We made some safety upgrades and tried self guided tours for the last 3 weeks of that season. A few years ago we initiated a self guided tour. Leading three to five tours a day was extremely tiring for the volunteer. A full tour usually took from an hour to hour and a half. Also it was very taxing on the volunteers, who are usually senior citizens. Depending on the volunteer guide you could get a very "technical" tour which many in the group might not want. Originally it was a fully guided tour for however many visitors were on site at the time. Tours of the dredge have changed in the last few years. The dredge is powered by two (2) Ingersoll-Rand diesel engines each producing 350 HP at that elevation. It has seventy-one (71) 8 cubic foot buckets each one weighs a little over a ton. The dredge is 988 tons, 112 ft long x 54 ft wide x 64 ft high and has a draft of 8 ft. Started on the 1st of April 1940 and finished on the 24th of August 1940. The pontoons and superstructure were built in Boise and trucked over Galena summit to this location. All the material came from Milwaukee by railway to the town of Mackay then loaded on trucks and made the difficult journey to construction site. They then contracted with Bucyrus Erie to build the dredge. It was estimated that there was 11 million dollars of gold to be had in the 5 1/2 mile claim. After doing some surveying they picked Yankee Fork valley as a place to do some dredging for gold. In 1939 the Silas Mason company out of New York was looking for a place to invest some money to help out the economy. The nearest town, Stanley, is 22 miles from the dredge.
The Yankee Fork is close to the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness area. The Yankee Fork Gold Dredge is located in the central mountains of Idaho on the Yankee Fork tributary of the Salmon River.
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