Gold Dredge No. 3 sits alongside the Steese Highway about 30 miles north of Fairbanks, near the old mining settlement of Chatanika. The massive steel structure — essentially a floating factory — was used to extract gold from creek-bottom gravel during the industrial mining boom of the early and mid-twentieth century.
The dredge is a National Historic Landmark and can be viewed from the road. It is a hulking, rusting monument to the scale of Alaska's gold mining operations — far removed from the romantic image of a lone prospector panning in a stream. The surrounding landscape of gravel tailings, reshaped by decades of dredging, tells its own story about what industrial extraction does to a river valley. If you are driving the Steese Highway toward Circle or the Chena Hot Springs Road, it is an easy stop.