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Yuba River Crevice Detecting For Gold Nuggets


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I think WesD is right. There is a similar thing in Colorado called "Hanging Flume" which looks pretty much identical. It was used to get water above the terrace gravel levels so they could be hydrauliced. The boards in that case were salvaged (the ones easy to get anyways) for other projects after the flume shut down, likely happened to the flume in your pictures too.

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The Flumes were the ground is not flat (normally just a trench) that I have seen here in Aus look very similar. I have also seen and old "wooden pipework" town water supply, it was circular and held together with wire. It was about 13 Km long the area was very hilly and at one spot they dug a tunnel through a ridge.

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9 hours ago, WesD said:

"Flumes were the artificial water ditches that moved the precious liquid to more useful places;

Yeah Wes it's incredible, there are flumes all over the Sierra's - which you probably know better than I do.

I am always amazed at the amount of work the old timers put in.  I remember in the late 70s I dredged 

down through 16 feet of overburden to get to the bedrock, only to find that when I did, there were two

Chinese coins laying in a huge bedrock crack opened up down for almost a yard. The old timers had 

already picked it clean decades ago.

 

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6 hours ago, Oleg said:

Thanks for the suggested versions.
So in the end this design served for gold mining?

Likely, given it's location. Usually they were built for 2 reasons - either to get water elevation for hydraulic pressure to work benches/terraces in the canyon, or to divert into a dry area outside of the current river channel (dry washes, hillslopes, etc) to hydraulic/ground sluice/etc other gravels - for gold mining. If you follow it up to it's highest elevation you might find the remains of a diversion dam, gate, or channel. And if you follow it all the way to the lowest elevation you will probably find some old placer gold workings, or various points where smaller flumes/ditches branch off to other workings. On ground it can be difficult to know where it ends or just washed away, but you might be able to see the whole flume course on aerials or high resolution LIDAR.

Farmers often made ditches that are basically like flumes for irrigation, to get water up onto elevated fields prior to pumps. But if that one is on the Yuba river then I'd say it's a safe guess it was built by gold miners, farmers wouldn't really build such a complicated structure out of wood either, theirs were mostly ditches. 

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11 hours ago, jasong said:

Likely, given it's location. Usually they were built for 2 reasons - either to get water elevation for hydraulic pressure to work benches/terraces in the canyon, or to divert into a dry area outside of the current river channel (dry washes, hillslopes, etc) to hydraulic/ground sluice/etc other gravels - for gold mining. If you follow it up to it's highest elevation you might find the remains of a diversion dam, gate, or channel. And if you follow it all the way to the lowest elevation you will probably find some old placer gold workings, or various points where smaller flumes/ditches branch off to other workings. On ground it can be difficult to know where it ends or just washed away, but you might be able to see the whole flume course on aerials or high resolution LIDAR.

Farmers often made ditches that are basically like flumes for irrigation, to get water up onto elevated fields prior to pumps. But if that one is on the Yuba river then I'd say it's a safe guess it was built by gold miners, farmers wouldn't really build such a complicated structure out of wood either, theirs were mostly ditches. 

I found this place by accident when I launched a drone to take pictures of the surroundings. 
 

A0B08F99-1DB9-4BA9-984F-9FDF770AD93B.jpeg

03CC30F0-5010-4948-BF03-314EE57734C6.jpeg

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