Dawson Gold Mine - Field Work with Michael Feinstein and Keith Cardon

🪨 Throwback Field Clip — Dawson Mine, Prince of Wales Island, Alaska (2013)

After seeing Dr. Molly Turko’s recent post about getting into the field, I felt compelled to dig this one back up.

This video was filmed back in 2013 at the Dawson Mine on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, during a boots-on-the-ground mapping and sampling campaign at a historic underground gold operation. What you’re seeing is real geology in real time: exposed bedrock, quartz veins, old adits and stopes, structural controls coming into focus, and the kind of messy, physical work it takes to understand a mineral system from the surface down.

We were trenching through overburden, reopening historic workings, mapping vein geometry, sampling slate-hosted quartz, and trying to piece together structure, grade distribution, and mining history the old-school way—by walking it, touching it, and arguing about it in the rain.

Full disclosure: apologies for the image stabilization 😅. I did what I could in editing, but cameras (and gimbals) weren’t what they are today—and neither were field workflows. Still, the geology holds up.

Molly’s point is dead on: fieldwork grounds your interpretations. It resets your sense of scale, reminds you what rock actually looks like, and keeps desk-bound models honest. Whether you’re in minerals, oil & gas, academia, or engineering—there’s no substitute for seeing it in person.

If it’s been a while since you’ve been outside looking at rocks…
check yourself and get back in the field.

#geology #fieldwork #mining #structuralgeology #gold #alaska #outcrop #getinthefield #TheGrizzledGeologist