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Ice Cold Gold Dredging At Crow Creek, Alaska


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steve-herschbach-gold-dredge-crow-creek-1996.jpg

I was really heavy into very late fall and very early spring dredging in the late 90's time frame. This photo is from 1996 and was taken by my friend Rich Lampright. I worked a lot at Crow Creek Mine, which is glacial fed. It runs very high and fast in the summer when the glacier is melting. The best time to dredge is in the winter months when freezing temps bring the water levels down by over 50% and the water starts running crystal clear. It also made for some very cold dredging at times, but properly outfitted with a good drysuit you can stay surprisingly comfortable. Usually.

Funny how some days I really was cozy and others it was just plain cold. I could operate well down to about 15 degrees. Below that, and the water literally froze in the sluice box while it was running. I resorted to subsurface dredges for the coldest spells as the box being underwater did not freeze up. But even then you see weird stuff. Ice crystals floating in the water build like snow drifts of slush behind rocks on the bottom, and giant balls of slush form on the pump intakes, eventually plugging them. Why suffer this you ask? I was seeing multi-ounce days working by myself. I took a lot of gold out of Crow Creek; even after paying a percentage to the owners it was good. In fact the best dredging I ever did. My best day in there working a 6" by myself was over 8 ounces of gold.

This was my favorite dredge, my old Keene 6" with twin Honda 6HP pumps. This model was made with a molded marlex powerjet in two pieces - the jet and the flare. The jet and flare assembled was about six feet long but I could just toss it over my shoulder and carry it in one piece it was so light. The dredge had a stout frame with a lever handle leveling system, far superior to the later slide the box back and forth nonsense. The box was a well built single run sluice that I preferred over later double-decker designs. I never should have sold it. I did however, to Brian Berkhahn, and he also got a lot of gold with it. And I know he now also regrets selling it. It was the best Keene dredge I ever owned.

Mark Keene told me they stopped making the marlex jets due to a high failure rate with the process but they should have either fixed the process or just charged more to make up for the failures. It was an incredible advance in the technology, and amazingly after all the years of use the inside of that jet never showed more than light scuffing. I think it was actually more durable than steel jets.

This photo is first thing in the morning, breaking away all the ice that has formed around the dredge overnight.

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 Great stories Steve! I had some very good success dredging in the upper Middle Fork of the Feather River but when I saw the river covered with dead Salmon and saw a film of mercury coveing the water and felt a distinct rise in the global temperature I stopped dredging- Now I feel better about myself.

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Here are a few more photos of me dredging at Crow Creek in 1996. I usually dredged by myself so photos of me actually in the picture are rare, so I really appreciate Rich Lampright taking these photos.

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Getting the dredge ready. The pumps are tapped on the bottom with drains so they can be drained each night. Footvalve hoses are pulled out of the water or the water in them freezes overnight. I usually stowed the carpet and riffles underwater overnight - here they have already been reinstalled in the sluice box. Probably around 15 degrees in this photo, so I have drysuit gloves and enclosed face drysuit hood on already. I usually suited up in camp and lived in the suit all day. Yes, I got cold. The only solution really is to just work hard and keep tossing rocks. The oversize blue jeans protect the lower suit from wear, and have miners moss sewn on the knees with fishing line for extra knee protection. I wore rubber galoshes to protect the drysuit boots from excessive wear. Gloves are coated with AquaSeal, as are elbows and forearms.

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OK, about ready to hop in, and you can just make out that it is snowing again. I really liked this dual engine 6" and put a tub where the motor would be with single engine versions to hold tools and misc gear. Since everything went in and out of the canyon on my back I was much happier making two trips with 6.5HP pumps than a single trip with one 13HP pump. The mask is a U.S. Diver's Mark I Pro, not made for many years but the best cold water dredging full face mask I ever used. It had a removeable mouthpiece tube for the regulator, and once I got the mask on it also stayed on all day. The regulator could be pulled if the motors were shut down for refueling. I am using three 15 lb lead weights here, as a drysuit takes more weight to keep sufficiently anchored in the water. I added a fourth weight, for 60 lbs of lead, when in faster water.

I had to pack into the canyon each day, and carried a 5 gallon jug of fuel in with me. The goal was to burn the jug of fuel, which running twin 6.5HP Honda pumps meant about 6 hours running time. I always left dredge off and spent an hour just tossing rocks out of the work area ahead of the dredge to minimize wasted running time. What with cleanups each day and winter hours this used up all the daylight I had available.

