Dawson City, YT - Gold Dredge #8

We drove up a hill behind Dawson City to see what we could see. And we saw this? What in the world is this?

Here’s another picture from Google Maps. What is this? A huge worm?

And, a close-up from Google Maps. Is this a maze?

Strange sights but our questions were answered when we visited Gold Dredge #8 SE of town, 11 miles down a dirt road with more of these strange formations along side it.

Working a sluice and a pan looking ofr gold is slow work. If there’s gold to be found, American ingenuity will get to it faster and more efficiently. Of course, the enviroment doesn’t matter much, nor do the workers.

Later we drove out to see Gold Dredge #4, one of the largest dredges ever used in gold mining in this area. It was 2/3 the size of a football field and 8 stories high. Built during the summer of 1912, it worked until 1959 with only a few years off. What did it do? It replaced loads of miners who panned and sluiced by hand with 2 people who worked the dredge. It used a huge bucket to bring up tons of gold-bearing gravel and rock, put it through the sluices in the dredge using water, captured the heavy gold and then deposited the gravel out the rear. It operated about 200 days a year (the warm ones) and 24 hours per day or 24/7/200.

The dredge digs up the rocky soil (called paydirt since it might have gold in it) on the right, shakes it through the dredge and dumps the rocks and much out the end on the left. Here’s the digging end.

And, here’s the dumping end.

Here’s what it looks like inside. It is 8 stories tall and shakes that rocky soil through all 8 stories.

Only needs 2 men to operate it but lots of men working the prior 5 years to dig make the permafrost soft enough to dig. These men drill holes and stick metal tubing into them and then heat these up.

OK, so that’s how a dredge works. Now, back to those strange ground undulations. Aha, it’s the rocky muck that the dredge pushes out after it has shaken it through the dredge and gotten any gold there was. That’s what all those strange sights we saw were. 100 years later, they are still where the gold dredges left them for all to see from Midnight Dome. Oh, yeah, ‘Midnight Dome’ - how did it get that strange name? Well, it’s the highest point above town and, at midnight on June 21, the summer solstice, there is a great party on top to celebrate the longest day of the year.

We’re not in Iowa any more. But, what fun learning about all this. Dawson City was one of the more interesting stops on our journey this summer. Maybe having the sun out helped.