"The Man with All the Time in the World Runs out of Time"

Joe Secora in his element, along the north fork of Indian Creek, high above Tustumena Lake, 1962.

THE MAN WITH ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD RUNS OUT OF TIME

JUNE 2011

Joe Secora was not known as a letter writer. Although he was an avid reader, he never filled the pages of a journal with words of his own. Taciturn without the dour demeanor, he seldom initiated communication but was genial enough once engaged in conversation.

Consequently,  when Secora died suddenly nearly 40 years ago, he left little record except in the memories of those who knew him. His voice comes filtered through the recollections of others and through his Tustumena handiwork, of which there was plenty.

In the years after arriving at Tustumena Lake in 1938, just before his 30th birthday, Secora built three cabins and mined for gold in the turbulent glacier-fed waters of Indian Creek. He hand-dug trenches and canals in the coarse gravel; he built mining tools and fashioned sluice boxes; he moved heavy earth in search for ore.

Secora dumps creek gravel into his sluice box--late 1950s.

As the years passed, Secora walked the upper lakeshore and the mountains at its periphery. He learned their convolutions and best passages, and he found their hidden, magical places, such as an ancient, giant cottonwood grove near the glacier flats.

He also learned the ways of the animals that trod these hills and valleys, and when young George Pollard became an area big-game guide in 1958 and asked Secora to work for him, he said yes and he excelled.

“He was the best, if you could keep up with him,” Pollard said. “He wasn’t so fast, but he was steady, up and down the mountains. He just never quit.”

Secora (center) poses with clients and a trophy, 1950s.

With clients, Secora remained generally aloof but was personable and friendly when necessary, just as he was with almost everyone. “I don’t think he changed any in regard to his clients or the people he guided, but they just worshipped him, probably for his independence and his ability to live without the rest of the world,” Pollard said.

Perhaps, Pollard mused, they admired Secora because he seemed to do easily what they knew they could never accomplish. “Most people couldn’t do it, wouldn’t last two weeks. You have to be able to live with yourself,” Pollard said.

Secora lived alone at Tustumena Lake for 34 years.

At his main cabin on the lake, Secora fashioned many of the accoutrements with which he worked and which made his home practical and secure.



In front of the cabin he created a covered porch, beneath which stood several Blazo boxes acting as sets of shelves. There were also various tools and a tidy head-high pile of hand-hewn lumber, whipsawed to precise dimensions. Beyond the porch was a vegetable garden, surrounded by a fence of wooden slats and rails.


Secora's main cabin (seen here in 1985) stood at the edge of the timber near the shore of Tustumena Lake.

Around the cabin, a visitor might spy Secora’s wheelbarrow, handcrafted from wood and tin atop a single steel wheel, and his homemade sawhorse, a number of wooden ladders, a two-seater outhouse, a small meat-drying building, a wooden walkway leading toward the lakeshore, and a shoulder-high stack of extra wooden shakes (or shingles) hand-cut with a hatchet and ready to replace the ones that covered his roof.

Shortly after Secora’s death in February 1972, Pollard said, individuals who suspected that the reclusive miner might have been hiding a fortune in gold ventured to his property and gave it a thorough going-over.

Secora's sawhorse and garden fence.

Secora's homemade wheelbarrow.

“There were snowmobile trails going into his cabin, and his place was torn up,” Pollard said. “They tore the rocks out—he had boxes of rocks under his bunk, samples that he’d picked up over on Fox River or on the Indian—and scattered them around. They looked in his cooler under the floor; that’s where he kept his potatoes in the winter time to keep them from freezing.”

Pollard said that he never heard of anyone actually finding any gold in the cabin, but it wasn’t necessarily a discovery that one would brag about.

Uphill from the Big Lake

About a thousand vertical feet above Secora’s Tustumena residence, at the end of a winding, wooded trail along the high north bank of Indian Creek, stood his second home—the Lake Emma cabin—erected on a small rise overlooking the lake and the tiny outlet stream that dropped into Indian Creek itself.

Secora at his cabin on Lake Emma in the 1950s.

Handcrafted from native timber, the Lake Emma cabin appeared simple in its architecture—rows of mainly horizontal logs, small windows, a roof of wooden shakes, a solitary stovepipe, a large sun-bleached set of moose antlers nailed to the front wall, a solid front door constructed of vertical planks, and a small attached woodshed just to the left of the door.

But this simplicity belied the cabin’s most impressive features—flat and plumb interior walls, and plank floorboards, all hewn smooth and uniform by hand. Comfortable and solid, this was Secora’s home base when working his mining claim on Indian Creek, some 400 to 500 vertical feet below the lake.

The front of the Lake Emma cabin, 1985.

