The recent bucket discussion has provided a variety of types of buckets, and jogged my memory about some buckets alongside the road east of here.

For a few million years, the Yuba River has carried rocks from the Sierras and deposited them in a huge area on the east side of the valley.

Oh, and the river happened to carry some gold, too.

After hydraulic mining was stopped in the 1870?s, some bright folks figured out that if they could remove the overburden left over from the mining, there should be gold under it.

One difficulty was the new law that said that tailings could not be discharged into the river. So they dug a pond, not connected to the river, and let it fill with water, which migrated through the rocks easily. In the pond, they built a dredger. A big one. On one end of the dredger was a huge chain made up of buckets. Kind of like the tool used to dig a trench for lawn irrigation. The other end had a conveyor.

This particular chain was made up of 125 buckets like these which weigh 3400 lbs. each. With this rig they were able to bring up rocks and gravel from a depth of 160 feet. The gold was separated on the dredge, and the waste was deposited by the conveyor into big piles alongside the pond. After digging out what they could, they moved the dredge to the edge of the pond and started over. So, the pond moved with them.

The buckets in the photo were made in 1916. The dredge is still in operation, and they have expanded their product line to include aggregate. There?s also a light-sensitive production line that separates gravels into different colors. Want all-white or all-black gravel for your rock garden? No problem.

Right next to the buckets is a group of mailboxes. As I was taking photos, one of the employees stopped to get the mail. I was able to pic his brain for the details of the buckets.

They really do call them buckets!

Art