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The Yankee Fork Gold Dredge -- a rock-eating dinosaur in the Sawtooth wilderness

© Brian Salisbury

I am always intrigued when traveling off the beaten track to find deserted buildings and derelict equipment indicating someone had once lived and worked in an area that's now empty and desolate. It makes me wonder about the forces that brought people there in the first place, what their lives were like and why they abandoned what they'd built.

For example, on a backpacking trip in the Sawtooth Mountains near Stanley, Idaho, I spotted the remnants of a 100-foot-long flume built many years earlier by a gold miner. At one time, this wooden channel -- constructed from sawed timber planks -- carried fast flowing water from a nearby stream to the face of a gravel embankment. The cascading water would loosen the gravel and enable the miner to shovel it into a sluice box then separate any flakes of gold from the mud, sand and stones.

The miner lived in a flimsy shack no bigger than three or four telephone booths stacked on top of each other. The rectangular box contained a crude stove and a wide plank that the miner would prop into place at night for a bed.

A few years after that backpacking trip, while traveling by motorcycle along the beautiful mountain roads surrounding Stanley, I came across an infinitely grander example of man's search for gold that had once gripped the Stanley Basin.

The day was bright and clear and I decided to turn onto a backcountry road called the Custer Motorway connecting the towns of Sunbeam and Challis. I was thoroughly enjoying this little side trip through mountain valleys and meadows filled with wildflowers as I followed the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River. Then, suddenly, there it was, a monstrous piece of abandoned machinery known as the Yankee Fork gold dredge.

How do you describe such a behemoth? Standing more than 60 feet high, it looked as if someone had taken a massive riverboat, turned it into a floating earth moving factory then abandoned it in the middle of the woods.

A gold dredge is essentially a barge with an apparatus in front that scoops up and ingests gravel. Massive equipment inside separates and captures any gold contained in the gravel -- right down to the finest grains. A conveyer-like device on the rear disgorges the gravel out the back.

The dredge is mobile because it floats on a pond that it maintains itself as it moves. To go forward, it extends the pond by removing gravel in front, then, after advancing, it fills in the pond behind itself to the appropriate size.

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