Original subtitles

(Transcrito por TurboScribe. Atualize para Ilimitado para remover esta mensagem.) If we're not making money, we're losing everything within the next week or two.

On this episode of Mine Rescue.

My main load mine is about 2,500 yards up,

but we're having issues with liberating all the gold out.

A one-of-a-kind hard rock operation.

Unfortunately, we're not running this right now.

Is dead in the water.

This is kind of what we were planning on working on.

As the miner's future hangs in the balance.

We're running a plaster operation down below.

I'm about 90% sure that this is failing.

Not one speck in that.

I mean, I'm really concerned now.

Yeah, me too.

Freddy and Juan must think outside the box.

I got well over 180 grand invested in this.

We have nothing left.

To get the gold.

Well, let's see what it shoots.

Oh, wow.

Holy cow.

Hugo, a roadrunner, Freddy.

There's been a lot of history in this area.

Gold built the state of California.

That's why California's here.

It's because of gold.

You can see some old hard rock shafts

on the mountains here, Juan, on the hills.

Yeah, I've seen a couple of them already.

Little outcroppings where they've done some work.

This miner's a gentleman named Jeff.

He's a hard rock guy in a way.

He's off.

He's struggling pretty bad.

75 miles east of the Pacific coast in Southern California,

the Runnels mine sits within a diverse mountainous desert region.

From the 1870s, this area was renowned for its rich underground gold.

The nearby Good Hope shaft produced over $310 million in today's money.

And this same Good Hope vein runs through miner Jeff Runnels' small 20-acre claim.

Sapphire's here.

Yeah.

Freddy.

Nice to meet you, sir.

Yeah, you too, sir.

How you doing, Juan?

So this your hard rock operation?

This is the hard rock operation.

My main load mine is about 2,500 yards up.

But unfortunately, since I last spoke to you, things have changed dramatically.

We're currently not running this right now.

This is kind of what we were planning on working on.

Are you not mining anymore or what's going on?

Well, I ran out of money for this up here.

OK.

So we had to shift gears, another operation down below.

And we're running a little bit of plaster.

I was seeing gold, and it was quick and easy.

So that's why we moved down there.

OK.

A hard rock mining is very expensive.

It is.

It is.

How much do you have invested in all your workings here and all your equipment?

About $183,000 last year.

Just last year?

Just the last year.

I'm broke.

Like, literally broke.

I have nothing left.

We're grasping at straws right now.

If we don't start making a profit in the next couple of weeks,

this is all getting packed up and put in storage.

I guess that changes a little bit, you know?

Yeah.

We came here thinking we're going to work on this plant.

Are you getting decent recovery out of the plaster plant right now?

No.

We're not retaining the gold that I've been seeing in the samples.

Do you have any gold we can see there?

I do have a little bit of gold.

So this is about the average size of the plaster.

That's big.

It's pretty gold.

That's for darn sure.

Yeah, it's nice.

Real wiry.

So you're mainly wanting us to help you down there then.

It's a plaster gold, right?

At this point, yeah.

This is the focus because this is where we're going to gain the fastest capital.

Well, you know, right now I think I want to go down there and look at your plaster plant

that is running.

Yeah.

And then we can come up with a game plan of what we can do.

I served in the Army from 95 until 06.

After several tours overseas, I sustained multiple injuries.

And then that ultimately led to spinal cord surgeries.

And I was discharged.

The goal prospecting was physical therapy to help me get out

and walking around and, you know, moving to get everything back to somewhat normal.

Over the years, gold fever set in.

And Jeff decided to risk everything to pursue his dream of mining full time.

Got the Calvary.

All the kids plus Roxy.

Moving his partner Roxy and their seven kids to a house on a rented gold claim.

We moved out here and I started prospecting for hard rock.

I've put my entire savings into this and financially it just strapped me.

So I got to make this work.

This is Steve, one of my dad's real long time surf buddies.

He's my second man.

I mean, he's my everything.

How you doing, Steve?

