![]() ''If you dig too deep, you're wasting your time, and if you don't dig deep enough, you miss the gold,'' he says. Because the gold is concentrated in the gravel immediately above bedrock, the first foot of bedrock is scooped up along with the gravel. The skill in operating the dredge, says one winchman, is to be able to follow the contours of the stream bed. At full power, the line pulls up 33 buckets a minute from 16 feet underwater. The refurbished dredge now floats in its own pond, the clanking of its bucket line echoing across the valley. The Lerners estimate rebuilding cost more than $1 million, but say that building a new dredge, presuming you could, would cost over $4 million. I walked around Dawson and bought buckets from people who had them in their garden, filled with flowers.'' Back in Operation ''We found buckets all over the place,'' Jeff Lerner recalls, ''some in the bush with trees growing in them. Many of the 72 buckets with which the machine scoops up pay dirt had been removed, no mean accomplishment, since each weighs 700 pounds. Several of the 19 pontoons on which the dredge floated had filled with silt. When Queenstake bought the dredge, most of the original brass fittings had disappeared, windows were broken and machinery wrecked. Bringing in a dredge from elsewhere or building a new one would have cost a tremendous amount.'' Lusney continued, ''and we thought there was potential for developing it with a dredge. ''The nature of the gold deposit, being under water, would have m ade a buldozer operation very, very difficult, and very expe nsive. ''The dredge was right there, sitting on the property,'' explains John Lusney, a mining consultant with Queenstake. So Queenstake bought the dredge from the Lerners, who now work for Queenstake. ''We bought it purely for the purpose of speculation,'' Jeff Lerner says.īut the dredge was sitting on property held by Queenstake and seemed suitable for the operations planned by the Vancouver, B.C., mining company. So the Lerner brothers bought the abandoned dredge in Clear Creek, although it had been thoroughly vandalized, for $35,000 in Canadian funds. Spiraling gold prices in 1979 spawned the second Gold Rush, making dredge mining look profitable again. By 1966, all the dredges in the district were shut down. ![]() ![]() The dredge worked the rich creek gravel until rising costs overtook the price of gold. ![]()
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