Gold has been very important to Alaska's economy. It is still being removed from Alaska now.
As we humans are wont to do, we snatch what we want, regardless of consequences. This behemoth ate through the earth, hoisting buckets of sand and gravel up into itself, where the gravel was smashed and excreted, leaving the gold behind. See the piles of sand and gravel behind it?
I can't imagine the noise..............
A view from inside the building, looking down the line of buckets. They discovered it was cost-effective to have replaceable lips on the buckets.
If we ignore the purpose of this thing, and just admire the textures and colors, it's sort of cool.
A bucket with a non-replaceable lip, and its current load -- rain water.
Lots of excellent rusty stuff everywhere you looked. Love the color of rust against this dusty blue.
Most of the rusty stuff was very large.
Even some stuff that wasn't actually rusty looked rusty. A painted wooden door -- doesn't it look very much like that rusty bucket full of water?
Of course there are other perhaps kinder/gentler, certainly more labor-intensive ways to get gold bits out of sand and gravel.
You take a bunch of sand/gravel in a pan, and slosh it around in a prescribed fashion. If you do it correctly, the sand and gravel wash out of your pan, leaving only the gold. (This works, of course, because the gold is way heavier than the other stuff.)
Gold!
Real gold!
They weighed it for us, and told us how much it was worth. I think this was two people's treasure, combined. Worth about $15, if I remember correctly.
I will leave you for today with a representative of the cultivated flowers at the gold dredge.
In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, a link to the next one is here.
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