Pilgrim Hot Springs
The year 1979 may have put new life into a mineral hot spring 50 miles north of Nome that for many years has bubbled up 175°F water through the permafrost at a rate of 60 gallons per minute.
In gold-rush days, the site was named Kruzgamepa Hot Springs, after the nearby river that heads in Salmon Lake and flows westerly into the Imuruk Basin. Up until the saloon and roadhouse burned down in 1908, the Springs was the resort spa where residents of the southern Seward Peninsula went for hot baths and other recreational delights. A severe influenza epidemic in the years 1916-1918 killed twelve hundred people living between St. Michael and Cape Prince of Wales. The flu left many children homeless so the Catholic Church built a home for then at what is now called Pilgrim Springs (the Kruzgamepa has also become the Pilgrim River). This mission survived until 1942, by which time the children had grown up. A church and a few other old buildings mark the site.
The solitude of Pilgrim Springs was interrupted this past summer by the frenzied thumping of a helicopter working to support geologists and geophysicists. A combined crew from the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys and the Geophysical Institute had converged on the area seeking to get themselves into hot water. The crew dug dirt, pounded rocks, drove pipes in the ground, strung wires around and appeared to walk aimlessly over the area carrying curious looking electronic gadgets.
When it was all over, the scientific prospecting effort pointed toward a hot area 1,500 feet away from the Pilgrim springs itself. To test the results, a drilling rig was brought in. Concern over the danger of drilling into too hot a spot led to the first hole being drilled off to the edge of the indicated hot area.
A six-inch hole was put down to depth 150 feet (50 meters) where it struck an artesian flow of 200 gallons per minute at temperature 195°F (90°C). A second well placed midway between the first well and the prime spot dictated by the geophysical work produced similar water at twice the flow rate. Next year, a well will be drilled on the prime spot.
When wells are put down to extract the hot water, one worries that the flow generated in one well might decrease the flow from another or from the natural spring area. But the preliminary geophysical work at Pilgrim Springs suggests that many wells could be drilled without harm. It appears that the Pilgrim (Kruzgamepa) River now carries away much of the heat energy brought to the surface, and that additional wells would merely intercept that energy. Initial measurements indicate that the river is carrying away energy equivalent to that heat energy contained in a flow of nearly 5,000 barrels of oil a day. This rate of oil flow is about the same as that of petroleum products from the North Pole Refinery near Fairbanks.
