The Dredge Boats That Swallowed the Blue River
Near Breckenridge, Colorado
Those long, curling ridges of round river rock along French Gulch and the Blue River are not natural. They are the leftovers of some of the most destructive machines ever brought into these mountains, the gold dredge boats. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a London-trained engineer named Ben Stanley Revett arrived in Summit County convinced that fortunes lay hidden in the river gravels, if only you could process enough of them.
His answer was the floating dredge. Each dredge was an enormous barge that dug its own pond as it went, drifting on the very water it displaced. A chain of iron buckets at the bow scooped up tons of gravel, ran it through sluices to catch the gold, and dumped the washed cobbles out the back in those distinctive winding piles.
Revett was behind most of the dredges that worked here. The Reliance Dredge began chewing through French Gulch in nineteen oh five, and others followed. The dredging era in Breckenridge finally wound down by nineteen forty-two.
One of them, the Reiling Dredge, still sits half-sunk in the pond it dug, now preserved as a historic site. The dredges tore the valley apart, but they left behind a landscape you can read like a page of history.
