Gold Dredging in Alaska

[Music] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] my brother randy and i have been building gold ridges for years [Music] with the hovercraft we can easily travel up and down the rapids [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] do [Applause] [Music] everything we did was new we used over 5 000 pop rivets and 20 tubes of glue to put the skin on one of the milestones is when we receive the 18 foot long 26 inch diameter pontoons from wing inflatables in arcata california this is our main flotation when we're sitting in the river as a gold ridge the trailer folds up around the dredge for towing and also as has a hydraulic tilt for launching our partner alan drove down from washington to help us with our skirt construction making the skirt for the hovercraft was one of the most difficult parts of the construction this was accomplished by building plywood frames and covering them with construction paper another part that proved to be challenging was designing and building the sluice box discharge out of the skirt you sure don't want to have sand and gravel run over the skirt all day long after we made the paper patterns alan and i laid them out on the skirt material begin cutting the skirt and gluing it together which point we become very confused what are we doing al nobody knows but after a few days we finally got it untwisted and turned right side out and put it on for the all-important puff test we left a few places in the skirt unglued so we could look inside and see what was happening well it's finally finished so let's take it to alaska eight days and three thousand miles later we finally arrived in alaska part of that eight days was spent in oregon when we lost the two left wheels on the hovercraft trailer coming down a hill in i-5 we were coming down this long great in oregon and i felt this bump and i said hey randy you feel a bump he says no i didn't feel anything well i think we might have a blowout or something i'm gonna pull over at the first off ramp about that time i felt another bump and i looked in my mirror and i saw sparks flying out and the trailer was wobbling all over the place and and uh cars were taking invasive actions i finally finally got it under control and pulled over as close as i could to the to the fence and told around and jump out and see if we have a blowout or something he came back and said no no blowout no tires or wheels missing a couple of tires one came off and pulled over i guess i don't know what happened just about every gold rusher we've ever met would love to have a hovercraft i was hoping to get me one of them built this year but it didn't work out this is the south fork of the 40 mile river near chicken alaska about 300 miles east of fairbanks this hovercraft gold ridge is 24 foot long and 15 feet wide on cushion with the water pumps transmissions sluice box air compressor 10 inch holes weight belts wet suits and three people plus all the other miscellaneous gear the total weight is about 5 000 pounds after arriving at the river it takes us about three hours to get the hovercraft prepared to launch when we launch these guide boards keep the hovercraft from sliding off the side of the trailer in case the trailer happens to be on a little bit of a slant they also help us get it back on the trailer because it happens to be a cross current or cross wind when we fold down the sides of the hover dredge it's 12 and a half feet wide we had to remove the propellers and the propeller guards to get it down to nine feet wide for traveling down the highway after we launched i didn't waste any time pushing those throttles up i wanted to feel that 500 pounds of thrust one of the first things we need to do is set up a downriver camp we use the 14-foot hovercraft to do this because it's more economical and easier to maneuver there's a lot of wind out there today makes landing a little bit tricky we spent the better part of a day moving those rocks you see on the right side just to make the landing area [Applause] our next scary moment was right at the start of the season when the rained about three days straight and the water started coming up like crazy randy and canal are out there spinning off trees as they go by and we're tied and cabled into the bank as close as we can let's go as the river got higher and the trees got larger the ores become useless pushing the trees away we couldn't see what was around the corner so i decided to take the hovercraft up and take a look and what i saw it didn't look good the water's still coming up holland and i decided to go upstream and look for a safer area to move to as soon as i took off i ran over a snag to split the skirt but i didn't know how bad i was afraid it could open up all the way we'd take a nosedive and randy kept waving me on so he just kept on going [Music] randy's going after another load while alan continues to put the camp together i think it took us six loads to bring the camp down about 450 pounds of load and each load was a three hour round trip how you make a camp kinda looks like the pitcher put the top on upside down upside down and he was reading the instructions but he didn't have his glasses yeah was the page was over if you're coming down the river with a fully loaded hovercraft and you get a tear in the skirt what you do is hop out with a handful of safety pins pin up the skirt and that'll get you back to camp where you can get some help as you can see this isn't exactly the first time we had to repair the skirt our plan is to sample three different flames which are 10 to 15 miles apart we will run 20 hours on each plane do a cleanup then go back to the best area and put in some more hours [Applause] little cat fire going my brother says hey wes there's a moose crossing down the stream after we arrive at the claim we put our spuds down to anchor us into place roll the holes into the water and start thinking about dredging we have the jet tube hooked to a winch so that we can lower it down we'll get to where we're going to dredge this is the first 10 inch dredge i've ever built when i started hooking that hose up i thought oh baby this thing's going to lose [Music] when we're operating as a hovercraft the pumpkin takes her blocked up now my brother is taking the block down as soon as we move the air compressor to the front and get it running we'll be ready to start dredging [Music] [Music] [Music] this doesn't happen very often but once in a while a rock will get wedged in the intake it won't go up it won't come back out so we have to help it make up its mind when we're looking for the pay streak we have a sample tray in the swiss box gold pan every hour [Music] this sample represents about ten percent of the golden code for that power [Music] look like amongst the bands [Music] these are the locks that won't go up the ten inch holes i have to remove by hand most of the rivers in alaska are a brownish color this is caused by the rain water flipping through the tunnel it's filled in alaska is tender tea now we're drying out a one hour sample here there's a sample number two now that's starting to look a little bit [Applause] better we have our 20 hours in so we're going to do a cleanup on the first claim the tailing pile becomes