We descended hunched over, down a long, steep, wooden staircase to the 1,000-level.

Located 23 miles south of Libby, the land surrounding the Libby Creek area has been of interest to prospectors since the early 1860s, when it was home to up to 600 miners working at a camp known as Libbysville.

My partner had the contacts and it wasn’t long before we had an agreement in place and the company had a geologist on site. I recall a time when he was getting the lay of the land, so to speak, and he broke off a rock sample and inspected it with his magnifier.

There are currently about 170 commercial-scale placer operations in Alaska. Most of these are small operations with just a few people working; they are often family affairs that operate seasonally only during favorable weather.

You find yourself with a bucketful of concentrates that you have accumulated over the season and consider the logical next step: to reduce the bucket of cons to a gold bar. Where do you begin?