Dredge #6
I don't have any photos of this dredge since the TSA baggage screening monkeys nuked my camera and destroyed the film. I'd feel better about it if they weren't so incompetant at actually protecting me from anything. The drawing above is a rough sketch of the dredge from what I can recall.
Dredge #6 is harder to get to than most of the other's I've explored. As with most of the dredges, there's a dirt road running directly to it, however at this site the road is guarded by a crochety old man who lives in a shack in the middle of a gravel pit. He looks like the kind of guy who'd cap a load of buckshot in your ass if you looked at him wrong, so don't try to go there via the road! The gravel pit appears to be owned or affiliated with the Alaska Railroad, I'm not sure what the old guy is doing there. It's possible to visit the dredge by circling around the shack through the gravel pit, or by bushwhacking through the woods from Ester dome or from a powerline corridor that runs close by. It's not really worth it for a casual explorer, since the dredge isn't too unique and is in poor condition. There are a few other buildings and a lot of mining relics nearby, mostly lots of big rusty pipe sections and other unidentifiable bits of equipment. While biking some of the back roads around the area I found some dredge buckets lying half-buried in several places, so this dredge must have made several passes through the area before winding up in the valley where it is now. There's a little water around the hull, but the dredging pond has either dried up or been ditched away, a lot of brush and small trees are growing up around the hull and the tailings stacker. When I explored it the structure seemed a bit more rotten and unstable than Dredge #10, and I was worried about falling through the floor in a few places. In relation to the other dredges this one is a bit smaller than 10 or 3, maybe around the size of #5 at Dome creek.
Terraserver photo of the dredge. The bow is pointing towards the lower left.
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