Digital Bob Archive

Fires resulting from vandalism or carelessness, or perhaps some of both, have long since consumed the buildings at the former community of Perseverance in the Silver Bow Basin at the head of the Gold Creek Valley. The biggest of those fires, in mid-June, 1930, took the big boarding house, the mess house and kitchen, and the recreation building. Left standing after that conflagration were the office building the superintendent's house, up on the hill, as well as the school house and some dwellings down on the flats. All of those have gradually disappeared over the years, most of them by fire.

The Basin Road, as it was first called, referring to Silver Bow Basin, was built by the owners of several mining properties in the valley and was maintained in the early years by the mining companies. Because of terrain and weather, the road was plagued by slides and maintenance costs were high. In the years before about 1905, when mining in most of the Gold Creek Valley was a summer operation, no attempt was made to keep the road open during the winters. That changed when year-around mining began on the Perseverance group of claims, which was about 1905. That was the same year Congress created the Alaska Road Commission to build and maintain roads and trails in Alaska. The ARC, under the jurisdiction of the War Department, ignored the Basin-Perseverance Road for ten years. Its first work in the Juneau area was the construction of a pack trail to the Eagle River Mine, north of Juneau. During those ten years the mining companies continued to maintain the road and to rebuild it when necessary. There is no indication that they sought any government help.

The Alaska Road Commission assumed maintenance of the road in 1915 and began the work the following year when it expended $2,285.72 in cleaning ditches, replacing 600 feet of planked roadway and spreading some gravel. The following year the ARC spent $5049.55 maintaining and improving the road. In 1918 much of the road was washed out by heavy rains which also caused much damage in downtown Juneau. The following spring the road was opened only as far as the Ebner Mill at the head of Last Chance Basin. Work on the rest of the road was started late in June and it was not opened all the way to Perseverance until mid-August.

The ARC ceased to maintain the road after the Alaska Gastineau Company closed down in the early 1920s. The Forest Service maintained the road until 1934, then downgraded the portion beyond Last Chance Basin to the Perseverance Trail. Even that had a low priority during the World War II years and with the coming of statehood in 1959 the Forest Service was happy to turn the whole thing over to the State of Alaska.

Volunteers from among the prisoners at the State Jail in downtown Juneau made some improvements to the trail, including new bridges, during several summers.
More recently the State Division of Parks has been in charge of maintenance, and as in earlier years it has been a constant battle because of slides. With revenues on the decline the future of the Perseverance Trail is, at best, uncertain.