Off to See the Country: Baker City, Oregon

Monday, June 24, 2019

Baker City, Oregon

Two major things we did while in Baker City, Oregon. One, the Baker City Heritage Museum and Two, the Sumpter Valley Dredge. I know...doesn't sound that exciting huh? Not like THE GRAND CANYON. But, we love museums....so much history, and the Dredge turned out to be a pretty cool site. Plus, the 30 mile road leading up to it through the mountains and pine trees was gorgeous.

Cedar Waxwing

Lake Phillip...a man made lake that backs up the Powder River.

So...we finally got to this HUGE dredge and walked around and through it.

You can get somewhat of a perspective of how large it is from the man in the foreground.

You can see how the front would scoop up the dirt, rock and gold, sort it out inside and spit the large boulders out the back.

Inside, the dredge would sort out the too-large rocks and eventually come down to sand and there would be the gold.

72 buckets, each weighing one ton

...and this is where the "tailings" were discarded. You can see the piles just beyond the water.

They built three of these and cannibalized the first two to make this third one.

Here's what's left of Dredge #1

...and what's left of Dredge #2

Here's a blurb about the dredges...

For decades the massive gold mining machine tore up a patch of eastern Oregon, extracting millions of dollars worth of gold. But today it stands as a relic of the past, maintained to show tourists another face of the gold rush.

If you stop by the Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge State Heritage Area, found about 30 miles west of Baker City in the tiny town of Sumpter, you can take a tour through the big dredge, where old, rusted pulleys hang from the ceiling and twisted braids of cable still run through the floorboards.

Standing several stories tall and 120 feet long, with 72 buckets weighing one ton each, the massive piece of equipment took three people to operate, with a crew of 17 to manage a host of other duties, from maintenance to bookkeeping.

The dredge worked by using its long arm of giant buckets like teeth on a chainsaw to dig up the earth and feed it into the machine to be processed. The gold was retained and the waste – known as tailings – was spewed out the back. The whole operation took place in a shallow pond of water, which moved with the machine as it crawled across the land.

Three dredges were built in Sumpter between 1913 and 1954, each working at a rate of more than seven yards of earth per minute. Between them, the dredges traveled more than eight miles and mined as much as $12 million in gold – at today’s prices, the gold would be worth nearly $455 million.

The first two dredges built in Sumpter were constructed in 1912 and 1915 by the Powder River Gold Dredging Company, and operated simultaneously until 1923 when the company shut down. In 1934, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the price of gold from $20 to $35 an ounce, the Sumpter Valley Dredging Company built a third dredge on the spot that was bigger and more efficient than its predecessors.

That machine sits at the state park site today, where it operated all day, almost every day, for 20 years. While the dredge mined a fortune, by the 1950s the operation had become unprofitable, and in 1954 it shut down for good. The dredge was abandoned, and over the next two decades it quickly began to deteriorate.

https://expo.oregonlive.com/life-and-culture/g66l-2019/02/94d550a70d2384/giant-gold-mining-machine-now-a-tourist-attraction-in-eastern-oregon-.html

...and here's what the 7 miles looked liked after the years of dredging....