we had the weekend off and had to stay here in Baker City, so i went for a drive to the town of Sumpter. While driving around the very small town i for a park with this in the middle of it.
wow, nice old dredge. that in oregon?
yeah its in eastern oregon. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=sumpter oregon&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl On the map that the link brings up you can see all the little spot of water that are all chopped up. that is the area that the dredge ran in.
I saw a video about that dredge on YouTube,, but I can't provide a link right now... It's very interesting
Good friend of mine has owned a couple of hundred acres up Cracker Creek in Sumpter forever that has several gold mines on it and great elk/deer hunting! He was telling me the story behind that dredge. It seems that when it was decommissioned and put to bed one of the old boys in town bought it for a song. Everyone in town thought he was crazy, unbeknownst to them it seems those old dredges left a lot of gold in the bilges and various other hiding spots. The old boy cleaned out the dredge with a fine tooth comb. Made enough to pay for it and a bunch more. He then donated it to the city for a historical monument. Don't know how much truth is in that story, but have heard it from more that one local in the local pub:drinkup.
there is a dredge like this on the series goldrush. it is in the klondike in canada and looks like it dug anywhere, even where there is no water. cannot figure that out. amyone have any info as to how they operated?
There were several of those placer mining dredges in the Yukon. They dug they're own pond to float in and all the tailings that came out of the sluice boxes went up a long conveyor belt (stacker) and essentially backfilled the pond behind it. The ground ahead of the dredge had to be thawed as they have permafrost that far north. They thawed the ground by pounding in water jets that sprayed cold water into the ground causing the ground to thaw and allowing it to be mined. Those dredges were usually built by Bucyrus Erie. My dad use to work up there in the early to mid seventies at a couple of lead/zinc mines and at an asbestos mine in northern B.C. And in 1998 my dad was up by Dawson City for the Centennial 1898-1998 and there is a restored dredge unit #4 that was rescued by the Canadian Government in '80's or '90's and put on permanent display.
very cool, I would have liked to see the old girl in action back in the day.
We toured one of these outside of Fairbanks Alaska some 20 years ago. I can't remember all the specs of it, the guy said it could be heard a mile or so away when it was running. There was primary [high voltage] wire to it from the shore, 3 phase. The gears in it were massive. A sluice type setup inside, I think they poured mercury in at some point, the gold stuck to it.
They didn't pour mercury in it that's used in a different process to refine the gold after it's been sluiced and panned.
20+ years dims the memory -
There is a restored 350 ton dredge in Skagway, Ak http://www.klondikegolddredge.com/
quite a genius set up,keepr running
I wonder if they lowered the water level and really got down to bedrock, or did they just dig down to the ~`12 or ~20 feet that the boom would reach?
thats awesome
There is a fascinating post on Livejournal with pictures of a floating dredge in use quite recently in Russia. Unfortunately the entry is in Russian, but the language translator in Google Chrome does a half decent job on it: http://mishakiselev.livejournal.com/5328.html
There is one in Idaho, on the Yankee Fork river, North of Sunbeam. 44°22'38.75" N 114°43'20.19" W Still trying to get it right.
Here you go... http://maps.google.com/maps?q=44°22...722757&spn=0.004494,0.006899&t=h&z=17&vpsrc=6
Bet it was incredible to watch that ole monster in action!
Speaking of which... I was watching Bering Sea Gold tonite and kept seeing a dredge in the background, looking like it was land-locked. So I found it...
We had a dredge near here " La Grange Gold Dredge " that was pretty much intact until someone bought it and disassembled it for shipment out of the country. I can't imagine doing so. We used to be able to board it and explore back in the 70's. It turned the ground upside down and left many acres of cobble rock tailings in huge windrows off the discharge belt. Wish I had taken pics of it, here is all I could find on the net, no bucket boom attached.
That old dredge looks better than it did in the 70's, that would be the 1970's ))))
my dentist uses one of these................
Came across this one while flying around near Dawson City today, so had to land to check it out! It's really neat to see how it was built and how it worked. A lot of the guts have been removed but a lot of it was still there. I couldn't climb into the machine too far because the wood was rotten and it would've been a long fall to the ice in the bottom, but from what I saw this thing had 22 control levers in the operator's cab, a whole rack of electrical stuff and who knows what else! There's a whole bunch of these things in various states of decay all over the place up here! The internet where I'm at is very unreliable so if the pictures don't make it I'll put them up when I get back home. Cheers
Nice pictures Spitzair my dad use to work up there in the early seventies and my uncle lived near Carcross until about 2000, one of these days I'll make it up there and do some exploring.
The one I saw in the Killbuck mountains AK. was hydro-electric powered, I wonder how many of them were fueled ?
There is a picturesque one on the hill above Runway 3/21 in Nome. Ghostly when it’s foggy out. I should take a picture.
When you see the amount of work a gold dredge does, it's a wonder they aren't still working today. In the tailing area, the fishing for arctic greyling is fantastic and wildlife seems to flourish in an area that otherwise wouldn't support much life. The umbilical for the Nyac dredge is well over 10 miles long. The power cable, would be worth more than it's weight in gold in today's dollars. I wonder how big a crew it would take to splice and move the cable, And would they splice while it was live, or shut down for maintenance, my guess ? A universal plug and they could have a momentary power interruption while adding sections of wire. here's another shot of your Nome dredge; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad_nkRHTKdc
Side note: Calista Corp is studying the Grayling in the NYAC area for alarming levels of Mercury. The Tuluksak River is a fascinating area with lots of history. I don’t know much about it besides my experience with fuel & lube customers working there. I did get an opportunity to fly over it. That’s amazing matrix of Tetris block shaped tailings ponds.
The natives are probably paying fishermen big money, to catch fish for heavy metal testing. I heard stories of briefcases of gold being flown out on a regular basis. So they were probably using quicksilver. Would they get away with using mercury, today ?
Much of the Mercury is being reclaimed as the old tailings get processed again.
Sounds like a huge operation!!