Gold miner finds value in staying active

In 1965 Bill Dunlevy was in the U.S. Air Force stationed in California. A friend taught him how to pan for gold. He was hooked. Bill and his family drove to Alaska in 1977. A few years later he retired from the Air Force and took a job in the private sector. He continued to mine for gold in southcentral Alaska and as far away as Nome. In 2008 Bill and five partners purchased a gold mining claim at a remote site in the Wrangell Mountains. Bill is 85 now. I interviewed him just a few weeks before he and his partners headed out for their annual trek to work the mine.

When you go gold mining, do you find it kind of exciting to do? Is it like treasure hunting?

That's the way it is with most of it. It's never been the value of the gold. It's the finding of the gold. A lot of people do make a living at it but with us as recreational miners it's just that chance you'll find that pocket, rich pocket, and then you get a handful of gold out of it. Or they find one of them big nuggets. Like last year we found a nugget–it was 3/4 ounces, golf-ball size. It was a beautiful specimen because it was gold and quartz mixed.

So on your site do you have bulldozers, four-wheelers, cabins? What does it look like?

We've got four four-wheelers, two trailers, and no heavy equipment at all. Just dredges and something to dive. You dive (under water to use) suction dredging. Most of the time we're never much deeper than 4 feet so you can usually work that from the surface.

I understand that you are headed out for some gold mining later this summer.

Yeah, we're taking off the end of June into July (2025). Normally we go for two weeks because usually at the end of two weeks we bust buns for that. I mean every day 10 to 12 hours a day. Everybody's usually collapsed in bed at 9 at night and I usually try to get them out of bed at 6 in the morning and we try to be on the creek by 8 and working. We got to get into dry suits before we leave the cabin.

We've got four four-wheelers out there and trailers so we can haul all our gear to the place we want to go, which just makes it nice. And we got four creeks and every one of them is richer than the dickens. They all got great gold.

What are you doing during the day that makes all of you so tired?

It's usually six to eight of us depending on how many go. We throw probably 25,000 to 30,000 rocks during a two-week period. Mostly it's rock throwing.

You clean the stream. You throw anything bigger than a softball across the creek. And then we usually mine up one side. We throw the rocks there away from the creek.

But once we start to move over and come up the other side, then we throw the rocks from there. We throw them back to where we already worked. And then that side eventually looks like a Roman road. It's all paved in rock all the way up as far as we go.

I think most guys who are 85 years old don't do heavy work like gold mining in remote sites. Why are you still doing it?

Well, that's why my motto has always been "use it or lose it." It's easy to sit down in a chair and don't do anything. It's easy to just watch TV or listen to music or just sit on your rear, and I hate that. So that's why I still cut the grass. I wash that motor home and then wash the cars and the truck and I try to stay as active as I can. And this gold mine is just another activity that I do. Shoveling snow is my winter exercise. See? Shovel snow in the winter, shovel pay dirt in the summer. It all works together. It's all good for your back, you know.

Do you have any last words for the readers, anything you want to say?

I can tell everybody just getting into it there is such a thing as "gold fever" and if you catch it there is no cure for it. You'll have it the rest of your life, and every time you're out walking anywhere you're always looking at the ground. You're looking around all the time.

This interview was conducted May 30, 2025. It has been edited for length and clarity.