Original subtitles

On this gold rush.

That's a lot of money, Charlie.

Marcus Nabel.

Might not want to follow me.

He's on the hunt for a new claim.

The gold's not good. It'll break it.

To secure his mining future.

Push it. Let's go.

Cannot afford to plan to shut down right now.

Rick Ness digs deep.

We're looking at at least 60 feet over.

Sometimes you've got to bite the bullet. Just do it.

To save his season. Oh, buddy.

I didn't know that gold mining had a lot to do with plumbing.

And Fred Lewis' first season as a mine boss.

Hey,

turn off that water.

Turn it off.

Hangs in the balance.

We keep getting kicked, but we keep getting back up. So, you guys ready?

I really want to start another operation.

After seven years mining in the Yukon, 25 -year -old Parker Schnabel is back in

Alaska, where it all began, on a mission to find new ground.

We've got a really good opportunity on a piece of ground that has had a lot of

historic mining.

It's for sale.

Guy that owns it wants $3 million for it, which is a lot of money.

Hopefully, everything runs smoothly at the mine site while I'm gone.

To pay for a new claim, for the first time ever, Parker's left his crew to run

his Yukon operation without him.

We've got a good shot at making a lot of money, and we're going to need a hell

of a war chest built up.

If they can keep that place going, then we can get another operation up and

rolling. The only thing we need is ground.

Parker is 13 miles outside of Fairbanks on his way to prospect the new $3

million claim.

I've asked Liam Ferguson, who has a sonic drill, to come up. Liam is the

the business when it comes to evaluating ground.

Hopefully it works out.

The property we're looking at is about two miles long, discreet.

starting up there about a mile and goes downstream about another mile.

The small wood claim is 397 acres of ground, three miles downstream

from a huge gold vein where a mine called Fort Knox has produced over 8

ounces of gold.

Now Parker must find out if enough gold has washed down from the mother load.

to make small wood worth mining.

Looks like you've already been washing rocks.

Yeah, we've got a few done.

He's hired Liam Ferguson to test drill the ground.

Hey, man. How's your summer been?

Good. Good. Yeah.

Beating me to the punch.

Yeah, we've got a few days ahead of head start on you. We've done a little bit

of drilling now.

For the past five days, Liam's been drilling test holes with his state -of

-art sonic drill.

At almost $20 ,000 a day, it's already cost Parker nearly $100 ,000 just to see

if there's good gold.

How many trolls have you drilled?

Probably done about 25 to 30. Oh, really?

Yeah. And so at least now you kind of have a better idea on what's going on

we can make a plan of where to go next. A lot of fine gold we've been finding

here. Like dust?

Yeah, like flour.

We're seeing gold that seems to be pretty spotty.

There's definitely gold here, but is there enough?

So far, Liam has sunk five test lines that show only patches of gold.

Parker needs at least five good results in a line to prove this piece of ground

is worth the $3 million price.

The potential that is here, you want to be sure.

You're thinking about jumping down some of them? Yeah.

Do you want to show me around?

Yeah, let's go for a walk.

Sweet. Oh, this looks like it's fun.

How have you been going back and forth this when you're walking around?

One minute, Carl.

So do you want to aim for this line?

That's that one we walked down?

Yeah. You could put like two right in the middle of this.

Two lines like there? Yeah.

Maybe we do like five holes a line.

There's a hefty purchase price on this property, and then we have no

infrastructure here, right?

It needs to be good ground to justify.

A lot of this ground's 100 feet deep, so it's not cheap mining.

That's the kind of ground that if the gold's not good, it'll break you trying

do that.

The next site Parker wants to drill is a quarter of a mile downstream.

The rig weighs about 50 ,000 pounds.

It's pretty rough terrain.

You did it on purpose, didn't you?

Well, we found the soft spot.

Looks like you'll be able to pull it out here pretty quick.

Is there anything here, Jake? No.

Keep it rigged off.

That's more like it.

It's a lot different than the mining that I'm used to. You know, we're very

at mining, like, exactly 20 feet of ground.

And some of the deeper holes, I think, have been over 90 feet.

So, it's a deep, challenging piece of ground, both mine and drill.

a late start to the season, but we're definitely making up for lost time right

now. We've already paid Troy his 100 -ounce minimum royalty, so everything

now on is going in our own pockets.

