Stampede

Saw a trail named Stampede the other day.  I could see it clearly following up the ridge of a mountain and it brought pictures to my mind of stampeding buffalo.  Since a herd of buffloe could never follow that narrow trail, seemed sort of wierd. 

Then. . . we hit gold rush country, and "stampede" took on a different meaning.  The Steese Highway north of Fairbanks was literally littered with the remains of the gold rush stampede.  Millions worth of the golden substance was taken from the area, and many more millions of tons of rocks still strew the countryside, never to return the lay of the land to it's former beauty. 

The second largest stacker drege in Alaska is rusting into decay. To use this equiptment water had to be piped in from somewhere and the dredge then dug up the submerged rocks, breaking them up and depositing the tailings into rejected piles.  This whole river system was "processed".  The water to float the dredge came from the Davidson Ditch, a series of ditches, pipes, inverted siphons that could carry 56,100 gallons per minute. 

Helen