The Emma cabin gave Secora even more solitude than the one on Tustumena, and it supplied him with a convenient dinner on those occasions that he had a hankering for Dolly Varden. All he needed to do was wander down to the lake and make a few expert casts with his handmade rod.

Secora nails a Dolly Varden while fishing for
dinner on Lake Emma.

“He roamed around quite a while to find that long beautiful rod—I don’t know whether it was birch or aspen—I think maybe it was aspen—and then season it,” Pollard said. “It must have been about 12 feet long, and he had about a 20-foot piece of line on it and a piece of fish fin or something for bait.”

When it was time to mine on Indian Creek, Secora followed a steep, sometimes slippery trail down from the Emma cabin to an even smaller shelter cabin situated next to two large curving aspens somewhat back from the creek itself. There he worked the creek gravels for color, meeting with only occasional success, according to Pollard.

Once, during some flooding, the creek cut a new bend near his trail and exposed an expanse of fresh gravel. “Joe told me that he was picking gold right off the surface in the gravel there,” Pollard said. “He really worked that over good.”

Secora's Indian Creek cabin in 1985. It was destroyed in a flood
several years later.

Still, Secora never found enough gold to get rich. “He had a hunter one time that wanted to buy some gold from him, and he went under his bunk or something and got out some flecks of gold he measured out,” Pollard said.  “That was back when gold was $33 an ounce.”

Secora worked hard for his paydays, gouging out diversion channels, prying up boulders and strong-arming them out of his way, dumping wheelbarrow-loads of gravel into his long, low sluice, and using a gold pan to filter out the sediments and find the color.

In his work, Pollard said, Secora had one gear—deliberate and steady. Standing about 5-foot-10, with spectacles and a receding hairline, he was lean and wiry and strong. “His movements were quick and sure, and he never got tired.”

Eventually, however, even this seemingly tireless worker began showing signs that not all was right in his world—or at least, according to Pollard, signs that he feared that something bad was about to happen.

Hints of Paranoia

After Secora was laid to rest beneath the mossy loam of Spruce Grove Memorial Park Cemetery in Kasilof, Pollard mourned the loss of a man he had considered a friend. Then, after intruders invaded Secora’s Tustumena Lake cabin, Pollard also reevaluated the paranoia he had once perceived in the tough old gold miner.

Secora, he said, worried that other individuals were after his gold: “I think he figured they thought, ‘That old prospector up there, he’s got a fortune under his floorboards.’”

Years earlier, recalled Pollard, he had begun to feel concerned about Secora’s mental state. In the mid-1960s on one of his many visits to Secora’s home, located just west of the Indian Creek mouth, he and Secora had shared an odd conversation:

“He said, ‘There was a couple of guys here, and they left me a bottle of wine. And I drank that wine and got terribly sick. I thought I was going to die.’ He said, ‘They must have poisoned it.’ So I said, ‘How could they? Was it sealed?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, how could they poison it?’ He said, ‘Oh, with a hypodermic needle. They could stick it through the cork.’ I got to thinking, ‘This is pretty loopy, you know.’”

Sometime later, on another visit, he and Secora had an eerily similar exchange: “Someone left him a dozen eggs, and he said, ‘You know, I ate a couple of those eggs and I got sick. I almost died.’ I said, ‘Are they rotten?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘How could the eggs make you sick?’ I knew he hadn’t had eggs for years and years. He said, ‘They could stick a hypodermic needle in them.’”

The reclusive Secora was known as a reticent man who could be amiable if necessary, but as a rule he listened far more than he spoke, and he kept to primarily himself, venturing to civilization—mostly Kasilof—only once or twice a year, ostensibly to resupply his staple goods and occasionally to play pinochle with his brother John’s in-laws (the Hermansens) or another small group of friends.

Leaving the lake was an involved process and a long journey. Secora had to pull-start the five-horse Mercury engine on the transom of his 16-foot, kit-built Chris-Craft and, in good weather, spend about four hours motoring more than 20 miles down the lake to its Kasilof River outlet. About two miles downstream, he would tie off his boat at the head of an old Army trail, unload his homemade wheelbarrow (for toting supplies), and push it for the next five miles to the nearest store.

“Time had a different connotation to Joe Secora than to the rest of us—probably a better one,” said Pollard, who believes that Secora never wore a watch or worried much about the time of day. His primary concerns were gathering enough to eat, assuring his warmth and security, searching hard for flecks of gold, and working as a trapper or assistant guide for extra money.



Secora (far right) poses with friends who visited him at his Tustumena home.

So it may have seemed odd to the man with nothing but time when Martin Hermansen came to him—after hearing from others of Secora’s paranoia—and insisted that it was time for Secora to take a vacation.