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And in the water finally. Always the best part, clear water, seeing gold going up the nozzle! The canyon at Crow Creek was full of reconcentrated tailing from later hydraulic operations upstream. These tailings were much thicker once but floods over the years concentrated them down to a layer two - three feet thick starting at the surface. Literally turn a rock over and see gold. The layer was fabulously rich and if I stayed in it a 2 - 3 ounce day was not unheard of, but I also had short days or poor days due to high water or being out of the gold, so it ran about an ounce a day average. My best day was about 8 ounces, where I think I got into an old sluice box spill. The dark post uprights along the bank are remnants of the old sluice and flume that ran down the canyon. It was about four feet wide, and the dredge is right over the remains of it.

They mined the canyon clear to the bottom in the old days. I spent one fall mining bank to bank and to the bottom. Below the reconcentrated tailing layer was a jumble of broken rock and boulders, boards, moss chunks, etc. Stuff that they tossed back into the excavation as they worked up the canyon. Tailings filtered down into this stuff and there was some gold in it. Depth to bedrock was about 8 feet. The bottom had gold also, but they did a pretty good job cleaning it up. The box was holding the entire creek above the workers and they shoveled overhead into it, and except for seepage most of the water was out of the work area. I ended up determining that the time and effort to work to the bottom was keeping me out of the main gold for too long and my daily take suffered a lot for it. From them on I just worked the shallower surfacr enriched tailing layer.

I spent years doing this as did a few other lucky souls who were allowed to work the canyon on a percentage basis. I was paying 25% for most of the time I worked down there, but it got upped to 30% near the end as I recall. A high percentage, but worth it for rich ground less than an hours drive from home. Most trips I stayed on site, but others when it was really cold I just commuted daily. Those were the good old days, the only caveat being gold was only a few hundred dollars an ounce back then. The rich gravel is now long since dredged up, and unfortunately too much of that gold got sold for far too low a price. I was fairly broke at the time however so the extra money really did help.

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I always like reading about your crow creek adventures.  I have used some of your mods for cold weather dredging such as the pet cocks to drain the pumps. In cold water I always wear a dry suit but I have been working on a hot water on demand system for comfort in a wet suit during summer months.  I will post pics when I am done.  

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I think I would have to use warm water these days - the blood just does not flow in my fingers and toes like it used to twenty years ago!

A small mod was using quick release couples everywhere they can be used, though I never got around to modifying the pump intakes. That has to be done carefully so as to not restrict the inflow of water to the pump.

I am a big believer in changing motor oil on schedule. Almost nothing else you can do will extend the life of a motor that is hard at work than timely oil changes. Having motors mounted on floats in deep or fast water, especially in cold weather, tends to make a person procrastinate. It took some looking, but I finally found some metric threaded tubes that I screwed into the base drain on each motor. I put enough high temp rubber hose on each to get comfortably over the side of the floats, and then capped the ends. When the time came, I had a coffee can rigged with a hook that hung from the frame. I would do this at the end of a running session so the oil was hot, at which time simply putting the hose in the coffee can and removing the cap made for an easy hands free oil drain. The waste oil got poured into the empty bottles from previous fill and packed out.

The lesson being that any little thing you can think of to make life easier when cold water dredging is well worth the investment of time and money.

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Here is some of the gold from the canyon in Crow Creek. Since it was reconcentrated tailing material, the gold was small with a few small nuggets now and then. This was back when I was still shooting film and I have scanned all my old photos and slides, so will be posting more in the future. Unfortunately my camera seemed to be scratching the films at some point, and lots of the scans have dust, etc. They are what they are however and sort of historical in nature so I will use what I have. I don't recall the total in this photo, but that is a four ounce vial, and those are freshly poured piles of gold, taller than the appear. Probably around 10 ounces of gold collected over a couple week period.

The gold at Crow Creek is of relatively low purity, averaging around 750 fine (75% gold) with the remainder silver, making for a light colored gold. It also means that gold mined at Crow Creek that goes to a refiner will get a relatively low payout. I always sold what I could to jewelers who liked the nice flattened gold seen in the lower left or right. Much of the rest was sold to a refiner, and back then gold was only a few hundred dollar an ounce, so I was not getting rich quick. This was in fact near the end of my dredging career, as by 1997 gold was under $300 an ounce. That, combined with depletion of the easy richer ground, was just not making the effort worth it to me, especially after paying a cut to the mine owners. After 1998 I switched from dredging to metal detecting in a search for the big gold nuggets that had been eluding me due to my focus on dredging the Kenai Peninsula.

steve-herschbach-gold-dredged-from-crow-creek-mine.jpg

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A very rare gold specimen from Crow Creek. Crow Creek is also the only place I have experienced where the white rock seen in some nuggets is often calcite instead of quartz.

Not sure if you know it but clicking on most photos on the forum will enlarge them. Click once, much larger, and in that version, look in lower left, and clicking there give you full size. You can then see the specimen better. Almost all the photos I post on the forum can be enlarged, some quite dramatically.

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Thanx for Posting Your Experience's Steve! Epic! Hardcore! :ohmy:Awesome! Ig

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