ALASKA - Most Alaskans know well the photos of people who came to Alaska’s gold rush —ships overflowing with passengers; prospectors with piles of gear headed up slopes or down rivers; folks looking weary and dejected as they headed home. But what did the land and streams look like after the gold rush?

Resurrection Creek, located on the northern end of the Kenai Peninsula, near Hope, Alaska, on the Seward Ranger District of the Chugach National Forest, was home to one of Alaska’s first gold rushes. Like most of the people headed home from the gold rush, this creek looked bedraggled after mining with hydraulic and heavy equipment during the 1900s to 1940s. Much of the soil was lost and stream channels and wetlands on Resurrection Creek were dramatically changed. Mining and mine tailings turned the stream into a long, straight, deep ditch with steep sides and no connection to the flatter, wider historic floodplain. The aquatic habitat and riparian vegetation no longer resembled a natural unmined Alaska creek.
In 2007, the Forest Service finished restoring Phase I area of this creek, just upstream of the Phase II area. Now, more than 80 years later, the Phase II area still looks bedraggled and is not expected to naturally restore itself for centuries.

While historic mining first damaged the creek, a mining company is currently collaborating to restore this part of the creek. The Forest Service is working with Hope Mining Company on a collaborative partnership to restore a two-mile stretch of Resurrection Creek on the Company’s active mining claims over the next decade. This partnership, with additional contributions from Kinross Gold and Trout Unlimited, will contribute to restoring near-natural stream channel process within the 74-acre restoration corridor. Restoration will include rebuilding the degraded stream channel and floodplains, constructing pools, installing logs and root-wads in new stream channels, constructing side channels and ponds, and re-vegetating the riparian areas. Monitoring of similar actions that were part of the Phase I area, completed in 2006, show great results: more complex stream channel, connectivity with the floodplain, improvement of aquatic and riparian habitat and dramatically increased salmon spawning and juvenile rearing.

To get there, planning has been intense. “While we have done restoration on other parts of Resurrection Creek in past years,” said Chugach National Forest Hydrologist Angela Coleman, “what is unusual about this phase of the Resurrection project is that we are doing the work on active mining claims, working with a mining company. It means that we have to coordinate our timing, location and actions very carefully so that we all accomplish our goals without disturbing each other’s efforts or results. We also hope to multiply our beneficial results by finding ways that mining activities can contribute to restoration.”

Planning meetings between the two partners continued throughout the summer of 2020 as the Chugach National Forest and Enterprise Watershed Restoration Division began preparations to restore the creek. In May, Lidar (a kind of radar that uses light pulses) data was gathered to help map the existing conditions and material needs for the project. Over the summer, Regional Office GIS staff created the mosaic datasets in CAD and ArcMap, products essential for completing the final stream restoration corridor designs. Closer to the ground, Forest Service engineers and crew completed the temporary bridge site surveys during the summer and finished preliminary designs in the fall.

So, while mining of the past damaged this creek, mining now and into the future will help “resurrect” Resurrection Creek.