That feels great, but if we're going to hit our 1 ,000 -ounce goal, it's time to

get serious.

Because of the lockdown, Rick Ness was six weeks late to start his mining

season, but he's quickly making up ground with 302 ounces.

almost a third of the way to his 1 ,000 -ounce goal.

Now he's ready to take it to the next level.

What's up, you goons?

Late again, huh?

Hey, what time is it?

Ew.

Well, first of all, I just want to thank you guys for all the hard work.

You know, things are really coming along good. You know, we're streamlining, and

we're looking like we know what we're doing.

Took a few years. Fake it till you make it, right? Fake it till you make it,

yeah. We can crank things up, and it's just in time because we're moving on

the cheap cut, and we're opening up the deep cut.

Wicked, man.

That's a whole different ballgame for us. We're moving over 60 feet over, a

burden in a lot of places.

That's a lot of junk material to move. It's going to be expensive.

Carla, you're going to have to get in the rock truck.

yeah just kind of throw everybody into the deep cut try to get that strip down

think we can get it all done you know it's doable now it's just like you say

mean you're gonna jump in trucks we gotta keep the ball rolling so whatever

gotta do yeah the reward there is hopefully 30 feet of pay underneath that

and good stuff like two ounce per hundred times yeah that's what we tested

at last year what i'm talking about all right let's get after it deep carl try

to keep your pants on i'm gonna try my best

It's gonna be one of the more aggressive things I've done as far as mining goes.

There's just three days of cheap cut pay left before the wasteland runs out.

We're looking at at least 60 feet of overburden. Sometimes you gotta bite the

bullet, just do it.

To get the three acres deep cut down to pay dirt in time, Rick pulls in the

whole crew.

We have a lot of overburden to move. It's going to be a tough one.

I'm in the gold room full time, and I'm pretty swamped in there.

I don't worry as me. I just don't want to get caught with a pass down.

It's a time -crush thing. We're about out of pay in that other cut, and we've

got a long way to go.

A lot of dirt to move to get to this pay, but it's going to be really worth

It's not going right with this thing, though.

Nah, that ain't good.

Hey, Carl, you got a copy?

10 -4.

Yeah, man, something's going on with the bucket.

Get your truck out here and take a look at this thing.

Without a 700, we're not going to get down to pay in the deep cut before we

out of pay in the deep cut, so hopefully we can fix this quick and get back on

task.

The 700 is the only excavator that can move enough volume of dirt for Rick to

stay on track.

Never bends a thing.

No.

All the welds broke, causes it to go wherever it wants.

Not in good shape, dude.

How do we get this to work?

Try centering it.

Getting this gouged a bit, weld it back on. Weld, weld, weld to make it tighter,

right? Just trying to build this up more.

Ugly. This thing takes a lot of work.

I know, man. It's going to be real low budget and hope for the best, right?

There's a collar on the bucket that holds the pin in place that the bucket

rotates on. Now the pin wobbles in there like that, and it causes all kinds of

damage. So you just need to get this bucket off.

We weld this collar back on. We can't just run it like that.

The bucket is attached to the arm by two pins.

On one of the collars that hold the pins in place, the weld has seared off.

Without it, the pin wobbles, making the bucket unusable.

Carl plans to weld the collar back on to secure the pin.

So yeah, this is our moneymaker. This is our main hole.

So this thing works.

straight so try to get that centered and wall it up but we'll see no warranty on

this job i'm going to talk

i'm just more ready to attempt to throw opinions all right yeah

i'm gonna need to handle it i'm strong but i'm not that strong

do you want to show me how to do it by blowing on my back

Attaboy. You got her. A little tight?

Yeah. Point.

Buck is filling back on easier than it normally does, so that's nice.

A couple nuts and we're back in business.

You're good to move it if you want.

Oh, yeah.

That's it?

You made it look easy, buddy.

Carl's got the 700 back up and running in just three hours.

That went good, man. That was awesome.

And Rick still has a full two days left to get down to gold -rich pay dirt.

This machine is digging dirt tomorrow.

I would say camp life, pretty much like deployment life.

Bunch of dudes and Kara stuck in a small little place.

Not a lot of room to get around.

