6/19/18 - Gold Dredge 8 Tour

Another 2 for 1 coupon, another tour from the same company as the Riverboat Discovery Cruise.  This one was north of Fairbanks in gold rush country.

You walk under the Alyeska Pipeline as you head to the train to the dredge.  Here the pipeline is above ground but sometimes it's buried.  Those pipes on the left keep the permafrost from melting by transferring ground heat into the air. 

They're big on mileage posts around here.  I think they're fun.

We rode out to the dredge on a replica of the Tanana Valley RR narrow guage train like they used when they were mining here.  Cute little thing, feels a lot like a ride in an amusement park.  Sort of looked like it too.  

Our Engineer was a local high school history teacher, and he gave us a crash course in Alaska gold mining history.  There were stops along the way where there were demos of various mining techniques, like using a sluice box.

And placer mining…dumping the dirt out onto the pile was the best part.

Then there's dredging, which is what we came here for.  When we got to the Gold Dredge, a woman was on it and she explained how the dredge and the extraction process worked.  (Sometimes this stuff is really interesting, but apparently gold mining how-tos weren't sinking into my brain today.  I think I got the basics though:  gold...gold-rush...rivers...panning, sluicing, dredging...lots of dirt...lots of water...environmental mess!)

Wash tubs, like in the last picture, were placed where each train car would stop and we were shown how to pan for gold.  The tiny little shiny flecks in the bottom of the pan are real gold!

We continued around the back of the dredge and past the Gold Dredge buildings.

They handed each one of us a little bag of dirt.  There were troughs of water where you could either sit or stand to pan for gold.  I thought I’d do better if I were standing than trying to do it sitting down.  At least I wouldn't dump a pan full of water into my lap.

George is panning.  That’s my pan next to him with dirt but no water in it yet.  You have to pick up a little water and slosh some of it out.  Some of the dirt will go out, but the gold is heavier and will fall back to the lowest part of the pan.  Eventually you get all the mud and water out and what’s left is gold.  

I had help from one of the Alaska miners so I finished first--I think he took pity on me because I was worried I'd tip it too much and dump ALL the dirt, so I wasn't doing a very good job of shaking the water and dirt out of the pan.  If you look closely, you’ll see some color in the pan. ("Color" is what prospectors called the gold left in the pan after you get rid of the dirt and rocks.)

You put the gold into a little plastic bottle, take it inside where they weigh it and tell you how much it’s worth.  (Our combined total was about $15.)  However much it is, you get to keep the gold. You can have it put into jewelry right there if you want.  Since the value of the gold we got was less than the cost of the necklace, we just brought it home with us.

There’s a souvenir shop and a jewelry shop inside where they have a 19 ounce gold nugget you can pick up and hold.  I was asking the kid some questions and he was very knowledgeable...turns out he's a geology major at UAF.  His job is to answer questions and NEVER take his eyes off the gold!  When a group of 4 people came over and started passing it around, he still talked, but the only eye contact he had was with the nugget.  I told him the job would screw up his social skills forever.

They also have have fresh cookies and drinks.  The cookies were good, but I wasn’t in the mood for more of the same Alaska t-shirts I'd seen the day before.  (Actually, the cookies were really good, so I had another.  I think George had more than that--every time I looked for him he was dawdling around the nearby t-shirts!)

We wandered outside to the dredge.  You can go inside and see all the old rusty equipment, abandoned when it was no longer profitable to mine.  There’s still an active gold mine nearby but this one probably makes plenty of money with the tours.

After we got back to the station, our Engineer gave us a little talk about the history of the pipeline.  Those things inside this cutaway are called "pigs" that are used to clean the pipes.  

When he finished, most of the crowd headed out to the tour buses that were waiting for the cruise ship people.        

The rest of us went home in these four vehicles.

Just in case you're wondering, I didn't get hit with gold fever, so this is probably my first and last attempt at gold mining.  It's really rather more work than I'm interested in doing. 

More pictures of gold mining here:  Gold Dredge 8