Dahl Creek Occurrence, Kougarok Mining District, Nome Census Area, Alaska, USAi

Regional Level Types
Dahl Creek Occurrence	Occurrence
Kougarok Mining District	Mining District
Nome Census Area	Census Area
Alaska	State
USA	Country

Location: This is approximatly located near the mouth of Dahl Creek (probably within a half mile). Dahl Creek is a northeast -flowing tributary to Quartz Creek. Quartz Creek crosses the Nome-Taylor road at about mile 78.5, Brakes Bottom. The mouth of Dahl Creek on Quartz Creek is about 8,000 feet upstream from the road crossing. This is the location used for altered bedrock reported by Sainsbury and others (1969). It is locality 4 of Cobb (1972; MF 417; 1975; OFR 75-429).
Geology: Sainsbury and others (1969) describe a highly sericitized, clay-rich altered zone containing groundup and angular vein quartz but do not report any geochemical data for this area. Altered schist is apparently common where bedrock is exposed in the Dahl Creek drainage. Early reports described the alluvial pay in the main Dahl Creek drainage to be on a false bedrock of clay below which there was a quartz gravel (Collier and others, 1908). A test shaft, which did not reach bedrock, indicated this deep gravel to be at least 187 feet thick. However, Sainsbury and others (1969) concluded that the false bedrock described by early reports was instead altered bedrock. Bedrock is locally exposed in the area, primarily on the crest of nearby uplands, but Sainsbury and others (1969) note some bedrock in the drainage 7,000 feet above the mouth. All known bedrock in the area is part of a lower Paleozoic metasedimentary assemblage (Sainsbury and others, 1969; Till and others, 1986).
Workings: Local bedrock exposures along Dahl Creek are the result of open-cut placer mining operations, particulaly dozer and sluice operations since WWII.
Age: Possibly mid-Cretaceous; if gold-bearing lode structures are present here they may be similar in age to some lode gold deposits of southern Seward Peninsula. The southern Seward Peninsula lode gold deposits formed as a result of mid-Cretaceous metamorphism (Apodoca, 1994; Ford, 1993, Ford and Snee, 1996; Goldfarb and others, 1997) that accompanied regional extension (Miller and Hudson, 1991) and crustal melting (Hudson, 1994). This higher temperature metamorphism was superimposed on high pressure/low temperature metamorphic rocks of the region.
Alteration: Schist in this area is apparently highly sericitized and clay-rich (Sainsbury and others, 1969). The presence of broken quartz veins in the alteration zones may indicate that the alteration is developed along fault structures.

Commodities (Major) - Au (?)
Development Status: None
Deposit Model: Gold-bearing quartz veins and schist

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Link to USGS - Alaska:	BN007

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References