And they're all messy teenagers.

In Oregon's Elkhorn Mountains, Fred Lewis is nine weeks into his first

running a gold mine.

So we've got all the equipment now, and the team is biting through their lips

right now to get to work. So the attitude in the mine...

Couldn't be any better right now, but I put my last 20K down on the mine. If we

don't start seeing a return, I'm done.

So far with his crew of combat veterans, Fred has less than an ounce of gold.

Everyone's ready to slay it and get up there and pull some gold.

Johnny's the first one up because he's got to go up and check his ponds to make

sure the water's flowing and make sure our ponds are full.

So he's all chipper and dapper in the morning.

I think this is Fred trying to put me back to boot camp right now.

Crack the whip and make me get up early and start the whole thing pumping.

But he called on a Marine, so he knew he called on the right guy.

Staff Sergeant Johnny Stans runs the irrigation system that feeds the wash

plant. The guys count on me, and I like being counted on.

But this is his first job on a gold mine.

I was checking first to make sure gas is filled, but luckily I went with fill it

up at the end of my last cycle.

I normally do that, but I still got to check because with a brain injury,

sometimes you forget.

And now the pump's all primed. The pump's full of gas.

We got to reconnect our hoses. Got to make sure these connections are good and

tight. It's sealed.

Got to be thorough, because this is one of my duties, and the guys are counting

on me.

Without this, who knows if we're going to get gold.

I'm going to go start the water.

Water's flowing, baby. Water's flowing.

Dirty water flows out of the wash plant into pond one.

The tailings settle, and clean water flows into pond two.

where it can be pumped back to the plant.

But overnight, the ponds drain out.

So Johnny needs to pump water up to fill the ponds each morning before they can

fire up the plant.

Success.

Upper pond is cool.

As you can see, it takes a while.

But that's why I got to wake up to it.

This water, I consider it the blood of the operation.

And I'm the heart. I got to pump it to the brain, the kernel.

He's got to figure out the dirt from the gold.

We all got to work together to get this mine to be as successful as possible.

And I'm really grateful to Fred for giving me this opportunity.

How's it going, guys?

Hey.

Give me a little spin, Johnny.

What? You're dry.

I'm getting better at this.

You're learning.

All right, you guys ready to get up to the mine?

Yeah.

Let's get fired up.

Johnny's got a pretty big responsibility. He's our irrigation

Quite complicated.

A lot of moving parts. But as long as the water's flowing from the swamp to

pond to the kernel, we're inventive.

Fire it up. Good job, Johnny.

Here we go.

Here comes the water.

We're up and running.

Start feeding it, Stuart.

We're good.

That water is starting to get kind of low over there.

Fred! Hey, hey, hey! Shut off that water! Johnny!

Johnny! Get his attention!

There's water shooting down there!

God damn it!

Turn it off!

Hey, what's going on down there?

Once again, Fred Lewis is forced to shut down his operation.

That 90 degree that keeps... We don't get up and running quick with the

I was over there working on that.

And the 90 degree turn blew.

Johnny Stans is responsible for the water supply.

Here's our problem, man.

You got one clamp on there and it ripped it right off.

So here's our irrigation line.

You need at least two clamps here to keep these suckers on. There's a lot of

pressure. I'm not very happy about it.

No water equals no gold, and I'm on the verge of losing everything.

They told me rip. Rip the hose right off.

They sure did.

We're getting nowhere every single day. This sucks, man.

We will be lucky to get 50 ounces of gold at the rate we're going. At the

we're going, we're not getting anything. I know. I know.

You got to have your head on a swivel down here. Yeah. I saw it from up there.

Boy, I've seen that. The geyser shooting up 20 feet. When I'm working over here,

I don't got eyes out on top of my head. I can hear it.

Yeah, we could all see it from over here. I only heard this puppy. You got

pay attention to all that stuff around you.

Talk it up to noobs. But, hey, happens.

Nobody got hurt.

Lesson learned, Johnny. Told you irrigation ain't easy.

I didn't know that gold mining had a lot to do with plumbing.

Do you plant that to the hose and just screw this into there?

It is my job to check all the connections. I'll admit that. That was

Fred seems like he's losing confidence in me, but at the same time, I'm new to

this. Never done any of this crap before.

