A different day in Dawson: gold, caches & beads

Today was a little bit of a bunch of different activities.

Didn't sleep particularly well. This seems to be sort of a zig zag pattern: one day I'm tired and sleep like a rock, then I'm well rested and don't sleep well the following night. It's fine, just curious. Having it light all the time doesn't help, because when you do wake up at 4am, it's full light, and my internal radar goes on full alert. I usually just listen to an audio book, putting the sleep timer on for 1/2 an hour, and that usually solves it.

Currently reading/listening to "Dark Money," which is pretty chilling. Maybe that's why I didn't sleep well!

Extreme wide angle shot of the dredge

Dredge No. 4

Had a bit of breakfast and headed out to the gold fields where Dredge No. 4 has come to rest. This thing is HUGE. It is currently the largest wooden-hulled dredge in the world. (There used to be a bigger one in New Zealand, but it burned.) It's always been the biggest one in the North America.

14-foot diameter gear wheel!

These huge mechanical dredges changed placer mining forever. I don't believe there are any operating any more, since they utterly destroy the creekbed. But back in the early 1900s, and through the first half of the 20th century, they were awesome, efficient machines. Operators claimed that they extracted 80% of the gold from the deposits. Our guide said that might not be entirely true, as miners today are reworking the tailings, due to the fact that the price of gold is high.

As always with these tours, a lot of information comes very fast.

For those of you who do not know how these things work:

1. The dredge sits in a pool of water of it's own making. 
2. In the picture above, on the right, is a conveyor belt of steel (2-ton!!) buckets that scoop up the loose rock and sand and water from the creekbed. 
3. That material is trundled up into the main building of the dredge, where it is dumped into a rotating trommel. This is like a big, long rotating drum that has 1/2-inch holes throughout. 
4. The small material (gold dust, sand, small pebbles) drops through to the sluices below. 
5. The large cobbles and rocks — and possibly large nuggets! — are carried out the ass end of the dredge, and deposited as tailing (left side). 
6. The sluices further separate the gold particles from the sand and gravel.
7. The final mixture is of "black sand" (actually magnetite) and gold dust, which was put into locked bins for further separation using magnets, but this was not done on the dredge. It was taken off the boat and done on land.

Part of the reason one comes to SEE things in person is to get a feeling for the sheer colossal size of this operation, and that just cannot be conveyed in photos.

The winch room, where the bow operator controlled where the dredge would go.
Those handles controlled the cables you see in the photo below.

Looking forward out the bow.

The gear wheel in the first picture was 14 feet in diameter. This meant that when it was transported from Ohio, it could NOT be put on the Skagway train to Whitehorse, since the clearance there is only 12 feet. Instead, it had to be put on a ship, and hauled north, clear around the coast of Alaska to the mouth of the Yukon River, where it was put on a paddlewheeler and shipped upstream (south and east) to Dawson City.

The dredge cost $400,000 to construct in 1912, a HUGE amount of money back then, but it paid for itself in its first year of operation. It operated until 1959.

Only four men were on board to operate it: a bow decker ($4/hr), stern decker ($4/hr), oiler  ($6/hour) and winchman ($8/hour). The oiler's job included not only making sure that the motors were oiled (but that no oil got into the water that was separating the gold); he was also the cook and the lightbulb-changer! Some of the lightbulbs were in very difficult places to reach.

There were also teams working in front of the dredge: one team clearing trees and brush, another clearing overburden (the "active" soil layer), and a third team that injected steam into the earth to melt the permafrost so that the dredge could dig into it. These men battled mosquitoes in the summer (I know all about THAT), and cold in the winter.

It is difficult to imagine the noise that this beast would make: rocks grinding against metal and each other in the trommel, tumbling past each other; metal grinding and squealing against metal (no oil in those parts, remember!); and all that noise reberverating through steel walls, making it essentially an echo chamber! It must have been an unholy racket.

Sluices.

Of course, the payoff (not for the crew, but for the mining company) was the gold. The gold bearing dust and small dirt, sand and pebbles, landed in the sluices where water was washed over them, and riffles and coconut mats were used to catch the gold dust and black sand. These were carefully washed and dried and the final material shaken into the lidded, locked bins. The supervisors would come aboard and take these away for additional separations with magnets. The gold dust would then be melted down, and poured into molds to make gold bricks.

Different types of riffles, and the black sand/gold dust bucket (and our guide's feet).

The payoff was NINE TONS of gold extracted from the Klondike by Dredge No. 4 alone. The gold was excellent quality, but, depending on where it was mined from, it could be mixed with silver (up to 20% silver).

By any measure, that is a staggering amount.

If you want to read more: 
- http://www.yukoninfo.com/dawson-city-yukon/dredge-mining/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dredge_No._4

Mining is still being done in the Klondike 

Mining today

The Klondike is still being actively mined, just not on as massive a scale. Current operators need to create holding ponds so that any material moved will settle out and not fill the creeks with sediment. They are still tearing up the landscape, but I guess it is being done "responsibly," and the land is returned to something approaching its previous state. Eventually.

Mining operation today, using backhoes and bulldozers.

My mind ringing, I went back to town. I had a bit of time to kill before the beading program at the Dånoja Zho Cultural Centre, so I though it might be fun to find the one accessible letterbox here in Dawson. (There is another one, but it's on an island in the middle of the Yukon River!)

Caches

Amid claps of thunder and flashes of lightning, I did find the letterbox, and also tried my hand at geocaching. Parks Canada has eight geocaches around town and in the goldfields. Basically, you find the caches, using GPS or an app, answer the question in the cache, then record your find. Luckily, it would rain hard, then ease off, and it was not cold, so having it rain was just fine. It did not rain hard enough to wash all the mud off the car!

I found four of the caches (yaay, me!) and was feeling pretty good about myself, but then the app refused to give details on the others run by Parks Canada. The app said they were "Advanced" and I'd need to pay to upgrade to see them.

Well that was not what I signed up for! So if anyone has some tips, I'd love to know (please reply in the "Comments" section). Also, the phone only works where there is reception, so that wasn't terribly useful either, if those caches were out in the goldfields!

Anyway, it was sort of fun. Linda Varonin, I DO like letterboxing better, and thanks so much for introducing me to it!

Keychain beaded with a fireweed image.

Beading

The sun actually has gone below the mountain, so I will make this short, but I had a wonderful one-on-one introduction to beading with "Fran" at the cultural center.

As women do when doing handwork, we talked about family, spirituality, politics, history and more. I may come and pick this up later, as she had another fascinating story.

My finished work was not as even as I would have liked, but I learned LOADS, and feel like I will do better at the "real" class next week.

My deepest thanks to Fran for spending so much time with me.

I may go back tomorrow -- she is going to be making "tooth powder" from horsetail!