With all the moving parts and gears and engines it must have been deafening to be working inside!Ī maintenance room is below the main deck but it smelt awful so we didn’t venture too far in there.One of the “Bonus” sights on this trip was a visit to the Old Chatanika Gold Dredge that was just a mile down the road from where we were staying at the Gold Camp. It is not recommended that you get on the dredge! Explore at your own risk! Please remember that the dredge is unstable and pieces of it could fall down at any point.

We didn’t see any “no trespassing” signs or fences or anything so we jumped on board for a quick peek! Please do not take any artifacts, deface or vandalize the dredge or destroy anything!

This dredge stands probably 80 feet high and still has many gears, pulleys and cables still attached. We also found tons of raspberry bushes along the banks of the pond where the dredge sits. There are still a few old dredge support buildings in the nearby overgrown weeds. There is a mystery surrounding the dredges that not all of them are accounted for…some are lost and hidden somewhere in Fairbanks… I love the history of the gold dredges around Fairbanks. This is a quick stop and fun place to visit if you have an hour. You can look all the way south and see immense piles of rocks and dirt, some with trees now growing on them. It is still amazing to see just how large it is and how much dredging took place here. You can still see #3 but it has drastically changed from the 2013 fire. Some are on inaccessible and some are lost. Gold Dredge #3 is one of nine dredges that were purchased for mining purposes in the Fairbanks area.

The fire was most likely started by some kids and when the forestry service was called, they responded but assessed the fire as not being a critical one so they then went up the road to a different, more concerning fire. The #3 dredge had a fire on Augand destroyed most of this historic machine. The dredge then separates the gold nuggets and flakes from the rocks and then dumps the rocks into piles. How a dredge works is that it drags giant buckets that scoop the pond or river bottom bringing rock and dirt up to the dredge. Between these same years, more than $70 million dollars in gold was dredged here. Gold Dredge #3 was operated from about the late 1920’s to the late 1950’s.

Chatanika gold dredge number 3