Dang, she's tightening.

I'm going to do my best to make sure everything's okay, the right way to be,

if it goes wrong, I'm just going to have to deal with it when it comes.

So we replaced these two pieces. Our clamps aren't holding very well, so

doubled down. We've got a muffler clamp on here. It can't leak. We're going to

lose a lot of pressure.

All right, you good?

Yep.

All right, we're ready to roll. Let's do this.

Any sign of water, shout.

Seems like what we're doing more up here is solving problems, and we're not

really doing a lot of gold mining, and I think that is hurting my chances of

getting my investment back this season.

It's getting frustrating.

some historic drilling on this property that showed pretty good promise.

Unfortunately, we're having a hard time replicating those results.

In Alaska, Parker's neighbor is prospecting Smallwood Creek.

We're going to jump downstream and hopefully we can find some gold down

We're going to head down the road about 2 ,000 feet into the east side of the

valley. The gold seems to be favoring that side, so we're going to start

In a new test area downstream, Parker and Liam will drill two new lines of

holes.

Parker must find a consistent line of gold to be sure the ground is worth the

price tag.

Drill's running all right?

Drilling's running really good.

So far, the gold they've found is 100 feet deep and would be five times the

of what he's digging now in the Klondike.

So now we're bringing the core out.

So you drill the core barrel down, push the casing over top, pull it out.

Bring it over here.

A lot of clay and vines, huh?

Yeah. It's kind of almost like a decomposed gravel. You can see that bit

that bedrock that's in it that's looking down.

So when you wash it, It's mostly all fines.

We're hoping the gold's starting to pick up down here.

The valley is a bit narrower, so it might concentrate that pay zone.

Liam runs the first sample from the new pipe through his test trommel.

Is that the bottom of one of the holes?

Yeah. You can see there's a piece of gold in there.

Oh good, there's one G. That might be a second.

Yeah.

It is a bit there.

He takes to concentrate from the sleuth rope to pan it in his mobile gold room.

Got decent colors in here.

This stuff's been really tricky to pan.

There's a lot of really fine gold, and it just wants to float.

So that probably looks like about...

two milligrams of gold for these holes to be viable we kind of want to see

200 milligrams so this is the bottom of that hole yeah and that's at 100 feet

better because at 100 101 .5 foot deep ground for that the plan

now is we're pretty much done this line we're going to head down to the next one

across the valley fingers across and it might be viable down there

The results are still way below the 200 milligrams that Parker needs to see.

Everything now hinges on the final line of holes.

So, this is the last one on this line.

Yep. On almost every line, there's been one, maybe two good holes that probably

would be mineable. The problem is they aren't together.

They don't line up. They're not back -to -back, but we're getting...

50 to 100 pieces of gold in a good hole, so you might be hitting pockets, and

the ground might have richer pockets throughout.

This is some expensive ground of mine.

100 feet, tons of water, intermittent frost.

Yeah, it needs to be excellent ground.

There's definitely good gold there, and we're finding good results, but it's

just not going to be it.

Easy call. So we're really going to have to sit down and work through the

numbers and make a solid plan before we can decide if it's worth money.

It's going to be a super tough call.

not too long ago and it's looking pretty desolate down there so it's going to be

a bit of a risk opening up the deep cut here.

Rick Nass is racing to open a new cut that could double his gold yield.

What do you think about this second cut, Kruze? Do you think it's going to pay

two ounces per hundred like it did last year when we tested it?

Well, I certainly hope that's what we need, man.

Yeah, me too, because we're moving an awful lot of dirt to get to it.

Rick has just half a day's overburden to strip before he can run pay dirt to the

wash plant.

Hey, Rick. Rick, you got a copy, Rick?

Yeah, go for it.

You know, we're running low on cheap cut pay.

We're going to run out before the dip.

Yeah, man, I get it.

You guys are killing it out there, but I just heard the plant's running low, so

you're going to have to speed it up.

Hopefully, by the end, we'll be into the good stuff.

I guess take that away.

We finally got three tracks running.

We all got our nose to the grindstone.

We need to get this cut down if we want to keep

up to the plant. It's chewing to the dirt, so we need to have all hands on

down here, right?

We're running out of time.