I'm Juan.

Hey, Juan.

Freddy.

Good to meet you.

Freddy, nice to meet you too.

What's the plan, huh?

Yeah, this is the wash plant.

So what kind of gold, like on your last cleanup?

The initial test that Steve and I did, it was showing really good gold.

The last cleanup we did, it was the eight hour run.

That was 1.14 grams.

For an eight hour run?

For an eight hour run.

Okay, so we're losing gold somewhere.

It's not good.

No.

It could be material too though.

Yeah, could be the material.

Jeff's gamble is mining the gullies on his claim for placer gold.

Using a wash plant cobbled together from pieces he already had on site.

So what we'd like to do is we want to do a four hour test run.

Okay.

And Freddy and I, we're just going to stand back, watch your guys' process,

and then we'll go from there.

Awesome.

Let's wash some gravel.

Do it.

We got here this morning expecting to be working on a hard rock.

And, you know, we got thrown a curveball right off the bat.

I understand where he's going with it because he doesn't have the resources left

to run the hard rock stuff.

It costs a lot more money to run that.

With this placer operation, probably every stream in California has potential to have

some amount of gold in it.

But that doesn't mean there's good enough gold everywhere to make money.

First bucket launch.

Hay dirt is tipped into a homemade hopper

where plastic pipe offcuts wash the material across a screen.

Operator Steve uses an old plank of wood to shake the pay out into the sluices below.

You know, I've been with Jeff since he got this place up and running.

We've worked through thick and thin from inside to out.

It would be devastating for this to go away.

What are you doing, puppy?

Hey, pup pup.

I came here to help him.

And if we fail, then I'm kind of a failure.

So hopefully Freddy and Juan can help get us through this dire situation.

You know, just starting out, that hopper that he repurposed with that little grizzly on there,

it's a bottleneck.

They've only been running a few minutes and it's already plugged up.

There's already a laundry list of things that we can do.

Take some test bands.

Go to the pay pile.

I'm going to take a look at the sluice box.

I can actually feel down there the ripple itself is above the mat

and it's allowing that material just to blow out of the ripple.

So half of that box is not doing anything.

With Jeff and Steve earning so little from their last run,

Freddy checks the quality of their pay dirt.

We're just going to take a little from here

and take handfuls from all over this pile for this next pan.

That way you aren't getting all your material from the same spot.

This ought to be fun.

Not one speck in that.

See, there's no gold in there.

Nothing.

So that's a bad sign.

What even makes this more disheartening is Jeff's on his last legs here.

You know, without getting onto some gold and recovering it,

you know, he's pretty much out of business.

What you got there?

Well, I pan in the pay pile that he's feeding to the plant.

Nothing.

I even had my grandpa glasses on.

Nothing even resembles gold in that one.

Right now he's just wasting money, Juan.

Yeah, I think you shut him down, Fred.

I think so too.

Honestly.

Hey, Jeff.

Yeah.

We're at two hours right now.

Let's shut it down.

All right.

And the reason why?

I've been panning all over the place.

I haven't found one single color.

Out of this material.

Not one.

Really?

Not one.

You're wasting money on gas, diesel, labor.

Still think you need to clean this up?

Yeah.

And have a look at it?

Right.

Because who knows?

You may have had one bucket in there that had some gold in it.

Right.

All right.

Well, we'll get this box cleaned up and see what it does.

Thank you, sir.

Sorry for being a bearer of bad news.

That's all good.

Thanks.

Weighing the gold from the test run will give Freddy and Lonn a larger scale sample of Jeff's

placer pay dirt.

Well, it's been kind of a weird day.

That's for dang sure.

He's no longer running the hard rock operation.

And come to find out that the placer mine may not be viable either.

So basically, right now, we're at this property's mercy.

You know, that's really all I can say.

Now I'm nervous.

Yeah, now I'm pretty nervous.

Either we're going to get gold and we're going to succeed.

Or the next week that runs by, we got to pack up and I got to leave.

