A Fox placer miner asked to move Treasure Creek. The state's public notice says equipment and an operator.

A miner near Fox wants to move a section of Treasure Creek, but you would not know it from the state's public notice, which describes the request in eight words and never mentions the creek.

The notice, posted Sept. 2, reads only: "Amendment for additional equiptment and adding an operator," misspelling and all. Comments are due Sept. 16. The creek diversion appears nowhere in it. It surfaces only inside the 13-page application, in a handwritten narrative from the miner.

The miner is Wally Trudeau of Centralia, Washington, who has been authorized to dig gold from Treasure Creek's gravel with heavy equipment since 2022. His amendment would add more of it: two large dozers, track hoes, dump trucks, a generator and two campers. And, in the narrative, it proposes putting Treasure Creek back in its original channel to move the water away from the mining cut and the waste pile. Trudeau writes that beavers dammed the creek around 2021 and shifted where it runs.

That single sentence is the entire diversion request. The application form has a required section for stream diversions that demands start and end coordinates, the dimensions of both channels, a construction and reclamation plan, and, in capital letters, a map of the diversion's full length. That page is not in the file. The diversion exists in the record as a line the miner drew on a phone screenshot.

The same form says a stream diversion has to be reported to the Department of Fish and Game's habitat section, may fall under the state's dam safety program, and counts as advance notice to the Army Corps of Engineers. None of those agencies appears anywhere in the file.

One request in the narrative was withdrawn. Trudeau had asked for a new road to the mine site, and that passage is crossed out by hand and annotated "removed per conversation 3/16/2026," with a note that road approval falls outside this permit. Nothing in the file records a similar conversation about the creek, and nothing explains why the notice leaves the diversion out.

The file contains no comments, no downstream water user, no neighbor, no watershed group. The only account of what would happen to Treasure Creek is the applicant's own handwriting.

A second placer application went out the same day with the same deadline. The Stenberg family of Fairbanks is seeking mechanical mining on Big Eldorado Creek through 2035. That one answers no to the diversion question and puts its settling pond on a hillside above the valley floor.