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What Are the Best 6 Inch Highbankers?

By: Dan Hodgins

According to my personal experience, the best ultralight highbanker for the money is the Crux Prospecting “Gold Trek” model. This machine has a number of unique features that make it stand out from the competition.

Crux 'Gold Trek' 6 Inch Highbanker Features

• Lightweight
• Extremely durable
• Compact, nested design
• Built-in spray bars in the hopper
• V-channel lines in hopper direct gold to the center
• Swappable grizzly screens (1/4 inch and 1/2 inch)
• Adjustable hopper angle for precise control of washing
• Versatile leg system with leg height and angle adjustability

For my Gold Trek setup, the total system weight is 29.4 pounds (13.3 kilograms) including:

• Crux Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker (header/hopper box, sluice box, legs and matting)
• Premium 1 inch gas pump (and fuel, e.g. Honda)
• 1 inch ultralight forestry hose with poly cam lock fittings

Ultralight 6 Inch Highbanker For Remote Areas

The Crux Prospecting 6 inch backpack highbanker is made from extremely durable and lightweight plastic. It was designed by Cyle Haddon, a manufacturing expert who also happens to be a gold prospector.

Cyle took his knowledge of manufacturing and applied it to the process of making a lightweight and nearly indestructible backpack highbanker.

Nested Design

The Crux Prospecting Gold Trek highbanker has a unique nested design that enables the unit to be collapsed in a very compact way that is convenient for travel and efficient in terms of space.

The unit also has a unique design for the hopper where the spray bars are actually built into the hopper itself. This is a brand new innovation we haven't seen on any other highbankers from any manufacturers, and it means you don't have to obsess over the number and size of drill holes when making your own spraybars out of PVC.

Spray Bars Built Into the Highbanker Hopper For 100% Control of Gravel, Cobble & Clay Washing

Having built-in spray bars means that the spray pattern is consistent and controlled ensuring a strong material wash in the header box. No more guessing about the number and size of drill holes in PVC pipes to get optimal pressure and material washing action in the header box.

The generous hopper is large enough that you can easily dump full shovel loads or 5 gallon buckets into it, and you can easily use your hand to move material back-and-forth to push out the bigger stuff. 

Hopper Angle Adjustment

The hopper box also has a very easy adjustment so you can change the angle depending on how long you want your material to wash for. In areas with heavy clay you'll want to set the hopper box at a slightly flatter angle to enable a longer more comprehensive wash. In places with relatively clean gravel you can steepen the angle and let ‘er rip.

Highbanker Grizzly Screen (Bars) - 2 Sizes

The interchangeable grizzly screen comes in two sizes - 1/2 inch and 3/8 of an inch, depending on where you're working. Having the ability to screen down the classification size to a smaller size is useful in areas with flour gold where you don't want larger material going down the sluice box.

What Pump to Use With 6 Inch Highbankers

With the Crux Prospecting Gold Trek 6 inch highbanker you can use either a 1 inch gas pump or a minimum 2000 GPH 12 volt electric bilge pump. If you are using a recirculating highbanking system the 2000 GPH will easily be enough as the hose length is short (6 feet or less) but if you have a long run of bilge pump hose from your pump to the unit you might find that 2000 GPH is not nearly enough water flow and pressure.

If this is the case I recommend that you switch to a lightweight 1 inch gas pump such as a Honda WX 10. With a pump like that you'll have more than enough water flow. In fact, when rusing the Gold Trek I run my 1 inch Honda gas pump on ⅓ to ½ throttle.

Highbanker Water Flow

The following table shows how much water flow you'll get from using a 1 inch gas pump such as the Honda WX-10 with the Crux Prospecting Gold Trek:

• Per Minute - 32 GPM (121 LPM)
• Per Hour - 1,920 GPH (8,728 LPH)

This amount of water volume and pressure is more than enough to wash well up in the hopper, and blast the light, low specific gravity sands and gravels out of the box below while retaining the heavy minerals with a high specific gravity.

The Gold Trek hopper also features V channel bottoms that are angled inward to direct the gold to the center line so that it lands in the middle of your sluice box rather than at the edges. This well thought out design feature is an excellent idea as you want your gold centered in the sluice box rather than traveling down the sides. When gold is in the middle of the sluice box the matting has a better chance of capturing it thanks to the concentration action in the riffles.

The Main Sluice

As the material comes down through the grizzly screen and into the main sluice it lands right in the middle where the majority of your gold will be caught in the first two sections of the mat. This is a very active area in the sluice and there's a lot of exchange where the lights get flushed out and the heavies get caught in the generous drop riffles in the rubber matting. Once gold gets into the drop riffles there is a ribbed rubber v mat texture in the bottom of the drop that self classifies the material and gives powder-like flour gold a place to hide.

