by Nick Neely
Then Jason would sink into the Rogue, where, in his NASCAR colors, he looked like an enormous drowned yellow jacket. Increasing amounts of duct tape began to appear on this “dry” suit, which, fortunately or unfortunately, he had borrowed from his brother. By design it was tight around the neck and wrists to prevent seeping water. But real tight, a size too small. Those cuffs resembled rubber gaskets, and he kept tugging at his collar like it was a tough day at the office, which happens to be what he and his father liked to call the river (“No one’s telling you when to arrive,” Ray told me, “or when to quit”). “Wow,” Bob once said when Jason surfaced. “You look purple.” Jason could only nod; language was still thawing in his throat. Having barely warmed up himself, Bob then donned his weights once more, spit into his mask and sloshed it clean to prevent condensation, and holding the regulator, said, “Put me in, Coach. I’m ready.”
Southern Oregon was unsettlingly overcast and cool. At least for July, when normally the Rogue Valley is sere and baking. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” Bob grumbled. “In California, it gets to be 110 degrees in the canyons. The sun pours straight down and bounces off the walls, but underwater, it’s just perfect. You mine with no top on then—only a mask.”
When Bob first learned of dredging, he traveled to the remote town of Happy Camp, just south of the border in California, and took classes offered by a mining club known as the New 49ers. The original forty-niners had named Happy Camp during its heyday, for obvious reasons; it sits on the Klamath River, Sasquatch territory, a famed and tumultuous gold stream that plummets through northwest California. Bob was immediately smitten with the activity. “I’m pretty kinetic,” he said. “I like to work hard, use my body. Dredging sounded like it would do that, and it does. But when you’re down there, it’s quiet. For me, it’s a meditative experience. If it wasn’t so cold, I could stay down pretty much all day. And at the end of the day, you might have some gold.”
Apart from the noise, suction dredging does have much of the spirit-lifting appeal of other outdoor recreation. Mid-Rogue, the view was of timbered hills and volcanic bluffs, the mist curling off the water each morn, the river gliding over the retired diversion dam behind us. As I loafed beside the rig, I glimpsed all sorts of creatures: With backswept wings, an osprey crashed into the river just in front of us and stole a trout. Red-breasted mergansers whistled upstream in a blur, like arrows shot from a bow. Blue and orange rafts drifted past, and their paddlers studied us as if we were the wildlife (What the hell is that machine?). When I queried Bob as to his most memorable dredging moment, he told me about mining the Salmon River in California one August afternoon. Exhausted and alone, he’d surfaced from hours of suction to find thousands of dragonflies swarming overhead. Swooping in pursuit of some insect. Diving toward the river, almost touching it. “I hadn’t looked up in three or four days,” Bob recalled. He lay on his back on the bank in the hot evening and, as if still at the bottom of a pool, watched them flicker and click across the hazy blue.
Bob first met Ray and Jason on the Salmon, a tributary of the Klamath, when they bought neighboring claims in 2005. Ray and Jason bought three, actually, and all told have invested about one hundred fifty thousand dollars in this enterprise. You’re right: That’s a lot of gold dust. But time is ostensibly on their side. When they began mining twenty years ago, gold was worth less than three hundred dollars an ounce, yet on my first day loitering in the Rogue, it climbed past sixteen hundred dollars, for a time. Theirs is not only a hobby, but a long-term investment that will pass from father to son. A hundred ounces, or so, would pay off their speculation. Once, on the Klamath River, Ray and Jason, and a few other friends, whisked up seven ounces in two weeks.
Unfortunately the guys bought into the Salmon at precisely the wrong moment, at least in the short term. A year afterward, a local Native American tribe, the Karuk, along with several prominent environmental groups, brought suit against the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, claiming that suction dredging was hard on rivers and fish, and that the environmental impact review was insufficient. The historic territory of the Karuk, “The Upriver People,” is the Klamath drainage, and their modern headquarters is Happy Camp. They caught the ear of Sacramento and, in 2009, Governor Schwarzenegger suspended all suction dredging until a new review could be undertaken.
