A Watery Tale (or Two) of Alaska
Where the water has personality
Alaska water is weird!
No, I’m not kidding.
Take the water in the Copper River.
Well, actually, you don’t want that water. Yeah, you can’t see through it. So? Yes, if you leave it in a cup for a while, it will evaporate into a mud flat. It’s called glacial flour and most rivers in Alaska are glacially fed.
Looks yummy, doesn’t it?
No, don’t drink it. Humans can’t drink mud. It will make you sick.
That’s a bottle of Copper River water I dipped myself and let settle for about 12 hours. You can see the mud settling out on the bottom. You can filter that water through a coffee filter and maybe drink it — if you add a liberal amount of either iodine or bleach to kill the giardia. Giardia is a parasite most often found in the gut biome of beavers and Alaska has a lot of beavers. People get really sick from drinking from Alaska rivers.
This is what passes for “pristine” Alaska water in most rivers.
Don’t drink the water.
Doesn’t Fit the Image
I know. Alaska is the Last Frontier, untouched by pollution. Pristine!
But the thing about wilderness is that wild animals crap in the water and pollute it. There’s no people around to clean it up, so the water stays polluted. Drink it at your own risk.
Glaciers melt. They’ve been doing that since a long time before humans existed. Melted glacier ice becomes water and water flows out of glaciers which grind rocks into dust. That silty water then flows into rivers, turning them brown with mud. It’s a natural occurrence. Is that pollution?
Good luck fining the glacier. They have a 100% rate of not paying the fine.
Alaska Rivers Are Muddy
My article earlier this week dealt with an 2013 EPA raid in Chicken, Alaska, obstensibly because the miners were turning the Yukon River brown. Ironically…or maybe just honestly…the National Park Service identifies the Yukon River as a glacially-fed river that has brown waters. No-duh! You can hear the granules of mud rubbing against one another when you canoe the Yukon. It’s not as muddy as the Tanana or the Copper rivers, but it is a muddy river.
Which creates a problem for the miners of Alaska, not just in Chicken, but across the state.
Impossible Standard
Alaskan miners are required to return “drinking quality” water back to streams that aren’t drinking-water quality when they take the water out. Nobody in their right mind would fill a water bottle with the silty water from the Yukon River, look at all the mud floating in that water, and expect to make it drinking water before pouring it back into the river. We’d look at that water and pour it back into the river as undrinkable.
Miners need that water to operate their sluice boxes to capture the gold they need to pay their bills. They build catchment ponds to allow the sediments that the gold was found in to settle out before they release the water back into the river. It’s hardly a perfect science, but it works pretty well. Ideally, you return water that is the same muddiness as the river. Most miners do try to do that.
The EPA used to be fairly reasonable, understanding that a naturally muddy river makes it hard to bring its waters into drinking water compliance. But that’s not how Section 404 of the Clean Water Act has been interpreted for almost 20 years. In the 21st century, the EPA has decided that humans have to do the near-impossible if we want to interact with our environment for capitalistic ventures. Miners are now required to return only “drinking quality” water back to the rivers they mine alongside.
That’s an expensive venture, requiring modern technology, rather than a sluice box and a settlement pond. Miners have been complaining about overzealous regulators for a long time and this is just one example. Alaska waters are rarely drinking water quality when they are untouched by man. If a miner takes a bucket of water from the river, runs it over his tailings in the sluice box, and contains it in a settlement pond for years, he might get water that is slightly less muddy than the original bucket, but it is nearly impossible to make it drinkable because the water wasn’t drinkable before he took it out of the river.
And the EPA wonders why miners aren’t excited to see them pulling up on their ATVs in their bulletproof vests, carrying AR15s.
Lela Markham is an Alaska-based novelist and commentator who has known a few Alaska miners and played along and sometimes in more than a few Alaska rivers. The Copper River (a mighty muddy river) is the archetype for a glacial river in her Daermad Cycle series.
This was extremely interesting and something I was completely unaware of. So sad how an agency originally intended for good, can become such a mess…pretty much describes our whole government in general too! Thanks for subscribing to wyrdplay 😊
Going out of the Chena in to the Tanana you suddenly start hearing the granules of silt, sand and glacial flour hitting the sides of your canoe even more. much louder, than on the Yukon.