Digital Bob Archive

In May of the year 1889 an extension of the old Johnson Road in Gold Creek Valley was completed to Silver Bow Basin. After that the entire four miles of road was commonly called the Basin Road, although in later years, after the settlement of Perseverance was established, it was sometimes the Perseverance Road. Soon after the road was completed a telephone line was strung between the office of the Eastern Alaska Mining and Milling Company in town and the mill it was erecting in the Basin. So far as can now be determined, that was the first phone line in the Juneau area.

The new road had been in use for only weeks when a slide and washout closed it for the first, but by no means the last, time. Silver Bow Basin normally received around 150 inches of precipitation each year (nearly double that of downtown Juneau), but the summer of 1889 was said to have been unusually wet, sending Gold Creek to its highest stage in years. Road repairs in August required nearly a week of pick and shovel work, and there was another, smaller washout in September.

Damage to the road delayed the hauling not only of the machinery for the EAM&M Company but also of a big compressor that Thomas S. Nowell was bringing over from his defunct Alaska Union Mine on Douglas Island for use in driving a long drainage tunnel into Silver Bow Basin. In order to get the compressor to its property, Nowell's Silver Bow Basin Mining Company built a bridge across the creek near where the tunnel was to start. A couple of years later, in February, 1891, a big snow slide struck the bridge, reducing it to kindling and tossing the pieces several hundred feet.

Slides and washouts have plagued the Basin Road and the Perseverance Trail that replaced a part of the trail for more than a hundred years, and some of the heaviest damage occurred in the Last Chance Basin section.

In March, 1900, a Juneau newspaper reported: \"For the past several days Old Mount Juneau has been roaring like a lion, with a great avalanche of boulders, snow and ice roaring down the steep slopes into the valley.\" Clearing the road took more than a week, but it was only a token of what was to come.

To carry the waters of Gold Creek while it mined the gravels of the basin, the Last Chance Mining Co. in 1900 began to build an enormous wooden flume nearly the length of the basin. A big piece of the flume was destroyed on January 13,1902. About 8 o'clock in the morning a large piece of Mount Juneau spalled off. \"There was a great roar and people could see huge trees turning topsy-turvey and a great avalanche of earth and rock rushing toward the valley,\" said a Juneau newspaper. \"About half an hour later another immense body of the mountain broke loose and crashed into Gold Creek near Shady Bend.\" Some 900 feet of flume was demolished and the road was deeply buried for about 1600 feet. Three valley mining companies which used the road - the Ebner, the Alaska Perseverance and the Alaska-Juneau - put crews of men to work to clear the road, a job that required several weeks.