A Damper Flap

A dampener flap is provided to break the surface tension, even out the flow, and enable flour gold to drop out of the flow where it can settle into the mats.

Damper mats are used by gold recovery experts such as Freddy Dodge and Juan Ibarra of Freddy Dodge‘s Mine Rescue (Discovery Plus) and Gold Rush (Discovery).

These professionals use damper flaps/mats to improve fine gold recovery in large scale industrial sluice boxes in the Yukon, Alaska and elsewhere. You can bet that if it's good enough for these professionals that dampers will work for the rest of us.

Sluice Box Length

In the 36 inch sluice itself there is plenty of length providing plenty of length for gold capture. You can choose to use the built-in mats for the entire sluice run or you may want to choose a different mat for the second half with a different texture to provide a variety of places for various shapes of gold to hide.

We think the rubber mat profile is a gold grabbing machine and we are excited to test out the profile in various types of ground and on many types of material. The beauty of this machine is that below the first section of matting (where it locks into the sluice) you can use any type of matting you want.

Sluice Box Leg Kit For 6 Inch Highbankers

The leg kit that comes with the Crux Prospecting Gold Trek highbanker is well-designed. The legs themselves are lightweight and very strong. They are made from a rigid plastic material that feels lighter than metal and is just as strong.

I don't have any hesitation about this material in terms of its durability. In fact if the highbanker leg kit was available for sale on its own I would probably purchase the leg kit itself.

How It Looks

Now that we've covered some of the key features that make the Crux Prospecting Gold Trek 6 inch backpack highbanker unique let's talk about its aesthetics. This thing looks like it was designed by Tesla.

It doesn't look like any other highbanker because nobody else has approached the design process the way Cyle has. It's a good looking highbanker – perhaps the best looking one on the market. Anyone who has laid eyes on the machine has wanted one.

One advantage of the black color is that you don't get blinded by sunlight like you would with an aluminum backpack highbanker. We also like the fact that the black color and plastic finish means that no paint will get scraped off unlike some machines that use a powder coat finish.

Is a 6 Inch Highbanker Wide Enough?

Aesthetic preferences aside, the Crux Gold Trek can move a lot of material. When trying to choose which size of backpack highbanker is the best, people forget that the biggest limitation on production is digging speed. And this is determined by material difficulty more than anything else.

If you're working in an area with heavily cemented, compacted cobbles and gravels the digging will be slow, so it doesn't matter if you have a huge 60 pound, 12 inch highbanker with a 6 foot extension that can take a bucket every 2 seconds. Additional feed capacity in a highbanker is waste in areas where the digging is tough, and you don't want to carry around more weight than is necessary.

That's the beauty of this machine. It's so much lighter than almost every other mini highbanker out there.

This means you'll get to more remote areas with less energy wasted lugging around heavy gear. In terms of highbanker setups this is pretty much as light as it gets, and this is a major advantage of the Crux Gold Trek.

Other related 6 inch highbankers include the following:

• Adventures in Gold 6 inch highbanker (Paul Jarvis aka Do All Paul)
• Geo Sluice Mining 6 inch highbanker
• Gold Rat 6 inch backpack highbanker

I have not personally used any of these highbankers due to obvious budget constrations. However, each of these machines has their advocates.

If you want to save money you may want to consider buying a highbanker made by a manufacturer that is close to you geographically. This would enable you to pick up the machine personally so you could avoid shipping costs.

Regardless, no matter what mini highbanker you end up buying, the key is to get to know your machine really well so you can understand its strengths, weaknesses and how hard you can push it in terms of water flow, angle and feed under specific conditions.

Crux Prospecting Gold Trek 6 Inch Highbanker - Production Speed (1 Yard Per Hour) With Very High Flour Gold Capture (Even in Heavy Black Sands Or Clay)

In my experience, the Crux Gold Trek mini highbanker can handle approximately 1 yard per hour of unclassified material, and 90%+ of my gold is caught in the top mat section, leaving the other 3 mat sections as backup.

The second mat commonly has 5-10% of the gold, and the 3rd and 4th mat sections only have a speck or two (if any gold). This makes the top mat section an excellent gold preview - just pan out the concentrates from your top mat section as it will have ~ 90% of the gold.

I seldom find even tiny specks in a catch pan, so I stopped using one altogether as the time required to pan the catch pan is a waste relative to the extra digging I could be doing during that time.

Are you are in the market for a lightweight and compact backpack highbanker that can handle 1 yard per hour of unclassified material with ridiculously good capture?

If yes, my personal recommendation is the Crux Prospecting Gold Trek Highbanker (6 inch).

It's the machine I use 100% of the time here in British Columbia, Canada (home of the Fraser River Gold Rush).