And that'll be it for this.

A pan and a bowl?

All right.

You want pancakes?

Yeah, please.

You want to do just plain and then you guys can top it how you want?

Yeah.

All right.

Ahead of miner Jeff's first gold weigh, it's breakfast time in the Runnels' household.

That test run was horrible.

Yeah.

Like, worst I've ever seen.

I'm just, I'm hoping that they can find a way to fix it, you know?

Yeah.

Roxy's my fiance of five years now.

Between the two of us, we have seven kids together, ranging from 19 down to six.

You can use maple syrup instead.

She's absolutely my rock.

She dove into this just headfirst and has been supporting me the entire time.

I would describe Jeff as my best friend, first of all.

And it's been his dream for a long time.

Being able to build something that's ours and his,

and that's something we can leave behind for the kids.

And it just means a lot.

You want eggs, Ella?

Yeah.

You want a little plate?

Financially right now, we sunk everything we have into this.

Him, me, Steve.

I mean, we're all in it.

We're a team and we're going to keep going because we don't quit.

Certainly not.

I'm sorry.

It is a very real situation.

A very, very real situation.

If this doesn't work, then we're all back to square one.

Morning.

Good morning.

How's it going?

Morning, Jeff.

With a looming deadline that could shut down his mining aspirations,

Jeff braces for the Placer Gold Way.

You probably didn't sleep last night.

No, not at all.

Pure gold.

Dump her in there and let's see what you got, sir.

All right.

Less than a gram, I can tell.

Yeah.

Doesn't look like much.

Oof.

Half a gram for two hours.

It's actually probably $20 worth of gold with the black sand.

If we're going to keep on running this, then you're just working to lose money.

That's what you're doing.

Bedtime.

Right.

The two-hour test run cost $150 in fuel,

meaning running the wash plant has put Jeff $130 out of pocket.

In a full day's run, the max he could make on the material he's running is $80.

You know, either way, it's very unsustainable.

You know that as well.

Yeah, I got kids I got to feed that don't do it.

No, they're actually taking food out of their mouth to mine right now.

You know, I think the biggest thing that we're going to have to do here is prospecting.

There's only one way to find out if there's enough gold in there and then let's get after it.

OK.

It don't look good.

It doesn't look good on me.

It doesn't look good on Steve.

Brady and Juan, they're our last hope.

I mean, this is it.

Well, right now, there's really no point for wanting myself to start a game plan

or doing any fixes until we find out if there's gold left in the ground.

We got to prospect the rest of Jeff's land and see if we can't turn around the situation here.

Just trying to read a few things here.

Yeah, for sure.

This doesn't look natural to me.

I'm about 90% sure that this is tailings.

I'm guessing 1800s.

Tailings, old waste piles from previous placer mining,

means Jeff's spring beds or draws have been almost entirely mined out.

I mean, I'm really concerned now.

Yeah, me too.

You got some placer, but it's super low grade.

Figure, well, $5 a yard on this, if we run 80 yards and then we can make that difference up.

Doesn't matter, though, because it's still not even close to being enough.

You know, a little tough love.

You're going to have to get the gold fever out of the equation because numbers are numbers.

Jeff thinks that, you know, a few dollars worth of gold per yard is going to get him by it,

which is wrong.

You know, the price of fuel, the price of parts, so forth.

You're still going broke, right?

This is done.

Dead in the water, huh?

Yep.

Basically, you know, the placer's gone.

And what placer he has left that he, like we ran in that first test, worthless.

Need to get with Juan, put our heads together and see where we go from here.

Awesome.

That was sick.

That was really good.

What scares me is he thinks his money is with the placer,

but the placer is completely worthless.

We're kind of in a tight spot here.

Yeah, and we don't have so many days here.

Well, why don't we prospect the hard rock as well?

Because that's his dream, right?

And if there's gold, you know, maybe we can figure a way to be able to do it

and get the gold out without breaking the bank.

I think that's a good idea, Juan.

