The Daily Alaska empire., 1951-02-28
Twenty fourth of a Series

LSO II. Oddltld, WllO ildo cSSA Alaska's Commissioner of Mines for a little more than year, is the second man to hold this job and the first Alaska-born man to head any Territorial department. He took over in the Department of Mines on January 1, 1850, succeeding B D. Stewart who had held the po- sition since the offic was created on March II, 1885.
 The Commissioners father, Hjal- mer Saarela, was an early-day resident of Juneau and was a car penter by trade. He worked for the Alaska-Juneau mine and on gener- al construction jobs and during the summers he gillnetted salmon for the cannery at Chilkat, near the upper end of Lynn Canal.
 In 1915, when the government took over the old Alaska Northern Railroad and began to build what is now the Alaska Railroad, the Saarela family moved north and settled at Anchorage. It wasn't much of town then and in fact until about that time had been known merely as Knik Anchorage the anchoring place for ships bring ing supplies to the little trading post of Knik, where a postoffice had been established in 1905.
 Leo Saarela, the present Com missioner of Mines, was born at Anchorage on October 2l, 1915, and was the first white child born in the new city. He finished grade school and high schoc' in his home town, then went to what was then the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines and is now the University of Alaska.
 Majoring in chemistry and metal lurgy, he graduated in 1889 and went to work for the Cleary Hills Mines, lode gold mine near Fair banks, as assayer and geologist.
 In 1941 Saarela moved over to the Territorial Department of Mines as asSayer and associate engineer under B. D. Stewart. He remained on that job until 1945 and in the summer of 1946, with couple of partners, he started his own placer mining operation.
 This was, and is, a bulldozer proposition on Hunter Creek, near Rampant, and Leo was active in the operation from 1946 through l949. The pickings were not heavy the first three years but in 1949 they adopted a new recovery sys- tenn, known as the sluice plate system, which has been developed by Glen D. Franklin and his asso- ciates in the Fortymile district, and since then the total gold re- covery has increased.
 During the winter months, when mining operations were closed down, Saarela hired out to the ex- tension service of the University of Alaska and taught the mining short-course in towns from Ketch- ikan to Anchorage.
 Since taking over ia the Terri tory's Department of Mines last year Saarela has found that the problems of the Commissioner are somewhat varied One of the more pressing ones of the moment is the virtual embargo on powder shipments to the Territory.
 This came about as the result of the Dangerous Cargo Act, which became effective on August g, 1850, and which prohibits the loading and discharge of powder in excess of 500 pounds near areas .of habi- tation. The Coast Guard, which ad- ministers the Act, has adopted the | American Table of Distances-a table designed to reduce the haz- ards of storing powder-as its standard for powder discharge in Alaska, and this has, for the time being at least, stopped the ship ments of powder.
 You can't carry on mining without powder" says Commis- sioner Saarela, and so far no meth cd has been worked out for resum- ing shipments of that commodity.
 The Evan-Jones coal mine in the Third Division is reported to have about two months supply of powder on hand now, and powder for seasonal mining operations and construction work throughout the North will have to start coming in soon.
 Saarela forsees that the larger mining operators may be able to fly their powder in and land it at airstrips not far from their op- erations, perhaps at an actual saving in freight costs. But he does not see in that solution great deal of help for the small operators in isolated places.
 Much of Saarela's time is devoted to efforts to revive interest in min ing in Alaska, and especially in the mining of minerals other than |