The Wrangell sentinel., 1927-03-03


 and Yukon river. west of the Can ada-Alaska boundary. and east of the mining camps on ohandalar river is large tract of unsurYeyed country about which little is known.
 In this wilderness a party of the Interior Departments Geological Survey is preparing to make both geologic and topographic surveys during the coming field season. In order to utilize most effectively the short open season the topographer of the party, Gerald Fitzgerald, left Washington two weeks ago for the Arctics. He was aboard the Victo- ria which was in port Tuesday morning From Seward he will go over the Alaska Railroad to Fair banks, where he will purchast a dog team to go by trail to Fort Yukon.
 At Fort Yukon he will outfit with all the necessary supplies and equipment needed by a party of four men, as there will be no other chance to purchase them until the party returnes to the Yukon in September. From Fort Yukon the outfit will be freighted to the East Fork of the Chandalar, where con- nection with earlier surveys to the west will be made. During April and May most of the time will be spent in preliminary scouting through the area to be surveyed and in placing caches of supplies at convenient places where they may be available during the summer.
 By the latter part of May the ice in the rivers will probably have broken, and as soon thereafter as possible J. B. Mertie, Jr., geologist who is chief of the party and who will have left Washington in May, will go to Fort Yukon by regular lines of transportation and thence go by canoe up Chandalar river and join MT. FitzGerald on the East Fork. From then on their work will be primarily to collect all the available information possible re- garding the geology, geography, topography. and mineral resources of as large a tract of country as the time at their disposal before the fall freeze-up will permit. Most of their travelling in this field will have to be done on foot, and their main means of transporting their supplies will be on their own backs and those of their dogs. They will have canoes by which they can travel on the larger streams, but much of the travel will be traverse to the general drainage lines.
 It is expected that in the course of the work the party will go at least far enough east to tie in with the work done in 1926 by Mr. Mer- tie on Sheenjek River and far enough north to reach the crest of Brooks Range, which forms the di- V de between the steams that flow ] northward into the Arctic Ocean and those that flow southward into the Yukon. Possibly the work may | be extended northward far enough to tie with the surveys made by D. de K. Leffingwell on Canning Riy CT, and thus furnish complete section across the mountains in this part of Alaska.
 It is impossible to predict in ad- vance of the completion of these surveys just what the economic value of this expedition will be. In fact, it's main justification is to gather authoritative data on what this practically unknown country contains. In spite of definite knowl edge of what may be found, there is reason to believe, from what is known of adjacent areas, that this tract has decided possibilities of containing deposits of valuable minerals. For instance, in other parts of the mountain province are bodies of granite rocks which con- tain metalliferous veins and from which placers have been formed.
 It is therefore highly probable that similar intrusive rocks occur in this area, and ore deposits may be associated with some of them. Then again, a specimen of oil shale from Christian River has been tested and found to be practically equal in it's oil content to the rich est oil shales on record. This river is within the area that will be sur yeyed. Some distance east of this I