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The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Tetlin Village, Contango, Kinross celebrate Manh Choh start; local businesses benefit from added crossroads town traffic North of 60 Mining News – September 1, 2023
The Manh Choh camp, which breathes new life into a shuttered hotel at the intersection of the Alaska Highway and Tok Cutoff Road, is a tangible sign of the significance of the gold mine being developed about 15 miles to the southeast.
Tetlin Village Chief Michael Sam, Contango ORE President Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, and Avalon Development President Curt Freeman during the groundbreaking ceremony at the Manh Choh Mine in eastern Alaska.
Young Tetlin Village residents helping with the core logging during the early exploration of the Manh Choh gold discovery.
TOK, ALASKA – An Aug. 29 groundbreaking ceremony at Manh Choh marked the official opening of Alaska's newest gold mine. But even before tribal, corporate, and state leaders tossed the symbolic golden shovels of dirt celebrating the start of Manh Choh, the Alaskan crossroads town of Tok about 15 miles to the northwest was already bustling from the added business this mine brings.
As the first real sign of civilization in nearly 300 miles for northbound Alaska Highway travelers, and the last full-service Alaska town for visitors heading south to Canada and the Lower 48 states, Tok is practically a required stop along the 1,382-mile northern highway known locally as the Alcan.
After fueling up, resting, grabbing a bite to eat, and loading up on supplies, northbound travelers have the option of turning toward Anchorage or continuing on the Alaska Highway to Fairbanks. Canada-bound travelers have the choice of a side trek over the "Top of the World Highway" to Dawson City, Yukon, or stay on the most direct route to southern locales.
Either way, Tok residents and businesses enjoy a steady, though seasonally fluctuating, stream of traffic and business for its gas stations, stores, restaurants, RV parks, hotels, and other businesses.
"Historically, Tok has been a pass-through community – a service town for tourism and government projects," Bronk Jorgensen, a Tok resident and businessman, told Mining News.
With Manh Choh – a joint venture owned by Kinross Gold Corp. (70%) and Contango ORE Inc. (30%) – setting up camp at the site of a shuttered and slowly deteriorating hotel in the center of town, Tok businesses are now enjoying an increase to their baseload clientele from the workers that have arrived to build and operate this mine on nearby Alaska Native land owned by Tetlin Village.
"This is the first real, private industrial project we have had in this area that is coming to full fruition. So, it is going to create a huge economic boost to this area, it already has," Jorgensen said.
For those who have passed through Tok many times on their journeys across Alaska and beyond, the extra bustle is immediately apparent when you see dozens of mining company and contractor vehicles lined up at the freshly restored hotel-turned-camp, parts stores, gas stations, and other businesses that line the Alaska Highway and Tok Cutoff Road heading south to Anchorage.
The bustle becomes even more obvious with a visit to Fast Eddy's, an iconic restaurant in Tok – every table full on a Sunday afternoon and a line of hungry locals, workers, and travelers waiting to be seated.
While Alcan travelers are transient by their very nature and thin out quite a bit during the winter months, the Manh Choh mine is providing year-round business, along with healthy paychecks, to some of the 1,600 or so residents of Tok and the surrounding area.
"It will provide a continued economic benefit through the wintertime when a lot of businesses in this town aren't generating enough money to pay the power or heat bill," Jorgensen said while sitting in his office across the Alaska Highway from Fast Eddy's.
He says Kinross has already gone beyond the norm to ensure that businesses and people in Tok, Tetlin Village, and other nearby communities are able to pay their power and heat bills during the cold and dark winter days.
"Normally when these projects happen, they would go to a large general contractor. Kinross has taken specialties out of the big contract and handed it directly to the local contractor, like me and my brother," the Tok business owner said. "That has been a huge benefit to directly employ local people and work with the community."
Tok's transformation from crossroads tourist town to crossroads tourist and mining town is something residents and geologists would have never dreamed of just 15 years ago.
