Fairview Prospect, Aniak Mining District, Bethel Census Area, Alaska, USAi

Regional Level Types
Fairview Prospect	Prospect
Aniak Mining District	Mining District
Bethel Census Area	Census Area
Alaska	State
USA	Country

Location: The Fairview prospect is along the the crest of a northwest-trending ridge, about 1.8 miles southwest of the mouth of McCally Creek. It is at an elevation of about 1,000 feet in the NE1/4 sec. 11, T. 19 N., R. 45 W., of the Seward Meridian. The prospect is locality 17 of Miller and others (1989). The location is accurate.
Geology: The Fairview prospect is unusual because it is one of the few cinnabar prospects in the Kuskokwim mineral belt that is wholly in intrusive rock. The host rock is an altered, sericitized, quartz-feldspar-porphyry sill about 120 feet thick and 1,000 feet long that trends northwest, parallel to the strike of the shale and sandstone of the Upper Cretaceous, Kuskokwim Group that contains the sill (Cady and others, 1955; Sainsbury and MacKevett, 1965). The Fairview deposit has a 40Ar/39Ar isochron age of 72.6 Ma (Gray, Gent, and others, 1997); it is the only mercury deposit in the Red Devil area that has been dated. The mineralization consists of cinnabar, stibnite, and quartz that fills several parallel fractures in the central part of the altered felsic sill. In the early 1940s, three trenches were sampled by the U.S. Bureau of Mines (Webber and others (1947). One 50-foot zone in trench 1 averaged 0.15 percent mercury ; one 5-foot zone in trench 2 averaged 0.40 percent mercury.
Workings: The property was discovered in the 1920s by tracing cinnabar-bearing float up slope from a stream below it. The Fairview prospect was staked in 1935 or 1936 (Webber and others, 1947). The U.S. Bureau of Mines trenched the property in 1943, but by 1959, the trenches were largely filled by vegetation (Sainsbury and MacKevett, 1965). Three trenches were cut normal to the felsic sill. In the early 1940s, the trenches were sampled by the U.S. Bureau of Mines (Webber and others (1947).
Age: The Fairview prospect has a 40Ar/39Ar age of 72.6 Ma (Gray, Gent, and others, 1997).
Alteration: Sericitic alteration in quartz-feldspar porphyry.

Commodities (Major) - Hg; (Minor) - Sb
Development Status: None
Deposit Model: Silica-carbonate mercury (Cox and Singer, 1986; model 27c).

Other Databases

Link to USGS - Alaska:	SM019

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

References