an island where we can park the smaller hovercraft and get our screens out of the way after we take out the screens we fill our cleanup tub about half full of water we figure we're dredging about 10 yards an hour so this cleanup will represent about 200 yards of gravel over this loose box [Applause] randy and allen roll up the rugs and then play a rubber dub dub in the cleanup tub we have to really rinse that rug because those gold pieces just bury themselves down deep and they don't want to come out you've got to get them out of there we found it's important to fold all the rugs the same way because not only do they each one have a top and bottom but each one has a different position in the sluice box this is a small cleanup box we put inside of our large box in order to reduce our concentrates from about 100 pounds down to about 10 pounds [Music] now it takes about 20 minutes to spoon the concentrate from the main box into the cleanup box oh there it is after two years of planning and building and testing we finally get to see some gold most of the gold on the 40-mile river is fine it scattered throughout the gravel but concentrated a little bit more towards bedrock a friend of ours let us use his large gold spiral concentrating wheel it really worked well separating this extremely fine gold from the black sand this process takes about an hour but it's fun to watch and the longer it takes the more gold you have i wouldn't mind if it took all day this is the gold we recovered from a 20 hour run on the first claim we tested they say you can eat gold they won't hurt you just a little under six ounces pretty encouraging for our first test let's see what happens on the next ones alan's wife norma has been patiently waiting for us to get the river camp presentable and that means a hot water shower too [Applause] [Applause] when we started out from the bridge i forgot to tell her it was an hour and a half ride it only takes norma a split second to see that everything's in the wrong place notice the stove and refrigerator on the right side of the tent nope that was the wrong side guys should be on the left side with lots of shelves with an exterior view first dinner for four of us down here at the town river [Applause] champaign is good boomtown we've never had a hot shower at a river camp before but i'll tell you we'll never be without one again after being in the water all day in a wetsuit there's nothing better than a hot shower for those tired muscles it's time to go down river and check out the next claim [Applause] yep we're cruising along down the river here and we caught a cut a rock that ripped uh about three foot wide by eight foot long tear on our skirt all the way down about where that vacuum cleaner is so far we've managed to uh use the pontoons inside they use them as lift bags we've got some cartons underneath we've got the rear end up high enough we think we can get inside and patch the skirt it can take a few hours i was standing inside the skirt underneath the deck we could only manage to get about one foot of the skirt out of the water at a time so i had to spray glue strips on one foot long and finally work my way out of the skirt now i need something to work it in with okay back these scissors here and pull it around well it took all day but we're all patched up and cleaning up the boat and tomorrow morning we'll take her on down the river again here's a picture of the ugly little rockers sliced our skirt you can see our mark still on there broke some of the sharper the razor blade this time of the year the fireweed is in full bloom you can see the beautiful color reflected in the water [Music] [Music] our scariest moment is when a loss controlled the hovercraft by giving it too much throttle going into a corner it was right here that i realized too late i had 5 000 pounds of hovercraft out of control luckily my brother jumped out of the way in time or this could have been a tragic accident it's hard to believe he finished taking the shot hey good did good well if i'd just find a place to change we've been working pretty hard for two weeks without a break so he said hey let's take a day off and have a weenie roast my brother randy had watched alan lose a hot dog into the fire with his wimpy stick so he was out to get the perfect one but by the time we got back we were getting a little low on food norma how do you like your hot dog burnt [Applause] like it did okay let's see about getting some more gold we saw a place over on the left side that looked like it'd be a good place for the gold to drop out so we decided to go over there and take our sample [Music] so [Music] if you watch closely on top of the cabin you'll see our studs going down that anchors in place against the current they'll actually go down about seven feet we're in about three feet of water [Music] here [Applause] yeah now we're starting to get a few little chunkies in the sample tray it's a little more what we're looking for [Music] oh yeah that looks better see that nice little nook it up in the corner there the gold is bigger too and we can find a couple little pickers since this gold was coarser we just pan it out in the pan we didn't need the spiral wheel the second claim looks better it weighs out at eight and three quarters ounces the last claim we're gonna check out is down below some gnarly rapids so we took down the small hovercraft to make sure there was a space wide enough to bring down the hover dredge [Music] woohoo there were some big boulders and tight turns in those rapids we finally made it down to claim number three last thing we're gonna sample there was very little rain all summer the river kept getting lower and lower we bungeed up the skirt to keep it from dragging over the rocks as we move forward randy stays pretty busy monitoring a host of gauges one of the things that's important is keeping the sluice box and dredge level he also keeps the pump rpm synchronized and compares that with the pump vacuum and the pump pressure he also keeps track of how many hours are on this loose box how long the divers are down and a lot of other stuff that only he can remember [Music] [Music] so from the smile on allen's face he likes what he sees [Music] it looks like somebody's hand pointing yeah okay wash it down [Music] here we're trying something a little bit different after we ran the cleanup box we put our sample tray in the cleanup block we then re-ran the concentrates to reduce the amount of black sand [Music] there's a little leaflets of gold just fluttering in there trying to wiggle out [Music] this reduced the concentrates down to about two or three pounds and that was a lot easier to pan out [Music] this turned out to be the best claim so this is where we spent the next two weeks the river was dropping lower making it difficult even to run up and down with the hovercraft we all had job commitments to go back to so we decided to call it a day and head on back [Music] but you know what i think we're gonna be back [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Reed Lukens

Views: 6,213

Rating: 4.8863635 out of 5

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Id: KP99x3MO1BM

Length: 39min 29sec (2369 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021