Gone Rogue

On a cloudy Sunday in July, traveling through southern Oregon with no firm destination in mind, I peeled off I-5 into the small town of Gold Hill, whose streets declare its history by way of businesses like the Miner’s Roost (the local watering hole) and Nugget Auto Parts. I was hoping for a glimpse of the town’s latest boom but was unsure what I would find or if anyone would talk to me. Swing a left on Upper River Road, and you trail the rough-hewn Rogue River through a neighborhood of unassuming ranch houses until the pavement gives up, turns to dirt, and skirts tawny Bureau of Land Management hills studded with oak. There are 37 miles of free mining access along the Rogue, and this stretch is apparently far from panned out: about 40 suction dredges were moored along the willowy, rocky banks or anchored midstream.

Most were idle. In suction dredging, a diver wields a hose underwater to siphon up the riverbed and its potential pay dirt, but the day was cold, intermittently drizzly, and most of the miners—dredgers, I should say—were at home or in their comfy RVs rather than in the 49-degree water. But I encountered a few. First, Dave, a silver-haired man in dripping red hibiscus board shorts and neoprene booties. He’d just dragged his six-foot dredge off the river and, with the aid of a local friend (whose name I didn’t catch), was corralling its tentacular parts into his truck bed, cursing and groaning and clanging; the thing looked like a hybrid of a go-cart and a central air vacuum. He lived in Newport, a town on the coast, and had to drive the four hours home to return to his day job on Monday.

“You writing a book?” Dave asked me after a minute, as he shoved his gear one last time and slammed the tailgate. “Cause you’re sure asking a lot of questions.” He’d only just peeled off his wetsuit, and I suppose it wasn’t the best time to nervously ask about dredging or whether he was getting into any gold. Probably he just wanted an Irish coffee.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Well, do you want to know what I call my mining business?”

I nodded.

“Mining my own business.”

John, a guy from Portland, was friendlier and voluble, more forthcoming. Sort of. He was mining “somewhere on Earth about 50 minutes away,” and he looked flat exhausted, his eyes slightly bloodshot, maybe because he’d spent the previous afternoon belaying his dredge (“a giant underwater hookah,” he said) down a remote cliff to his private claim. That’s how mining rights work on most Oregon rivers; the open access on the Rogue is rare. John had blown the day off to recover and, already, scout fresh stretches. I ran into him along a rippling bend with a view of Lower Table Rock: one of two sheer volcanic mesas that rise like curtains above the fertile Rogue Valley’s pear orchards and cattle pastures. “Is it worth it!” he called out, optimistically, to another miner who had surfaced midriver to rest on a boulder like a mink, a small universal dive flag—red with a white diagonal stripe—waving over his dredge. “Sorry, I can’t hear you,” the miner shouted. Fifty-fifty that was true.

To and from Gold Hill, you drive along a deep, unhurried stretch of river lined with black oaks, their lobed leaves as large as hands, their limbs hung with lengths of Spanish moss that sway in the breeze like the scraggly beards of miners past. Lots of dredges here, tied across the way opposite the dusty public road—the more difficult to steal. When I pulled over to stand water-side and gaze at the Rogue’s laconic gloss, I heard a rustling from the bank’s willow and grew tense. John emerged. “Oh,” I said, “it’s only you.” We stared at an enviable “party barge,” as he called it: an extra-large, stand-on-top dredge that, as it turned out...