THE CHISTOCHINA GOLD FIELD, ALASKA: 
By Walter C. Mendenhall. 
GENERAL DESCRIPTION. 
The Chistochina gold field is a small placer area in the northwest- 
ern part of the Copper River Basin, Alaska, near the intersection of 
the one hundred and forty-fifth meridian west longitude and the 
sixty -third parallel north latitude. The district is among the foot- 
hills just south of the Alaskan Range, which rises to heights of 8,000 
or 9,000 feet in the vicinity, and serves as a gathering ground for ice 
fields and glaciers, from which torrential rivers flow north to the 
Tanana and south to the Copper. All of the diggings at present are 
on two streams, both tributary to Chistochina River, which flows into 
the Copper. The larger, but not the more important of these, the 
Chesna, is about 12 miles long and empties into the Chistochina 
11 miles below its source, in the Chistochina Glacier; the smaller, 
Slate Creek, which, with its tributary, Miller Gulch, yields nine-tenths 
of the gold of the district, is only -1 or 5 miles long and joins the Chis- 
tochina just as the latter emerges from the glacier. 
The field is usually entered over the military trail from Valdes, the 
nearest seaport, 225 miles to the south, but is accessible from Eagle 
City on the Yukon, about 250 miles north. The lack of navigable 
streams along these routes means that supplies must be transported 
practically the entire distance by pack train or sled, and that there- 
fore the district is one of the most remote and difficult of access in 
Alaska. 
GEOLOGY. 
Our present knowledge of the geology of the region ma} 7 be briefly 
summarized as follows: 
That part of the Alaskan Range lying immediately north of the 
gold area is made up principally of micaceous schists whose thickness 
and age are unknown. 
Immediately south of the schists and separated from them by a 
fault, whose throw probably exceeds 10,000 feet, is a belt of Permian 
a This paper is an abstract from a more complete discussion which is shortly to appear in a 
j paper entitled: The Mineral Resources of the Moiint Wrangell District, Alaska. 
71 