“This does nothing to an ecosystem,” Bob argued. “Now, in the old days, when they raped and pillaged, and killed the Indians, there were real problems.” Indeed. Nothing does nothing to an ecosystem (let alone a culture), but I understood Bob’s frustration and at times imagined the dredging I saw as a weirdly localized storm that swept up riverbed and laid most of it right back down. In a six-hour workday, the average dredger sucks up two to three cubic meters of riverbed, or about twenty to thirty wheelbarrow loads. On the upper end, that means ninety miners/divers might collectively plow up an underwater football field, end zones included, in a couple months’ time, which by rule is the length of the dredging season in Oregon.
The largest concern—the rallying cry for opponents—is the well-being of wild steelhead and salmon, which nest in riverbeds and are especially vulnerable while spawning. On the whole their populations are terribly reduced, less than 10 percent of what they once were. Having to contend with dredges could tip some exhausted salmon over the edge, energy-wise. And there are other complications: A female salmon spends days crafting and curating an artful nest in river gravel with her tail, in which she deposits her life’s work, a kind of translucent, oily gold. Possibly she might select dredge tailings for her spawning bed (though she is very discerning), but this gravel is mobile, a booby trap that would destroy her roe. Sediment plumes from dredges might also fill the porous interstices of salmon nests, suffocating or starving eggs.
In its new review, however, California Fish and Wildlife concluded that suction dredging’s environmental hazards are “less than significant” if precautions are taken. The cavities that dredges scour in the middle, or “thalweg,” of a river are filled by normal winter floods, while marginal piles and potholes are likely to vanish after several seasons. If dredging is prohibited during times of salmon spawning, incubation, and early emergence—as it already is in Oregon and California—these complications are probably avoidable.
But when I stumbled upon Ray, Jason, and Bob, the moratorium was ongoing, much to their irritation, because the state wasn’t sure it could afford to enforce regulations. Thus history had repeated itself: Once more, California miners were trickling into southern Oregon, this time driven not by a boom, but a ban. Our hero/headsman Big James, for another, owned claims on the granite-strewn Yuba River in the Sierra—more river, he said, than a team of twenty could work in a lifetime. Yet here he was in Gold Hill, outcast with his gorgeous husky and death-metal Henry.
Here’s a confession: I myself have a history of mining on the Rogue. Several years ago, I was fortunate to spend six months living within the eighty-four-mile “Wild and Scenic” stretch of the Rogue Canyon, where the river is deeper, more brooding; the boulders a slick ebony, and the size of ten-passenger vans. This is to the west of Gold Hill, ocean-bound. My solar-powered cabin sat on a five-acre meadow that was a steep, fifteen-minute walk from the river, and two hours from a grocery store via bumpy, winding BLM roads. No other lights in the canyon. Just Jupiter. Below the porch stood a few apples trees, a sagging barn, and a garden with an electric barbwire fence to slow the bears.
Along this part of the Rogue, you can find rusty twelve-inch-diameter piping riveted together long ago. From mossy, maple-umbrellaed creeks, it stretches diagonally across the hillsides. In the late 1890s, mule trains packed it in so that teams of miners could wash out and sift through whole banks with their “dictators,” with stream-fed hydraulic blasting. Now, inside one length of pipe, I hid a camp chair for my evening reading at a local cove. There were battles in the canyon during the Rogue Indian Wars of 1855–1856, instigated, not surprisingly, by the influx of miners who d
isplaced and massacred the Takelma, “Those Along the River.” Lesser outrages also occurred: The original homesteader on my meadow, Dutch Henry, is said to have killed his mining partner (watch out, Big James). Two of them, actually, on separate occasions. Along this wild section of the Rogue, you still can find remnants of claims, cabins, and cable used to winch gigantic boulders, as well as the rare musket ball.
In Grants Pass for groceries one day, I bought a plastic pan for a few dollars at the Armadillo Mining Shop, a place of regional renown where you can buy bumper stickers that read “Earth First! We’ll Mine Other Planets Later . . .” and any other mining paraphernalia, including suction dredges. Back at the homestead, I then borrowed a plastic colander for a sieve and a screwdriver for a pick. Both of which I subsequently wore out and had to replace. If you’re only panning, the best strategy is to “snipe the cracks,” which is also basically what Bob and Jason were doing underwater with their pry bar: On bankside stone, look for cracks perpendicular to the stream’s flow. A river is the archetypal sluice box, after all, and during floods these cracks act as natural rills. Water eddies in these crevices, drops its gold. Scrape them clean and sift. Swirl your pan carefully. After more hours than I’d like to admit, I had gleaned a tantalizing pinch of dust and a few sizable flakes. The largest I named Africa, for its shape.
