Gold dredger drowns in Willow Creek

WILLOW — A Wasilla man drowned Saturday after losing his footing in Willow Creek.

Alaska State Troopers report Joshua Pool was swept downstream just after 6 p.m. A trooper helicopter spotted him and the Mat-Su Dive Rescue Team recovered his body.

Dive team chief Cliff Silvers said that Pool and another man had been dredging for gold in the creek. The two were better described as weekend dredgers or hobbyists, Silvers said. Working with a dredge can be dangerous work.

“You don’t stand on it or next to it. You’re under it in the water with surface-supplied air,” Silvers said.

Right down next to the Parks Highway, Silvers said, Willow Creek is calm and placid. But Pool and his dredging partner weren’t down by the highway.

“They’re six miles up the Willow side of the Hatcher Pass Road,” Silvers said. “They’re working in a canyon. This water is boiling through that canyon. It’s not a sedate little waterway.”

Silvers said that when Pool went in, his partner chased him “several hundred yards” before deciding to head back to the campsite to use a cellphone and call for help. The dive team was paged out at about 6:30 p.m.

The route Pool took down the river sent him over multiple waterfalls. “Rather short waterfalls, but still they’re waterfalls,” Silver said.

He compared the conditions Pool experienced to a gigantic washing machine full of big rocks.

“He was found three quarters of a mile downstream from where he went in,” Silvers said.

Pool was deceased when rescuers arrived. The spot where he was found was easier to access than the dredge site.

Accessing the scene was tough work for his team members, Silvers said. They had to hike in through alders and devil’s club, and it took five or six of them to get the job done.

“You had to walk along the lip of the canyon looking down at the cliff,” Silvers said.

It was just a continuation of what had already been a long day for rescue divers. The team had worked the Little Su Classic prior to that, fishing kayakers and canoers out of that river for most of the day. It was minor stuff, but just at the start when a handful of people tipped their watercrafts, Silvers said.

“My crew on the water had, like, five lives saved right off the bat,” he said, though the boaters weren’t in much danger given how shallow the Little Susitna River was.

Afterward, they brought their gear back and got it cleaned up and put away in the team’s equipment bay.

“Leaving the bay at 6:30 at night we got paged out for Willow,” Silvers said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.