While Yukon's Klondike goldfields are only about 110 miles to the northeast and the Fairbanks gold mining district is about 170 miles to the northwest, Tok itself is not known for its mineral riches.
While Tok did serve as a resupply post for miners in the Fortymile district to the north, nobody had ever found any appreciable quantities of gold around this stopover town.
That is until an astute and curious petroleum engineer by the name of Brad Juneau stumbled across some interesting rocks while searching for black gold on Alaska Native lands owned by Tetlin Village southeast of town.
Not sure what exactly he had come across but convinced it could be valuable, Juneau took his discovery to Curt Freeman, a longtime Alaska geologist based in Fairbanks.
Though skeptical that a petroleum engineer discovered gold in an area of Alaska not known for its mineral potential, Freeman agreed to take a look at the property in 2009.
It did not take long for Freeman's skepticism to shift to excitement over one of the purest gold discoveries made in Alaska in years.
Fast forward 14 years, and the happenchance discovery made by Juneau has been expanded to a high-grade deposit containing more than 1 million ounces of gold and the company he founded, Contango ORE, alongside global gold mining partner Kinross have broken ground on a mine there that is set to produce its first gold next year.
This is a remarkably short timeline in an industry that typically measures grassroots discoveries to producing mines in decades and often generations.
During the Manh Choh groundbreaking ceremony, Contango ORE President and CEO Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse commended Freeman's efforts to "make a grassroots discovery in an area that really was not very well known at all."
More importantly to Van Nieuwenhuyse and the official Mahn Choh mine opening being celebrated, Freeman worked closely with the people of Tetlin Village, who are the closest residents to the mine and own the ground where it is being built, from the very onset of exploration.
"He did this because it is the right thing to do," the Contango ORE CEO said.
And, like Ted Lasso of Apple TV fame says, "Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing."
By doing the right thing, Freeman helped to build a strong bond with residents of Tetlin Village and garnered support for developing a mine at Manh Choh, which means "Big Lake" in the Upper Tanana Athabascan language.
This name was selected by the Tetlin tribal council in 2021 as a nod to the 7.5- by 4.5-mile Tetlin Lake, a site of high cultural significance in the Tetlin community.
The mutually respectful relationship forged between Tetlin Village Chief Michael Sam and Freeman has been carried forward to Contango ORE and now Kinross as the mine readies for first production next year.
It is likely that without this strong relationship with the Alaska Native landowner and the surrounding communities, Kinross would not have been willing to join the Manh Choh project, and the groundbreaking ceremony would have been at some point in the distant future-if ever.
During the groundbreaking ceremony, Kinross Gold President and CEO Paul Rollinson said that doing the right thing when it comes to environment and community is a foundational principle of the global gold mining company.
"We have to be mindful that we are always a guest in someone's community," he said.
This mindfulness is a reflection of Freeman's working closely with Tetlin Village and hiring local residents from the early discovery days at Manh Choh, as well as the legacy Kinross wants to leave once the mine is closed.
Rollinson said the lasting legacy includes building a center that will allow Tetlin Elders to live out their years on Village land and continue to pass their wisdom to future generations; a high priority for this Alaska Native community.
The Kinross CEO also says the company will leave behind job skills that will allow village residents to continue the prosperity brought while the mine is in operation.
Tetlin Village Chief Michael Sam said he is excited about Manh Choh and what it means for the Alaska Native village southeast of Tok.
"I hope this will make things easier for my people," he said during the groundbreaking.
Manh Choh Mine is slated to begin shipping ore to the Fort Knox Mine near Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2024. Over an initial 4.5 years of mining, this operation is expected to produce roughly 1 million ounces of gold-equivalent, which includes the value of both the gold and silver recovered.
And there is a very good possibility that Kinross and Contango ORE will find more gold and other metals that will continue to keep Tetlin Village and Tok bustling deeper into the future.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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