Greetings from the Cripple River Gold Camp! Today it is rainy and cool, almost cold. This is the sixth and last week of camp, and while many people are feeling a little sad, the pace in camp is fast paced. For people here for the entire six weeks, the time has flown by. It is easy to put off until later many of the activities you want to do, or places you want to go to, or even checking out that interesting gravel bar in the river when you have the entire 6 weeks of summer ahead of you.

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Greetings from the Cripple River Gold Camp! Today is a beautiful day again! The light rains of yesterday and the day before are gone, and the golden sun is shining on our freshly washed camp. There are ten or twelve white birds sitting on the blue green water, with the sun shining off their snowy white feathers they look like pearls or snow balls bobbing and dancing on a sea of blue.

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Greetings from the Cripple River Gold Camp! The last three days the weather turned on us, and the hot sunshine turned into clouds and sprinkles of rain. A slow cold wind from the North Pole blew through camp one day and chilled everything down. Today, the bright golden sunshine is back, but the wind is still just a ‘tad’ nippy. Perfect weather for a lot of us who trek north each summer looking for gold, fun, adventure, and to escape the 105 plus degree heat of the ‘Desert South West’.

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The weather way up here in Alaska has been absolutely ‘beautimous’, especially for beach mining and adventuring! Hot, dry, and sunny with enough of a cool breeze to keep those pesky bugs at bay! The Bering Sea is so smooth that when you look out of the chow hall window at ten p.m. the sunshine reflecting off the blue water looks like millions of twinkling diamonds gently floating on the water.

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Tom Massie, Champion Hider of Treasure Tins, is in camp! It seems that two of last years treasure tins are still hiding somewhere in camp. These small tins, about the size of Altoid Mint boxes are wrapped with duct tape to protect the surprises inside. What’s inside you may ask? Well, it varies. It could be carved jade, a gold coin, some walrus ivory jewelry, a gold nugget, or other great things!

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Greetings from the Cripple River Gold Camp! This year the first crew into camp, also called ‘the early crew ‘, were relieved and happy to see there were not huge drifts of ice and snow waiting for them like last year. Break Up, an important time in Alaska when deep ice on the Bering Sea (and all rivers and streams frozen solid all winter long) melts, breaks apart and flows away,

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