We are headed across the Top of the World highway to Dawson City. First stop is Chicken to explore the town, its gold dredge and sample delicious cinnamon rolls at the Chicken Creek Cafe where we stayed overnight.
The chicken sculpture was created by high school
students from recycled lockers
Other chicken themed destinations
A beast of a machine
This machine the size of a small building slowly crawled across an Alaskan river valley, its metal buckets plunging into the ground one after another. This is a floating mining machine built to move mountains of gravel in the search for tiny pieces of gold. The dredge floated in a pond of water and moved forward using huge winches and cables.
The dredges moved at a snails pace. One dredge moved 4.5 miles in 31 years
Our guide is explaining to Amy how pipes were driven
into the ground to melt the permafrost ahead of the dredge.
The generating room
The continuous chain of steel buckets scooped up gravel
from the riverbed. Bucket after bucket, the material was
lifted aboard the dredge and dumped into a rotating trommel,
a large cylindrical screen.
There were three quarters of an inch holes followed
by inch holes. Any thing larger was dumped out the
back of the dredge
The smaller material was washed out of the trommel
into the sluice boxes in this secure area.
Every two weeks a special crew came
and removed the gold.
These levers controlled all the mechanics of the dredge
When it became unprofitable to mine the gold,
the crew just walked away leaving everything in place
The model gives you an idea of
how they looked in operation
