Tours stop at Fort Knox, Alaska’s largest gold mine

Patricia Jones

Petroleum News Contributing Writer

Operators of Alaska’s largest gold mine located northeast of Fairbanks stopped its commercial tour program effective Jan. 1 in an effort to refocus its community outreach program to local residents. Although free tours for local school groups and other educational and civic groups have been provided since the Fort Knox mine opened in late 1995, the company started a commercial tour program catering to tourists visiting Alaska in 2002.

Visitors paid $21 per person to for a guided two-hour mine tour, which included a view of the gapping pit from a van, walking through the gigantic rock crusher and watching huge indoor mills pulverized gold-rich rock. The tour concluded with a Polaroid photo of the visitor holding a giant Hershey-sized gold bar and a stop in the Fort Knox gift shop that offered gold jewelry, t-shirts and caps for sale. Fort Knox operators advertised the tour in major Alaska tourism publications, including the Milepost, the Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau, the local newspaper’s visitor guide and with publication and distribution of colorful rack cards.

“We got great returns (on advertising),” Lorna Shaw, director of tourism at Fort Knox, told Petroleum News Jan. 12. “It was an amazing response. We were not able to accommodate everyone who requested tours.”

Part of the attraction is that few operating gold mines in the United States are open for public tours, Shaw said. As in Fairbanks, mining tourist attractions are more typically based on historical operations, such as panning or dredging.

Tours not part of corporate mission

“Instead of people who live here…we were primarily focused on folks visiting in Alaska,” she said.

Now, marketing and public relations efforts will be focused on educating the local public about the company and its mining operation. Educational and civic groups will still be able to tour the facility, Shaw said, and more effort will be made to make mining presentations to school groups off-site.

As part of the changed outreach effort, the company is making plans to conduct a public perception survey in the Fairbanks area.

Fairbanks Gold Mining Inc., which operates Fort Knox, is a subsidiary of global mining giant Kinross Gold, based in Toronto, Ontario. Fort Knox’s annual gold production of more than 400,000 ounces is Kinross’ single largest producing mine.