Juneau Perseverance Trail

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Wednesday, July 11, 2007 It wasn’t raining when we got up so we thought it’d be a good day to hike the Perseverance Trail. The hike follows an old wagon road used by miners and is part of the history of Juneau. The town was founded as a gold mining camp in the 1880’s. Gold Creek, where Joe Juneau first found gold in 1880, runs beside the trail The hike goes up the mountain and back into the valley where you can see remnants (very few) of the mining camps and the Glory Hole where the gold was excavated. Over $80 million dollars worth of gold came out of that area!
The trail was uphill but easy to walk. Shortly after we started it began to rain. We crossed the rushing creek at several places. Snow melt was evident on the mountains and water streamed down into the valley.
We saw the Glory Hole which is a big hole (surprise) and is being reclaimed by the forest. By the looks of the area, it was hard work getting to that gold.
After the hike Frank visited a little mining museum close by the trail and found out we could pan for gold in Gold Creek. We happen to have brought our own pans (part of Frank’s rock hounding supplies). So we tried our hand at it. The process of panning for gold is tedious, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. We didn’t have any luck. Frank said he needs to look for a book on the procedures, something like Gold Panning for Dummies.
There were also two older men panning. They were dressed for the weather and practically sat in the creek. One man had found quite a few gold flakes, I could see them in his pan. He wasn’t too talkative, but he did show me (sort of) how to sift through the silt. The other man talked to me when he changed his panning location. He was serious about panning. He said he had been at Gold Creek 10 days and panned 5 hours a day. He had accumulated about .25 ounce of gold so far. He said he didn’t sell it - - - - not sure what he did with it, just collected I guess. Unusual hobby. So it was an interesting experience, if not cold and soggy, but not very productive for us.
Actually, getting to the hiking location was more of an adventure than the hike itself. Juneau is called “little San Francisco” because of its narrow and steep streets. In order to get to the trailhead you had to maneuver through some pretty tight streets(single lane). None of the hiking guides said anything about parking and we didn’t know where we were going to end up. So, we started to back down the narrow street we were on (very interesting) and at the bottom of the hill a tour taxi told us if we got up the street and around the corner the road would open up and there was a nice parking lot at the trailhead. Sure enough, he was right. We tried it again and made it.

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