A new gold claim would push mining into a creek the government has spent a decade repairing for fish

A two-person gold operation near Chicken is seeking to extend its mining down Warner Creek — in the headwaters of a drainage where the federal government has spent the past decade repairing salmon and grayling habitat wrecked by a century of placer mining.

The application, now open for public comment through Aug. 24, adds a single state claim to carry "the exact same scope of work" farther down the valley, with what the operator describes as "no change to operations at this time." But the ground it would move into is not ordinary mining country.

Warner and Grace creeks join to form Jack Wade Creek, a tributary of the Walker Fork inside the Fortymile Wild and Scenic River corridor — a river system Congress singled out for protection. The Fortymile has been mined since gold was found in the 1880s, and that legacy left its streams choked with tailings, their channels rerouted, their water quality impaired and their fish habitat degraded. In places the damage is bad enough to cause repeated washouts of the Taylor Highway.

Since 2015, the Bureau of Land Management has been working to undo it. On Jack Wade Creek, BLM crews have rebuilt stream channels, redirected flow back toward the center of degraded waterways, and revegetated eroding banks — restoring habitat for the Arctic grayling that anglers travel the Taylor Highway to catch. The work has been more than local repair: BLM has used Jack Wade Creek as a field laboratory, developing reclamation techniques now applied across Alaska, from the Denali and Dalton highways to salmon streams in the Koyukuk drainage. Large sections of the creek sit on closed federal claims that can no longer be mined at all, because they fall inside the protected river unit.

One of the quieter ironies of the effort is who has done much of the digging: miners. BLM has partnered with small operators who mine old gold while reclaiming the streams they work, and in 2019 the bureau gave one Fortymile operator a national award for its stream-restoration work. The model treats the gold as what helps pay for the habitat repair, not the other way around.

That is the backdrop against which the Warner Creek application lands. Beginning in 2025, BLM announced a new, longer-term restoration strategy for the watershed, with an early focus on reducing the erosion and sediment washing down from historic mine tailings in the upper drainage — the same upstream reaches where new mining would occur.

Whether this claim proceeds is Alaska's call, not the federal river managers'. Roughly 70% of the Fortymile's boatable segments are state-owned, and the new claim is a state one. The jurisdictional split has been contested before: when BLM moved to close federal claims inside the river corridor in 2015, Sen. Lisa Murkowski objected to "the scope of the mineral entry closure envisioned by BLM."

Public comments on the application close Aug. 24.