The Bristol Bay region (p1. 1, fig. 4) includes the area drained by streams flowing into Bristol Bay from Cape Newenham .on the quartz veins in fine-grained igneous rock. The best values in the
creek were found immediately downstream from the veins. Port age Creek is about 5 miles long and enters Lake Clark from the northwest. From 1910 to 1912 and for a few years after World War II, some gold was recovered, but the total amount was prob¬ably worth only a few thousand dollars. Desultory mining and prospecting have been reported from other streams in the same general area, but there has been no activity on them for many years.
Bonanza Creek and its tributaries, Pass and Scynneva Creeks, (12, 13, fig. 4) have been extensively prospected, but production probably has been less than 150 fine ounces of gold. Quartz veins, some containing a few sulfide minerals and a little free gold, are the probable source of the gold in the creek gravels. The valley of Bonanza Creek, though narrow, might be capable of supporting a small dredge or a dragline operation under favorable economic conditions. The Nushagak River and some of its tributaries, par¬ticularly the Mulchatna River, are known to be auriferous and to have been the source of very small amounts of gold in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. There was, however, no commercially successful mining in the Nushagak basin. Farther west, on Trail Creek (7, fig. 4), a headwater tributary of the Togiak River, there are signs of placer mining, but the results are not known.
A reconnaissance study of the U.S. Bureau of Mines (Berryhill, 1963) of beach sands around Bristol Bay failed to discover major concentrations of valuable minerals. Although an atypical sample from a beach south of Egegik (9, fig. 4) contained nearly 250 pounds of iron per cubic yard of beach material. There were traces of flour gold in a few samples from this beach and similar deposits on the northwest shore of Hagemeister Strait (1—6, fig. 4), where there was a small stampede in 1937 following overoptimistic re¬ports by prospectors. Gold recovered from beach deposits around Bristol Bay was worth no more than a few hundred dollars. The beach gold probably was mainly reconcentrated from glacial de¬posits; some from Hagemeister Strait may have been derived from nearby sulfide-bearing veins.