If NH has a limit on the size does the state have a permitting process that you have to jump through to stick a dredge in the water? I ask because in Idaho, we have several jurisdictions all claiming they have superior jurisdiction and once you start you can figure a couple of years of submitting paperwork into those places...... however the IDWR hasa recreational permit that trumps the IDL bond process, but once you submit to that it is only good for a set length of time to dredge in certain watercourses, the bulk being 45 days of July to mid august although there are a few watersheds open year round. This is after you either register a claim, or purchase the rights to dredge on one or have a friend who will let you sink a sucker in the water....
but if you choose to set a highbanker up in Idaho you have to go through the IDWR and record a water right for use in the county where you are gonna set it up..... then wait 30 days for anyone to object..... submit a notice of intent to the forestry service, BLM, IDL, IDWR, and any other department claiming to have authority to govern the mining process in Idaho like the DEQ, and the IDEQ, any city or county that falls within that watershed, and of course if they have a zoning regualtion reaching that far out.... and folks wonder why there is a gold rush in places like Mongolia or south america right now...... cause here the regualtions of seeking permission far outweigh the fun involved in seeking treasure from the mountain or stream. [soap boxes can be slippery when wet]
All that said and done, a person needs to know about how deep the berock is they are trying to seek out with the dredge, how much overburden has to be moved, the size of the overburden like if its only gravel for the most part, then a 2-3 inch dredge from what i understand of them will do fine, but if you have a majority of 4 inch and bigger rock, then moving it all by hand becomes tiresome and hard to deal with...... regaurdless of the size of the fines you are gonna get, you still have to reach them to get them to the sluice.
The above ida of a rockerbox is not a bad one, my dads uncle made $20 per day in the 1930's one winter not far from here with a couple other fellas using a rockerbox, and at at $35 gold that was pretty good, and for the time was outstanding as wages of the day around these parts were about $1.25 to 1.75 per hour if you could find the work that paid.... carpentry, logging, sometimes farming and ranching, but not always year round in any of those fields...... mining was about the only thing that folks could do year long, though no promise of payout was ever made.... A good rocker box operation takes 4 people,... a digger, a water bearer, a gravel bearer and stick man [the fella who rock the cradle] this is why folks like the engineers at Keene and a few others started making equipment to cut down on needing so many folks to move the same amount of material....
Equipment is not hard to make, many folks do it on their own, some just figure out how to mine the pockets of would be miners and build equipment for them, some works, some works better than others and some just wont do what it says it will and miners lose a little cash..... though "pocket gophers" abound in about every profession i spose.
William
North Central Idaho