Hermansen attempted to persuade Secora to sojourn in California, where he’d been a prospector before heading north to Alaska in the 1930s. Secora argued that he didn’t have the money to cover the airfare, but Hermansen convinced him to accept a personal loan.

When he returned sometime later to Alaska, he had yet another tale to relate to Pollard:

In northern California, he had headed straight for the mountains to prospect and soon found paydirt. Unfortunately, it was located on private property, so Secora offered the owner a deal: He and the owner would file a joint mining claim, Secora would do the mining, and the two men would share the profits.

The landowner agreed, but insisted that a friend of his be included in the deal; he said that he and his friend would take care of the paperwork. When they returned, however, only the two friends’ names were on the claim. Discouraged that circumstances were once again conspiring against him, Secora grew determined to return home directly.

But Secora had no money. So he sold his good pair of Bausch & Lomb binoculars, according to Pollard, and may have sold his Exakta camera as well to raise the necessary funds to fly north.

Then, in the early 1970s, Secora met a Ninilchik entrepreneur named Wayne Bishop, owner of Inlet View Cabins and Café. Bishop, a former hard-rock miner originally from Wyoming, was also the owner of a single-engine Aeronca Champ. He flew in to the upper lake three or four times to chat with Secora and bring him old mining magazines.

On Feb. 23, 1972, he brought Secora one of his wife’s homemade pies, and he convinced his new friend to make the short flight with him up Indian Creek to Lake Emma, where they would land on skis, auger a few holes through the ice, and see if they could catch a few Dolly Varden.

Beginnings and Endings

Joe Secora, according to Pollard, was born in or around Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 30, 1908. Alaska’s No. 1 Guide: The History and Journals of Andrew Berg 1869-1939, by Catherine Cassidy and Gary Titus, doesn’t specify a birthplace but says that Secora and his brother came from New Jersey.

Eventually, the Secora brothers trekked transcontinentally to California to prospect for gold, and Pollard said he thinks that Joe Secora’s next move was into the Susitna Valley, where he continued prospecting until taking up residence on Tustumena Lake in 1938.

With the exception of military service, Secora would spend the rest of his life at the lake. At Spruce Grove Memorial Park Cemetery, Secora’s grave marker indicates that he was a Private First Class in the Army Air Forces during World War II. Pollard said that Secora was also involved in a rescue on Mount McKinley during this time.

The grave marker for Joseph Secora at Spruce Grove Memorial Park Cemetery in Kasilof.

At Tustumena Lake about four decades earlier—in May 1901, according to Cassidy and Titus—51 placer claims were located and filed along the lower stretch of Indian Creek. In July, those claims were consolidated under the Northwestern Development & Mining Company, which issued $50,000 in bonds to fund the enterprise.

In Oct. 1901, Andrew Berg, his brother, Emil, and two other men also filed on 80 acres of placer ground along Indian Creek. Over the next three years, while Berg built a cabin near the creek mouth, the NWD&M Co. installed a small sawmill along the lakeshore just north of Berg, began building a road from the mill up to creek itself, and then set up a hydraulic mining system. In 1904, the company reported having a “fairly good season,” but then it abandoned its operations and never returned.

In November 1930, on the site of the old sawmill, one of Berg’s friends, Erling Frostad, began but never finished a log cabin.

At some point after his own arrival at the lake, Secora enlisted the assistance of his brother and either Jimmy or Buddy Minano to take up the task of completing Frostad’s project, said Pollard.

The cabin they finished became Secora’s main home until his death on Wednesday, Feb. 23, 1972.

On that day, Secora sat in the passenger’s seat of Bishop’s plane as they flew into Lake Emma. Pollard said he remembers Bob Richey of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service saying that he had seen ski tracks and evidence of ice fishing in the snow covering the lake ice. Richey had noticed the tracks on Thursday, Feb. 24, while assisting the Civil Air Patrol in searching for Bishop’s plane after it was reported missing at 10 o’clock the night before.

Richey then spotted the wreckage of an airplane at 11:25 a.m. on Thursday in the mountainous terrain between Indian Creek and the Tustumena Glacier. He identified the wreckage as Bishop’s Aeronca, and, according to the Cheechako News, a helicopter was called in from the Rescue Coordination Center at Elmendorf Air Force Base. The chopper carried two State Troopers from the Soldotna detachment who recovered the bodies and transported them to Walsh Mortuary in Kenai.

“They (Bishop and Secora) took off toward the south fork of the Indian, and they turned around to come back and crashed,” said Pollard. “There were a couple of little rises there he had to get over, and he didn’t get over the second one. I think he overestimated the power of his plane.”

Bishop, who left behind a wife and daughter and a business, was 56. Secora, who left behind three cabins and a gold-mining operation, was 63. Whether Secora also left behind any gold only the intruders to his Tustumena home may ever know.