I might call a friend of mine and bring him in.

He's got some technology that might be very helpful.

Okay.

I'm going to run up to his hard rock mill.

Let's really figure out what's there and see what we can do to make some improvements on it.

Let's do it, buddy.

Let's do it.

You want to know something?

This is flipping hot for a gringo.

A little rough, huh?

Coming up.

This whole mountain range produced millions of dollars in gold.

Let's see what it shoots, Dave.

Oh, wow.

How's it going, Dave?

Hey, Fred, how you doing?

On the Runnels Claim in the shadow of California's legendary Good Hope Mine.

Well, Jeff, this is Dave, a friend of mine.

We've known each other for a couple decades now.

Freddy's hard rock expert, Dave Emsley, arrives on site to prospect Jeff's underground shaft.

Let's have a look at the vein structure up there.

Yeah, let's see what we find.

Over at the hard rock mill site, Juan turns his attention to the state of Jeff's hard rock plant

in a hail Mary hope of making the Runnels Mine fully operational again.

Hammers are way wore out.

Working properly, rocks are fed into a hopper and then crushed using these steel hammers in a mill.

So inside, we've got this rotating assembly that has the hammers hanging onto it.

The centrifugal force pushes those hammers out and it starts breaking up that material

until it can finally fall through the screen.

But if you look at these, these are the old hammers.

You can see how wore out they are.

The material doesn't break up as quickly.

We're going to have to do better than that.

A few thousand feet up the mountain.

Well, here it is, Dave.

Oh, look at that.

Nice.

Dave holds the key to unlocking Jeff's hard rock gold.

A state-of-the-art $50,000 XRF gun.

So this is an X-ray spectrometer.

It's a radioactive emitting device.

But we can take this machine, point at a rock, pull the trigger.

It sends an X-ray out and what reflects back will tell us what minerals are in the rock,

what metals are in the rock.

So, for example, if I shoot a watch,

shows me percentage of gold, percentage of silver, et cetera, instantly.

What normally takes 72 hours to do can be done inside of a minute.

Lead the way, Jeff.

The whole point by bringing Dave in is to pinpoint, you know,

the hotter spots in that vein system up there.

Fingers crossed that we find something that's worthwhile for Jeff in there.

And we can save his home and his livelihood.

But, you know, it's all a gamble.

So this is the main working area.

The main ore body is on the left-hand side.

Stretches in.

That's a decent-sized vein.

Well, I think we ought to do a little bit of testing on it.

Let's see what it shoots, Dave.

What about this piece of...

Nothing good on that one.

How deep back should she go?

Probably 300, 400 feet.

The inherent problem with hard rock is it's never consistent in veins.

You know, they pinch and they swell and they get richer and they get poorer.

So you can go two feet, it'll be completely different.

Try the center of the vein there.

Yeah.

We're seeing some silver, copper, some nickel, lots of iron.

When we get some of the base metals in there, that's a good sign

there's going to be gold presence as well.

So that's showing about 30 grams a ton.

30 grams a ton.

That's a good sign.

30 grams translates to $3,200 a ton.

A fully functioning hard rock operation could process around 40 tons a day,

bringing in up to $640,000 per week.

So that's shooting about 40 grams a ton right in there.

The most accurate way is actually to take a pile of dust

and see what we get on the dust.

So that's showing about four ounces a ton right now.

This whole mountain range historically produced millions of dollars worth of gold.

So this vein complex is going to be offshoots of that.

The trick is, is just getting it out of the ground.

Right.

It's a time-consuming and expensive process.

It is.

Blasting ore from the rock takes investment Jeff doesn't have.

So for now, the gold remains trapped in the mountain.

There's an ore pile on the outside of the mine.

Let's look at it.

But Freddy's got one more place to test.

This is all the recent stuff that I pulled out from the mine when we cleaned it out.

OK.

Historical is all on the right.

That looks historical.

OK.

The waste tailings pile are unprocessed from the 1800s,

when old timers blasted, then dumped lower grade ore.