Cannot afford the plant to shut down right now. We've got to make it.

Push it!

Let's go!

Our pay pile is dwindling.

We're going to be fighting it for a bit here, but hopefully things start to come

together for us, right?

Hey, Rick, I've got to let you know that this is probably the last load I think

I can scrape anymore out of this cheap cup thing.

This is the last thing we needed to happen. We're doing all we can to get

over for the move.

Yee -haw!

I'm pretty sure I'm scraping the top of paydirt here.

That's the stuff we're looking for.

All right, here we go.

This is the first load of paydirt out of the second cut.

Cocks full of gold, they say.

I'm telling you, I'm loving the material coming out of this hole.

I bet you there's going to be some big old clonkers in the box coming out of

here. So the fire's with you.

Man, that was really, really close. But everybody showed up, disaster averted,

and on to bigger things.

If the deep cut delivers two ounces per hundred yards, Rick has a good shot at

hitting his 1 ,000 -ounce goal this year.

30 feet of pay in here like they're supposed to be.

Get us through the rest of the season.

Everything's going really well right now. We're up and running. We're running

pay through the colonel.

In Oregon, Fred Lewis brought together a crew of veteran buddies on the promise

of gold.

But after five weeks of failure, they have less than an hour.

What the f*** is going on?

Kendall!

Hey, Kendall, the water's off!

Johnny!

Johnny, where are you?

Hey, get up to the pump now!

I'm awake.

Dude!

You've got to be here, man.

I know, but I've got to be there, too.

Where were you?

I had to go down there to the other pump. The pump was running, but there

water going to the plant.

You've got to be here at all times, man.

Look at how dirty this water is, dude.

We've got to make sure that you're letting me know if this is getting

I know. That's why I wasn't at the pump. I thought we can pump some more water

from the cut, get it up here, dilute it a little bit.

Yeah, I see your thought.

We're going to have to fix this, man.

I hate to say this, we're going to have to pull the hose.

If anything stops this from running, it's either clogged up in here or

down in there.

I feel like Johnny's not giving me 100 % at this point.

I always give people a second chance.

So I'm going to give him a chance to pick his bootstraps out of the dirt and

figure this job out.

And if that doesn't happen, well, I'll have to think about something.

First thing to check.

It's a foot valve.

What the... Dude.

What? This is ridiculous crap.

Look at that.

That's, like, compacted, too. Yeah, I know.

Oh, man.

It's completely stopped up.

Our problem is our pond is not settling fast enough.

Yeah. We definitely need to filter it. Well, I don't know if we need to filter

or if we just need to make it deeper, because that, I think, is caused by this

sitting too close to the bottom.

The volume of water is our biggest hurdle right now. I think the filter. We

to filter all this crap out.

Your plan would shut us down for two days.

You know what that means? No gold this week.

Putting in my filter would take 24 hours.

All right. Well, if you're right, then I'll be shamed. And if I'm right, you'll

be shamed. All right. No shame, baby. No shame.

Get that thick.

Can I get cattle down here?

I'm on my way.

Right now the whole pond is dirty, so I thought, why don't we build like a

little beaver dam to filter it out.

Johnny's idea is to build a wall of rocks across the pond, line it with

of wire mat to filter out the tailings, and so provide clean water to pump to

the plant.

I'm not 100 % confident that it's actually going to clean your water.

Well, there's only one way to figure it out.

Let's get some rocks. Let's do it.

First stone is about to go into the dunny dam.

All right, stretch out as far as you can.

Perfect.

Yeah, we got to get this dam built.

I'm liking it.

Nice.

Hopefully this pays off in the end to let us run a little bit longer so we

actually can get more gold.

It's really starting to take shape now.

It's going to act as a really good filter system for the water so that none

this garbage will get through.

One more rock ought to do it.

In she goes.

Unbelievable.

You did a real good job on this dam, fellas.

Why don't we pack it in for the night?

the upper pontoo dry out.

I can go down there and do phase two of the Johnny Dam.

I'm going to mold the screens around the rocks, make a nice filter.

Nothing's getting in that suction tube.

The metal fencing should stop fine material passing through the dam.

We're going to be able to run way, way longer than we have been and actually

find some gold.

Hey, hey, hey.

Hey. Well, what in the hell have you got going on here?