When I hiked out from the homestead in December, fifteen miles east along the Rogue, the vial that held my gold collection shattered in my backpack. I might have burnt it to recover the dust, like dredgers do the felt carpet and “miner’s moss” from their sluice boxes at the end of each season; but I’m afraid my backpack was worth far more. So I shook out the big, outer pocket into a nonstick frying pan and swirled away the sand once again. Africa, and all the other micro-continents, were still there, beckoning.
I’ve always been somewhat bemused by the fact that this element, this shininess, was the standard to which our financial systems, and so much of history, were once pegged. What could be more arbitrary or frivolous? It’s a pliant metal, that’s all; it would make for a particularly soft hammer. Allegedly, all the gold “recovered” to date in the world would cover only a football field four feet deep, which is astounding. But on the other hand, why isn’t such scarcity a knock against the stuff? Yet I must admit that I am who I am because of gold, not least because I am a Northern Californian. My fourth-grade class, like many others, field-tripped to the Sierra foothills, to “Gold Country,” where not far from Sutter Mill we panned our first glinting flakes from a long wooden trough that was definitely stocked, like a man-made pond is with fish. This was my heritage, I understood. The Niners were my football team.
So when, as a twenty-four-year-old, I caught my first wild flash, borne by the Rogue, it was about time. And the appeal of gold, I see now—or I would speculate—is above all illumination. It afforded us light long before we named the oil we indiscriminately burn “black gold,” or dammed rivers like the magnificent Rogue for electricity. Pressed into leaf, it is relief from shadow, reflecting the day or a candle around corners into dark, interior spaces. To an extent, our attraction is simply biological. The eye gathers light and won’t be denied.
In elemental terms, that’s what Ray, Jason, and Bob also pursued: In the semitranslucence of water, something ignites the retina. “If you ever stick that nozzle on bedrock and see gold, you’re the first person to ever see it,” Ray told me, with a hush in his voice. These guys weren’t in it for the money, not really. “I don’t know any miners that are making a good living,” said Bob, though, it’s true, they probably wouldn’t tell you if they were. Chasing light was the goal.
For darkness is a cold prospect. Along the Rogue in Gold Hill, I slept in my Jeep at night, shoveling my camping gear to one side so that it formed a precarious wall on the verge of collapse, like the hard-pack Bob and Jason siphoned away underwater. I’d have slept in the open air, but rumors of marauders crept into my head. Miner’s tales, probably. But I’d also heard that it was illegal to camp by the river, which I wholly believed since no one seemed to try. Nowhere else was free and convenient, though, and it was an easy commute to my temporary “office.” So I compromised, keeping a tidy camp in my car; imagining that I might have to make a sharp excuse, if not a getaway, from the end of this muddy access road, hemmed in by trees and brush, and beside railroad tracks that, after midnight, returned me suddenly to consciousness with a flood of sound.
One night, as I was eating pasta and boiled squash from a pot, the beam of a sheriff’s spotlight swept through the spindly madrones of the Gold Nugget Wayside just across the river. My nerves tingled; I put out my headlamp, feeling illicit. But I was thankful for that searchlight as well, because I couldn’t say who else kept to these woods. Tweakers and survivalists, marijuana growers and desperate writers. They might imagine something like gold was hidden in my glove compartment. Briefly I felt the attending shadow that, ironically, most prospectors have known. I locked myself in at night. I located my pitiful Swiss Army knife. And come morning, I boiled my coffee and looked forward to mining, wondering if those flakes Bob, Jason, and Ray intercepted were from the same mother lode as those I’d gathered a few years earlier, sixty miles downstream.
