Monroeville Beach Mine, Nome Mining District, Nome Census Area, Alaska, USAi

Regional Level Types
Monroeville Beach Mine	Mine
Nome Mining District	Mining District
Nome Census Area	Census Area
Alaska	State
USA	Country

Location: Monroeville Beach is a buried gold placer on bedrock at an elevation of about 35 to 45 feet. It is buried by deposits of the Nome coastal plain in an area where surface elevations range from about 100 to 125 feet. It is about 2 miles inland from the modern beach at Nome and extends in a northwest-southeast direction semi-parallel to the modern beach for about 1.5 miles between Little Creek and Bourbon Creek. The Saturday Creek (NM294) placer mine appears to be located on the trace of Monroeville Beach about a half mile west of Bourbon Creek. The map location is at the eastern end of placer workings along Monroeville Beach, in the SE1/4 section 14, T. 11 S., R. 34 W., Kateel River Meridian. This is locality 129 of Cobb (1972 [MF 463], 1978 [OFR 78-93]).
Geology: Monroeville Beach is an abrasion platform gold placer deposit at about 35 to 45 feet above sealevel that developed as Third Beach was being formed. The main deposit was traced for about a mile between Little and Holyoke Creeks (Moffit, 1913, p. 119). The placer continues as a low-grade deposit to a point just west of Dry Creek and possibly below Newton Gulch to Otter Creek (Metcalfe and Tuck, 1942). The width of the deposit in its productive section near Center Creek was 300 to 500 feet. Much of the detritus associated with the gold was coarse grained, and ruby sand was lacking. The gold also was coarse-grained; it mainly occurred in about a 1-foot-thick zone above schist bedrock. About 2 to 3 feet of schist were mined with the pay gravel. Arsenopyrite, pyrite, and magnetite were abundant in concentrates. The placer deposit was covered by about 50 feet of frozen gravel and muck. Tuck and Metcalfe (1942, p. 33 and 35) proposed that the Monroeville so called beach and other similar deposits was formed as an advancing sea eroded and redistributed a previously existing beach deposit. Unlike the strandline beaches, the abrasion deposits are not marked by an upper escarpment.
Workings: Mostly worked by drifting from shafts. The deposit was discovered about 1906.
Age: Quaternary.

Commodities (Major) - Au; (Minor) - Ag
Development Status: Yes
Deposit Model: Placer; marine abrasion platform deposit.

Other Databases

Link to USGS - Alaska:	NM257

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References