Glavinovich brothers swung their 10-pound sledge hammers onto the “thaw points” of the Nome pipe, they analyzed the process. Densely planted pipes circulated cold water into the frozen ground. With the water above freezing, it thawed the ground, circulated the warmth, came back to the surface where it warmed, and was then pumped back into the ground.

They pondered, “What was the ideal water temperature for thawing the Nome ground; how long to circulate the water; how to improve the method?” Soon they developed techniques for drill basin thawing that endured for the next 40 years.

Continuing, Glavinovich said, “My parents married in 1935; soon, my sister and I arrived.

“During my childhood,” he remembered, “I grew up playing basketball, trying to trap, as well as running dogs. I was the only non-Native in my graduating class of 5. In the summers, I’d tag along with Dad to the dredge.”

The thaw points had to be removed before the dredge could begin. The “boat” moved on its own pond, digging continually as it went. A conveyor belt with buckets carried the pay dirt into the dredge’s hopper where pressurized water cleaned and separated the pay against big revolving screens, filled with holes. The holes at the top of the screen were larger and at the bottom, smaller. The screen undersize fell into the boil box and then into the active sluice boxes where they washed down over riffles, and the heavier gold was caught. The finer tailing material shot out the dredge’s stern and sealed off the pond. The coarser materials went out the stacker, piled on top of the tailings, and finished damming the pond.  In 1952, U.S.S.R. & M. (U.S. Smelting and Refining and Mining) appointed Glavinovich Sr. manager of the Nome operations. He oversaw the four dredges, capable of 7,000-10,000 cubic yards per day as well as the construction of a new dredge, No. 6.

“From 1958 until the early 1960s,” Glavinovich Jr. continued, “I worked on the Nome dredges. Later I was based in Fairbanks. Additionally, I was involved in the operation of the 6-cubic-foot bucket dredge at Hog River in the Upper Koyukuk.”

He added, “A dredge’s size is described by the size of its buckets. For example, the largest ‘boat’ in the state, near Ester, has 10 cubic foot buckets.

“When I first started working boats, I was involved in the clean-ups and weekly production monitoring. I’d creep up ahead of the boat with surveying equipment and measure the edge of the bank as the boat was undercutting the bank. The trick,” he grinned, “was how close I could get to the edge and not fall into the dredge pond.”

In 1961, he graduated as a geologist from the University of Alaska School of Mines. “I became involved in exploration and new recovery techniques for the dredges. I continued to work clean-ups where a select crew in a controlled, very short amount of time, had to pull the riffles, collect the gold, then replace the riffles, and get off the boat!

“For five hours, a big boat like No. 5 took no breaks! No lunch, no coffee, no cigs, no nothing. Dredges were incredibly efficient, but in 1962 when the price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce, and against rising operating costs, the dredges had to shut down.”

“Of the high gold concentration of Nome’s paleo-beaches, only about 16-17 percent has been mined. The fineness of that gold is about 96 percent. But it’s necessary to move multiple yards of dirt to recover one-onehundreth of an ounce of gold. By contrast, at Pogo mine up the Goodpaster River, the initial reserve was estimated at .5 to .55 ounces of gold per metric ton. Additionally at Pogo, the gold is concentrated in a vein, not scattered over buried paleo-beaches.”

In 1985 and under the umbrella of a fellowship with the Colorado School of Mines, Glavinovich Jr. reviewed the mines of Yugoslavia in his father’s Croatia. He found the ecological and safety protections there almost non-existent. In the 1990s due to the Balkan wars, the mines stopped completely.

“Through attrition,” he added, “there are few of us left in engineering and geology who have placer gold experience.”

From his father’s early development of cold water thawing to today’s multi-national owned, high tech mining, the Glavinovich family has matured, inextricably intertwined with Alaskan mining.

Judy Ferguson is a publisher and freelance writer from Big Delta. In 2009, expect Ferguson's ”Salute to Statehood, Volume I, Windows to the Land, A Native Alaskan Story,” and, “Volume II, Bridges to Statehood, the Alaska Yugoslav Connection.”