There are degrees of hard-pack. The hardest is so dense, so compact, it requires a “blaster” to loosen up the riverbed—a mini “dictator,” in essence, that jets water like a dentist’s spritz, except it will break your skin. Occasionally gold will lie atop so rigid a layer, because it acts like a cobblestone street. But on the Rogue, the miners were demolishing “semi-hard-pack,” which the hose easily devours. Good thing. In suction dredging, how much gold you recover is directly tied to how much riverbed material, or “overburden,” you have to tunnel through to arrive at bedrock. The deeper the overburden, the more burdened the miner, but we were standing on just two or three feet. “You can’t get much better than this,” said Ray. “Well, you could get better—you could find the damn vein.”
But much of what the guys were recovering was “flood gold,” which is like the static that might distract a listener from the real signal. For here’s another truth: Gold is every goddamn place in the Rogue Valley. Erosion broke it apart and carried it downhill, and incredible floods flushed these particles swiftly downriver, en masse, spreading traces clear across the flood plain over millennia. Over eons. “Your valley used to be your mountains,” Ray explained, pointing to the top of the ridge, “and your mountains used to be your valleys.” Gold was even wedged in the random boulder marooned by the left rear wheel of Bob’s pickup, which all week Ray vigilantly guarded. One afternoon, just for kicks, he kept busy by scraping one of the boulder’s grooves clean. He panned out several flecks of gold. “What I really need for sniping the cracks is a dental tool,” said Ray. “Bob’s got plenty of those, but not here.”
Nothing illustrated the inversion Ray described better than the Rogue Valley’s iconic Table Rocks. We couldn’t quite see these raw volcanic buttes from the dredge, but they were nearby, towering like monuments around the bend. Ten million years ago, the whole valley had been a sandstone plain, way above our heads. Then lava covered it all a hundred feet deep, in the process blocking and filling a prehistoric river—some ancestral Rogue—and sending its water skyward as steam. Gradually, other generations of rivers washed this volcanic layer and the softer sandstone below it to the ocean (creating the next sedimentary plain, offshore and now ready for uplift). In the Rogue Valley, only a few of the deeper, more durable meanders of that fossilized river were spared: the dark horseshoe formations rising eight hundred feet above us; the Table Rocks.
So it goes with gold: It flows downhill, with mountains. Rain, snow, ice, wind, and streams are the original “dictators.” The richest prospecting stories, not all of them apocryphal, are of cowboys tripping over outcrops of gold in plain sight, which by legend is how the Gold Hill pocket was discovered. In theory, you could locate such a lode by painstakingly sampling hillsides for loose gold and, ever so gradual
ly, triangulating—following the fan of erosion to its concentrated source. Barring that, you have to recover gold that has entered a waterway. Dredgers and all other placer miners rise each morning in search of those lucky crevices and boulders where dreams settle and disappear.
Idling in my waders, I realized fishermen and miners have much in common. Where fish lie to save energy, flakes are likely to rest, too, say in an eddy behind a boulder (Big James knew just where to throw in his hose). You also learn to “read” the river for possible deposits: A miner becomes the mind of gold. But unlike fish, gold will forsake deep, quiet water for the shortest course to the sea, depositing, for example, in the shallows of a river bar, on the inside of a bend. It has momentum. “Like things go in the same direction,” Bob explained. “If you find lead, sinkers and nails, hubcaps, that’s a good sign.” Deposits of sand, like the Wisconsinites were battling? A red flag. Lighter material isn’t apt to follow the same line as gold (which is also why the lighter stuff flows out of the sluice). The ideal for a suction dredger is to discover an accessible “pay streak”—the path gold has traveled and settled—and follow it into the sunset.
You know the river’s finally giving up its gold when the tail water of the sluice begins to churn a light, warm brown. This tint represents the finest of silts, a thin layer pancaked between bedrock and the rest of the riverbed. This is the burial ground for valuable metal. On the Rogue, this clayey stream came in pulses, like a heavy exhalation, as Bob or Jason cleared the gray “overburden” to suck up this final, soft connective tissue. To my eye, this plume of ancient particulate—a fragile interstitial realm subjected to light again, at long last—dissipated about thirty feet downstream. Jason also described a rare orange mud, found beneath certain and unknowable rocks, that he’s learned almost always harbors gold. Whenever he spies it, he gently sets the nozzle beside the patch and tickles it like a chin to see “the color” revealed as the sediments are whisked up the hose.