The Yankee Fork Gold Dredge sits like a beached leviathan in a valley it helped destroy and remake. When gold fever cooled along the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River and the dredge finally ground to a halt in 1952, it left behind 6.5 miles of stone intestines: gravel tailings that snake through the valley floor like the aftermath of some geological surgery. This is one of the few gold dredges left intact in the lower 48 states, and the only one in Idaho where you can climb aboard and see the guts of the machine that ate a river valley.