Oh, this is a Johnny Dam.

Standard issue filtration system.

I like it.

I've never seen anything like it. Yeah. But I do like it.

So Johnny's finalizing the steps on the Johnny Dam.

It's looking pretty good. I like the idea of the rocks. It's definitely a

idea to stop debris. My only concern is maybe that fencing may get a little

clogged.

Fire up the plant and get this thing tested out and start running pay through

the kernel. You think it's 100 % success?

I don't want to say 100 % because that sounds cocky. I'm going to go ahead and

say 99 .99999999 % 50 -50.

Johnny, it's on you, buddy.

Water's coming.

Right now, this water's public enemy number one.

If we can run this plant four hours straight, the kernel's eating gold the

time, we're winning.

The more we run, the more gold we can find.

Let's just put some dirt through it and see what we can get.

The water's still looking clean coming out of the kernel.

Right now, it's clear as day.

The Johnny Dam is doing perfect.

I couldn't imagine it doing any better.

Got all the garbage on this side.

I couldn't be happier.

The Johnny Dam is working properly. I hate to admit it, but it is.

And we've got good water supply in pond one and pond two.

Johnny!

Takes a big man to a man when he's wrong.

It does.

And you're a big man. Whatever you got to tell yourself, I was right.

Johnny, you took rocks and wrapped them in fence. Why would I think that would

work?

But it clearly worked.

I'm just sitting over here in pride.

Actually, I'm starting to feel more and more confident that you can do this.

Good work.

I tried hard. Don't take that compliment to your head.

Johnny's a funny guy.

I've been friends with him for years, but he's a goofball.

And I feel like some of the mistakes he made may have been because he was a

little lax.

Now that he knows how important his job is, he's stepped it up and I think he's

taking responsibility.

And that's what we need on this mine.

Everybody had a pinnacle to their career.

Bud Aldrin landed on the moon.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

And Johnny made the Johnny Dam.

Johnny be good, baby.

We've got our water situation solved, so we can now operate at full capacity,

and it's all up to gold at this point.

We're ready to mine.

Out at Smallwood Creek.

For this line, we don't really know what we're going to expect here, so we'll

just be saving all the gravel to buy and walk it to figure out what's going on.

Parker and drilling contractor Liam Ferguson drill the final line of test

Liam's just finishing up panning the last couple of holes we've done.

Park has spent nearly $200 ,000 on drilling the test lines, but still

seen the results he needs.

Finding some decent stuff, but it's just really spotty, and I think it's

probably a really narrow pastry, and quite deep. And we've spent a lot of

drilling so far, so we'll weigh these up.

He needs a solid line of good holes.

to make this deep ground worth the $3 million price tag.

They panned the final drill samples.

This one looks better than the other ones we did today.

The one we got the most hope for right now.

A lot of pressure riding on the back of this little hole.

200 milligrams would make the ground viable.

100 feet, 32 milligrams, Parker.

I don't know where all the other gold's gone.

It's supposed to be there.

It's not like we're hitting dead holes.

Like there's gold here.

Yeah, but no major hit.

I think we're going to stop drilling for now.

Yeah, I agree.

As for, like, buying this place right now, I'm not putting all my eggs in this

basket.

Just 30 milligrams at 100 feet.

That sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen.

Yeah, it's an easy way to lose a lot of money.

The gold wasn't as easy to find as what we were expecting.

Thank you for coming out here and making it happen.

I will say that there would have been a lot more fun ways to spend 200 grand,

Liam, but I'm glad it's going to you.

Hey, if you just bought a helicopter and said, we're not going drilling, I'd be

more than happy.

I'd be like, sweet.

Let's see how everybody's doing.

Hello. Hi.

How are you guys doing?

Parker calls co -foreman Mitch Blushke to check his progress on Indian River.

The plants are running all right?

And we've had a hell of a time trying to hit some gold with the drill.

Pretty frustrating for sure.

All right, thanks, Mitch. Have a good rest of your day.

All right, you too, man. Bye.

Sounds like they hardly even missed me.

How's it going, Chris?

Hey, Mitchell. What's happening, man?

Mitch is responsible for hitting the gold targets while Parker's away.

But they haven't put any on the scales since he left.

