Claim staking takes off

Prospectors looking for valuable minerals in Alaska hit the ground hard in 2003, laying claim to 507 square miles of state and federally controlled land in the Last Frontier.

That's about double the effort by claim stakers in 2002, said Dave Szumigala, a geologist with the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, during a presentation at the March 2004 biennial conference of the Alaska Miners Association in Fairbanks.

"It shows that Alaska is on people's radar screens worldwide," he said.

Claim staking has continued at a rapid pace in early 2004, according to documents filed with the state recorders' offices in Alaska.

Key areas include Pogo

Key areas of claim staking activity include the rolling hills surrounding the Pogo gold deposit northeast of Delta Junction, the Denali Block area in the Alaska Range near Paxson and the Pebble gold-copper-molybdenum deposit near Iliamna Lake.

According to Kerwin Krause, property manager in the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, those three prospecting areas make up 903,240 acres of active claims, equal to 1,411.3 square miles of ground.

That's roughly one-third of the total amount of land in Alaska staked for mineral exploration and development. In 2003, 2.8 million acres or 4,401 square miles of Alaska was covered by active mining claims or prospecting sites, according to Szumigala.

State land staked in 2003, in both 40-acre and 160-acre claims and in 160-acre prospecting sites, totaled 311,520 acres, or 486.7 square miles, according to a recent update of land data in Szumigala's presentation.

That's nearly double the 167,440 acres, or 261.6 square miles, of state land staked in 2002. State land staked in 2001 totaled 147,680 acres, or 230.7 square miles.

Claim staking on federal land also increased, doubling from the 5,220 acres staked in 2002 to the 13,520 acres in 2003.

Macroeconomics of global metal markets driving Alaska staking

Macroeconomics of global metal markets is driving the recent claim-staking in Alaska, according to Curt Freeman, a Fairbanks-based consulting geologist and owner of Avalon Development.

"Worldwide demand for copper, nickel and the platinum group elements is outstripping supplies so these metals are getting looked at hard by mining companies," he said, referring to activity at Pebble and the Denali Block. (See Pebble claim staking story and Nevada Star story in this issue.)

Claims surrounding Pebble jumped from roughly 350 square miles recorded at the end of 2003 to 564 square miles, recorded by the first of April, according to geologists working in the area and state records.

Attention and interest in Pebble, which contains both copper and gold in large amounts, is also fueled by an increase in gold prices. The weakening U.S. dollar and global political uncertainties are also increasing demand for gold, Freeman said.

"With demand for these metals up, the producers are scrambling to find more supplies after spending five years in hibernation due to low demand and flat metal prices," Freeman said. "Their interest has translated downstream to the junior explorers such as Rimfire and Liberty Star who can now go to the public markets and raise venture capital, a near impossible task from 1997 to 2003."

Another consideration in the recent increase of claim staking, particularly in the Interior, involves the successful permitting process for the Pogo gold deposit.

"That's huge news down here - it changes the whole area from a good discovery and deposit to now officially a mining district," said David Caulfield, president of Rimfire Minerals Corp., a Vancouver, B.C.-based exploration company with considerable land holdings neighboring Pogo.

Large parts of Alaska underexplored

Despite its rich mining history, large portions of Alaska remain under explored, including the Goodpaster River drainages, which host Pogo.

"It's an area that's basically untouched - not the third or fourth generation of field work that you see in the States," Caulfield said. "You can count the number of properties on one hand that have seen drilling … it's not like you're trying to find the morsel between the last two meals."