In North America, it may well be impossible today to get an environmental clearance to conduct such large-scale stripping of valleys. The use of huge dredges such as the ones in the Klondike and at Nome is limited to Siberia now. Dredge #8 is also open for tours in Fairbanks, and the Pedro Dredge in Chicken is being readied for access. One such dredge, the Sixtymile Dredge, was moved in September 1999 from the Sixtymile gold district near Dawson to Skagway. Tourist-based operations with a gold dredge as the centrepiece. Several private attempts are being made in Alaska to develop There is a comprehensive paper on-line describing the process (see the Links page). 4, which is owned by Parks Canada, was found to have structural damage which required extensive emergency repairs to save the gantry structure. Preserving machinery the size of a gold dredge can present enormous technical problems. Although they look complex, the basic concept is very simple - the buckets scoop up the gravel and dump it into sluice boxes inside the dredge, water is pumped in to separate the gold from the gravel, and the worthless gravel is then dumped out the back. Many changes and additions were made to make them suitable for working frozen ground, but the technology changed little for the 80 years they were in use.

The bucket-line dredges that changed the character of gold mining in Alaska and the Yukon were invented in New Zealand. With buckets that gouged out several cubic yards of gravel on each pass, enormous amounts of material could be processed by a dredge, so even fairly poor ground could be profitably mined. Relatively little gold was recovered, and it wasn't until the arrival of huge dredges that gold production soared. In fact, those methods were only used for testing streams, and in the early stages of mining in some areas such as the Klondike. Primarily done with gold pans, or possibly sluice boxes. Most people believe that gold mining in the Yukon and Alaska was By Murray Lundberg Arctic & Northern Mining

How does a giant land dredge work