Welcome to where we Share What We Think Is Our Purpose!

We hope you will enjoy learning more about our club and will consider supporting our organization, thus helping to preserve our Small Scale Mining activities, and in some cases, avocation, for years to come.

The combined pressures of technology and population create an expanding appetite for a shrinking resource base.

As competing interests jockey for political correctness, will gold dredgers survive the multiple use battles? This is a very important question. Every other user group has more registered voters and better financed lobbyists than small-scale independent miners. Misinformation published by biased groups is also detrimental to the public’s perception of the Small Scale Mining activity.

Gold dredgers and other small-scale miners are perhaps in a unique position of being able to mitigate some of the adverse impacts of other human activities. Removing toxic heavy metals is one example. Every dredger removes pounds  of submerged lead every season from lost fishing weights and gun shot, and many of today’s suction dredgers also recover quantities of mercury lost from historic mining operations. This environmental cleaning is also provided at no cost to the State or Federal Government.

Relative to other effects on fish survival such as fishing, dams, and logging, special interest groups are always attempting to correlate any or all types of in-stream work as being hazardous to fish habitat. However, the effects of panning, sluicing, and small dredges are slim and in most cases favorable due to a number of factors.Some of these are …

Cleaning and stratifying the cemented gravel’s improves spawning areas and allows inflow of cooler ground water. Dredging holes create cool pools that protect young fry from infections, predatory fish, birds, and other animals.

Dredging creates better habitat for the invertebrates and other organisms which need protection and porosity in the streambed for their development.

Removal of Mercury from streams keeps it out of the food chain which provides for safer consumption of fish.

A few things to keep in mind when working in-stream …

Learn the rules for and regulated time frames in which in-stream dredging is allowed.

Since you are permitted to rock hunt, pan, high-bank, and metal detect year-round, learn to recognize and avoid potential spawning areas.

Remember, if suction dredging is off season, the fish spawning process is then somewhere in-cycle.