Alaska's Gold Cord Mine: 100-Year-Old Riches ⛏️

In this episode, I travel all the way to Alaska to explore the historic Gold Cord Mine with Josh, a fourth-generation miner whose family has been tied to this property for generations. This is a rare, in-depth look at a real hard rock gold mine where family history, underground geology, and old-school mining engineering all come together. Josh takes us into the workings to show how the original miners chased narrow but incredibly rich quartz veins through quartz diorite host rock, dealing with fault offsets, pinching and swelling ore, and all the unpredictability that comes with underground vein mining.

We start at the upper workings and head through a well-built portal into the zero level, where Josh explains how later generations drove access through waste rock to reconnect with older workings from the 1920s and 1930s. From there, we climb down into the mine through historic raises and winzes, including a long ladder descent into the lower levels. Underground, we see old stopes, ore chutes, rails, mucking equipment, ladders, timbered passages, sumps, and narrow vein exposures that still show why this district was worth mining in the first place. The vein may be thin in places, but it carried impressive grades, and the mine’s geology tells the whole story: faulted quartz veins, stringers above the main structure, sulfide bands, gouge zones, and rich shoots that blossomed suddenly out of otherwise tight ground.

One of the most fascinating parts of the tour is hearing how Josh’s great-grandfather and the earlier miners worked these veins by hand, following the pay wherever it led. The mine produced significant gold from the upper levels, and later generations continued exploring deeper ground below the original stopes. We get to see how difficult that work really was, especially in a mine where the vein could disappear across a fault and force miners to hunt for it again. Josh also shares family stories about reopening flooded levels, walking in the preserved footprints of his ancestors, and the long-term dream of bringing parts of the mine back into production.

After the underground tour, we head to the original mill site, where the history of the operation really comes alive. Josh walks us through the old mill building and explains how ore was brought out of the mine by rail, carried through the snow shed, dumped into the ore hopper, crushed in the jaw crusher, fed into the ball mill, classified, and finally concentrated through gravity and flotation. We also see the assay office, the old safe where bullion was kept, the compressor, the generator, and the remains of the original amalgamation setup. It is an incredible look at a one-ton-per-hour mill that once ran around the clock and processed ore from this remote Alaska mine.

This video is packed with authentic mining detail: underground stopes, faulted gold veins, historic equipment, family mining history, and the realities of narrow-vein hard rock mining in Alaska. For anyone interested in gold mining, underground mine exploration, vintage milling equipment, geology, or historic family-run operations, this is a must-watch tour of one of the most fascinating small gold mines in the North.

For more info please email or call:

Email: info@MBMMLLC.com
Phone: 360-595-4445
Website: http://www.mbmmllc.com/
eBay: https://www.ebay.com/usr/mtbakerminingandmetals
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/MBMMLLC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MBMMLLC
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mbmmllc/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MBMMLLC