BLM bought snowmobiles to get to Alaska's abandoned gold mines

The Bureau of Land Management's Eastern Interior office has spent $125,098 this month on a UTV, an ATV and snowmobiles from Tanana Adventure Sports in Delta Junction, for its abandoned mine lands work. The four purchases came over 11 days.

The field office manages 6.5 million acres of east-central Alaska, much of it placer country, where miners washed stream gravel for gold and left the valleys behind them damaged.

BLM lists more than 200 abandoned mine sites in Alaska, many with impaired wildlife habitat and stream function. That is the agency's inventory. A 1996 estimate, cited by federal auditors in 2008, put the number of abandoned mine sites on BLM land in Alaska closer to 6,000, though BLM has said that figure includes sites it may not manage.