Just busy. Yeah, I bet. It shows, man.

It shows.

What are you thinking? We'll just weigh all this up when he gets back?

Yeah, I think so. It ought to be a cruncher for sure. Yeah. It's going to

trophy. You going to let me have a look at Lee?

Yeah, check this out.

No way, man.

Yeah. Those are two -hand buckets right there. You're looking with two hands.

Yeah, that's a lot.

We won't know until we get on a scale, but that's looking pretty damn good.

Okay. All right, thanks, Chris. Yep, no problems.

Rally on me.

In Oregon's Elkhorn Mountains.

You guys ready?

Oh, I'm ready.

After six weeks getting the mine up and running, Fred Lewis gathered his rookie

crew for their first gold weigh.

I really want to point out, you guys, that we had a lot of adversity thrown at

us these first couple weeks.

I know we had a lot of water problems, but the Johnny Dam was a great idea. I

think with some little tweaks here and there, you might actually be the

irrigation one day.

I'll take corporate irrigation. Corporate irrigation. I'll give that to

A lot of teams might have stopped by now. We keep getting kicked, but we keep

getting back up, and I think that's what's going to define us.

You guys ready?

Yeah, let's do it.

You're going to need a bigger pan.

All right,

.28.

Yeah. Quarter of an ounce.

Woof.

$490. Look, guys, we are a rookie mining team. This is our very first gold way.

We should feel pretty proud about what we've done, and I'll take it.

We're going to get better. I know we're going to get better because we're

starting at the bottom, and the only way to go is up.

Can you just think of that? You better believe it. That was good.

That was good.

Yeah.

First gold runner to get better.

Started out a little bit of a rough week. The pumps were giving us problems.

hoses were giving us problems.

But the Johnny Dam worked perfect.

Finally got our first gold away.

Only one way to go from here is up, baby.

That's Duncan Creek.

That's the right stuff right there.

After four days running pay from the chief cook.

and one from the deep cut.

Rick Ness and his crew assemble for a double gold weight.

Yeah, in classic fashion.

With a breakdown, we came dangerously close to running out of paper. Just in

nick of time, buddy.

Well, we wouldn't have nothing to dig it with if not for you, Carl. Yeah.

How many ounces do you think you're in that holder?

Last year, I mean, we pulled 800 yards out of there and ran it, and there was

ounces. That's unreal, man. So, yeah, we'll do a little more math on the

I guess.

First up.

The cheap cut gold.

That looks good, Rick.

We got 10, 20, 30, 40,

56 .36.

Worth over $98 ,000.

Get used to this, Rick. That's good. That's what we've been putting up. But,

know, the deep cut's better than that, right?

So this is from one day of running deep cut right here.

Jesus.

Holy smokes, dude.

Next, the gold from running just one day of deep cut pay.

Get ready.

So we got another 10, another 20, another over 30.

That's one day?

And we got 35 .21.

Oh, buddy.

Oh, man.

Worth $62 ,000.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, buddy.

Together. It's the biggest weekly Goldway of the season.

That was at 91 .57.

Which boosts their season total to 393 ounces, closing in on their 1

,000 -ounce target.

I don't know what's more impressive, the Goldway or you figuring it out. Yeah,

you've got a guy on site that knows math.

We're step boys.

At almost 100 ounces a week, Rick and his crew could be looking at a $2

season.

Time to start hammering down, throttling that dirt out of there. Do it, dude.

Yes, sir.

So another big week there, and a couple more band -aids. That's the problem.

We're keeping things rolling, so nothing wrong with that. We're getting gold

coming in. I'm happy.

Yeah, I'm ecstatic, man.

I've never seen that much gold on one gold bait.

We'll keep at it.

Well, we are done with the cheap cut, and so far the deep cut's looking really

good. So let's just hope it stays that way.

Next time on Gold Rush.

Get down here now.

Rick Ness' 1 ,000 -ounce mission.

Your back's hurting?

It's the skids. That's a major, major problem.

Tony Beat's season.

Looks like something I would buy.

Heads for liftoff. Let's haul it out of there. Throw some rocks in and see what

it does.

And Parker returns from three weeks prospecting.

Don't drop it.

To the mother of all gold waves. Get into your airplane. Let's fight.

20 airplane.