Grouse Creek Mine, Kougarok Mining District, Nome Census Area, Alaska, USAi

Regional Level Types
Grouse Creek Mine	Mine
Kougarok Mining District	Mining District
Nome Census Area	Census Area
Alaska	State
USA	Country

Location: Grouse Creek is a small, north tributary to Noxapaga River. The mouth of Grouse Creek is 9,000 feet east of the mouth of Winona Creek on Boulder Creek. This location is approximate but Grouse Creek is only about 1.5 miles long. This is locality 49 of Cobb (1972; MF 417; 1975; OFR 75-429).
Geology: Gold was discovered soon after the turn of the century on tributaries to the Noxapaga River including Grouse Creek (Collier and others, 1908), and mining took place here after WW II (Hopkins, 1963). Frozen, stratified peat and silt (muck), 20 to 30 feet-thick, commonly overlies a few feet of auriferous gravel on schist bedrock (Hopkins, 1963, Figure 8, p. 94). Muck locally contains bones of extinct Pleistocene mammals. Although tundra cover of bedrock is extensive in the area (Till and others, 1986), Hopkins (1963) indicates that quartz-calcite veins are common in schist bedrock of the gold- producing tributaries to the Noxapaga River.
Workings: Surface, open-cut placer workings are present somewhere on this drainage.
Age: Quaternary; an early radiocarbon age on shallow parts of the frozen and stratifed peat and silt of the nearby Black Gulch (BN018) was 8,800 +/- 200 years (Hopkins, 1963, Figure 8).

Commodities (Major) - Au
Development Status: Yes; small
Deposit Model: Placer Au-PGE (Cox and Singer, 1986; model 39a)

Other Databases

Link to USGS - Alaska:	BN017

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

References