The winner: Dan Moroz, Frisco:
This is an old gold dredge boat located on Tiger Road outside of Breckenridge. These dredge boats were built on their own pond, consuming the pristine stream bed ahead, and disgorging river rock behind. Very destructive process as they moved upstream processing the stream for gold. The irony for this boat is that it sank as internal water pumps failed and the river won!
Linda Gilmer Polhemus, Frisco: Ben Revett owned this and other dredge boats in the later part of the 1800s and early 1900s. These boats ravaged the area around Breckenridge as they followed the river and stream beds, chewing up the landscape and creating huge rock piles in their wake in search of gold. I lived at the old town of Tiger when I was young. My father worked as a logger in the area, and I remember this site well. In the 1950s and 60s, the dredge was beginning to fall into disrepair but was quite a sight to see in those days. Much of the dredge was still standing then and you had a better sense of what it looked like than today’s remains allow.
Jane Morton, Colorado Springs: This is the first Bucyrus dredge on the Swan River near Galena Gulch, north of Breckenridge. This dredge boat worked the area from 1900 to 1904. The dredge deposited the rock piles in the background. Ben Stanley Revett was instrumental in organizing the first dredging company near Breckenridge and was active in dredging activities there. He lived in a lovely house called Swan’s Nest near the Swan River. My father taught school and coached basketball in Breckenridge in 1930 and 1931. Dredges in town were active then but closed down for good in 1942. All remains of the old dredges are slowly sinking into their ponds. I learned about the dredges from the Summit County Historical Society during the twenty years we lived there.
Linda Randall: This has to be the former dredge boat outside of Breckenridge. We were leaf gazing last week at the same location. The rock piles are a tribute to environmental blunders of the past! A double meaning to “fall’s gold.”
John Swartz, Breckenridge: I would call this photo of the dredge off of tiger road “the ship of fools,” as miners destroyed the valley in search of silver. They ruined the valley for short term gain.
Bill Carpender, Denver: I have great memories of showing the dredge and its remains to our three boys in the summers of 1972 through 1976. The superstructure was still in place then, so it has deteriorated substantially since then.
Steve Eisinger, Wheat Ridge: There’s a picture of me with that gold dredging boat. It was taken last summer on a day hike of the 6th segment of the Colorado Trail. My dad is hiking the entire trail, one segment at a time, on weekends, and I went with him a few times last summer.
Anne Esson, Vail: Two months ago, I watched a pair of Belted Kingfishers perched on the “arms” of the dredge as they taught their young to fish. It was quite a spectacle for me, and for Hugh and Urling Kingery, my companions. Mired in the wetlands pond at Bull Run Gulch near designated Open Space, the dredger is identified by a sign in the parking lot as having been used by mid-19th century gold miners to dredge up gold from the bottom of the creek as I recall. It is truly a gold mine today for opportunists such as our Kingfishers, who clearly regarded it as theirs this summer.
J. Shelby Welch: There were nine of the dredges built by the Bucyrus Co. of Milwaukee, Wisc., between 1898 and 1942, that dredged up gold-bearing gravels on the Blue and Swan rivers,as well on as French Creek in the Breckenridge-Frisco area. The most operated at any one time was 5. All but one of the nine were owned by the Revett company. The dredge in the picture operated until 1942, and was shut down during World War II. My closest friend, Kirk “Hawkeye” Hawkins, who died in October 1985, and I “discovered” the hull in the late ’70s while jeeping in the area behind Tiger Run. I have a number of 35 millimeter slides that I took of the dredge that day, and have treasured the memory of the day we stumbled across it, and the memory of my best friend.
Joe Bryan, Loveland: Dredges similar to the Reiling were used extensively in the Breckenridge area once all the easy gold was removed from the stream beds via sluice boxes. After a few initial setbacks and through innovation, dredging proved for a short time to be an efficient and cost effective method of obtaining ore by using a barge to scoop up gravel down to bedrock and then perform onboard milling operations.
While these steam powered dredges were efficient at ore processing, they were very destructive to the riverbed and left many miles of gravel piles some of which can be seen along Highway 9. Remains such as the Reiling were common until the 1960s, but have since become scarce as time and human development have taken their toll. The Reiling is just one of many fine examples of the ingenuity and determination Colorado miners had back in the late 1800s and early 1900s in their quest for gold and silver.
Peter Gregory, Parker: In April 2007, my daughter Molly and I went on a 6th grade class camping trip to Keystone. We visited the Breckenridge dredge boat in a spring blizzard. Huge piles of rock surround this site and the class enjoyed pounding on rocks with geologists’ hammers in the wind and the white stuff, hoping to find their own mother lode.
Amber Rudeen, Keystone: These boats dug up the riverbeds in the search for gold from 1898 to 1942, and left behind large piles of discarded rock. I work at the Keystone Science School as a program instructor, and this is a great place to teach students about Colorado mining and geology.
Mike Donovan, Boulder: This dredge and several others like it were once constructed and used on the mountain streams around Breckenridge to pull up the bottom of the stream bed with large powerful conveyors. The dredge itself served as a processing station for that mined material. The gold would be separated and captured while the waste river rock would be deposited in large piles along the stream bed as the dredge slowly dug and churned its way downstream. These piles of dredged tailings once filled the Breckenridge Valley, but today most of those mine tailing piles have been smoothed out and built upon. If you know where to look, there are still a few places in the valley where these tailings are still visible to this day. An interesting side note is that in the very heart of Breckenridge is a restaurant named The Dredge. It floats in a dredge pond on the Blue River. Though of modern construction, a visit to The Dredge Restaurant can give you a feel of what the Tiger Road Dredge would have looked like in its prime during the early 1900s. A visit to the Tiger Road Dredge, the Lomax Placer Mining Museum on a Saturday and then lunch at the Dredge Restaurant makes for a very enjoyable series of stops that fit together nicely and will help you understand a portion of Colorado’s colorful and interesting mining history.
Jim Hylton, Lakewood: My family and I have sent a number of fun days near the remnants of that old gold dredge that sits in a wonderful pond on the Tiger Run stream near Breckenridge. The old dredge once worked the stream up to the point where it now sits. It was not able to work higher, because it was blocked by a small rocky outcrop and waterfall upstream from the pond where it now rests. I have fond memories of fishing there with my son.
Robby Stjernholm, Lakewood: Ironically, these old barges are “historically preserved sites,” but were responsible for dredging and tearing up a very scenic area that took years to regrow and be restored. You can still see mounds and mounds of mine tailings left over from these dredges up and down the valley floors around Breckenridge.
My good friend Brian Holt lives on Tiger Road and owns the Good Times dog sled and snowmobile operation. For extra work during Christmas season, I help him by driving a shuttle to transport his Good Times guests up and down Tiger Road from Breckenridge to his base lodge for either snowmobiling or dog sledding. As part of my spiel to the folks in the van, I often give the story of how the dredge barges were used and their influence on the Breckenridge area, while I point out many of the leftover mounds.