All right, well, let's take a couple samples and see what we can get.

It's going to be a mix of stuff.

An old ore pile was too low grade for the old timers,

but at today's gold price, it may have enough gold in it to make it worthwhile.

This is showing 19 grams, so half an ounce.

Oh, wow.

So that's good.

With gold at $3,200 an ounce, this mixed grade old timers waste pile could be worth millions.

You can literally just shovel it up right now, crush it, grind it, table it.

And who knows, once you run this, it may bankroll you enough

that you can get the rest of this stuff going.

Awesome.

You know, to find out there are decent values, that's kind of a godsend,

because even on a smaller scale, I think Jeff can get by.

And he can also go a bit larger scale once he gets the money in his pocket.

And now, you know, I need to go make a game plan with Juan,

get our ducks in a row, and figure out exactly what we need to do here.

How are you doing, Jeff?

How's it going?

With just 48 hours to get Jeff making enough gold to save his family home,

Freddie and Juan pivot on an accelerated plan.

We're going to turn this into a kind of a two-part thing.

We know you can't afford to run your hard rock operation right now,

so we're going to get a small hard rock plant going.

We're going to put a sluice box under it,

where you can actually start getting the ore, get some money together.

Ultimately, hard rock mining is the big boy mining.

You know, it takes a lot of money, a lot of equipment to be able to extract the gold.

This little plant is going to get some money together, get you back up to the mill site.

Awesome.

Oh, wow. That's amazing.

To set Jeff up on a ladder to success,

Freddie and Juan will take on a two-stage build.

First, they'll replace Jeff's placer plant

with a small, low-cost hard rock plant made from Jeff's on-site pilot mill, or crusher.

A small sluice box will sit underneath, custom-built for lighter hard rock gold.

Jeff can use this setup to work through the easy-to-reach old-timers' ore

and gather the capital he needs to fund his main hard rock push.

Juan will then set him up for that future

by swapping out the worn hammers on the main hard rock plant

with custom-built brand-new ones that can easily break down the ore and free the gold.

So, after hearing you have seven kids and then you're a vet,

Freddie and I, we came to the agreement that we want to do this, you know, for you guys for free.

Yeah, pro bono.

We appreciate that.

That means a lot, man.

Freddie and Juan, you know, they know my ultimate dream is going back to my hard rock mine,

and everything that they're doing is going to put us towards that goal.

So, I'm excited to pull that whole ore pile down and run it.

It's going to be a huge game changer.

You know, we started with plan A, and then we went to plan B, and now we're on plan F.

Time to get rolling.

Got it.

In the race to save miner Jeff Runnell's home and mining dream...

We're going to bag this stuff up here.

Okay.

His partner, Steve, has enlisted local reinforcements

to help move the old-timers' ore down the mountain.

The old-timers left a lot behind.

So, hopefully we should be able to generate enough funds to get the other plant up and running.

All right, we're ready.

All right, Steve, here it comes.

Hello.

Let's go measure that real quick.

It's a full-team effort to create the small hard rock plant

that can process the old-timers' ore.

So, what I was thinking here, Jeff, is we pull this off.

Okay.

This dry chute, right?

Then our sluice box is going to go underneath.

Jeff's repurposed mini pilot mill will crush the rocks to powder,

releasing the gold, which will fall into Juan's brand-new sluice box below.

Welding the top rail for the sluice box.

You can't run before you walk.

Ultimately, this little plant allows Jeff to be able to get his finances together,

save his home, and eventually get back up on the mill site.

It looks good, Juan.

Thank you, Freddy.

All welded out, it's now Freddy's job to fit out the small plant sluice for hard rock.

I'm going to put this as a baffle plate.

Right.

Here, like this.

So that water is going to hit it.

Okay.

That'll spread that for us.

If we were to just shoot it in.

It would just go straight out the box.

Right, blow it out.

Golden hard rock is lighter and notoriously hard to catch.

By slowing and spreading the water flow,

the baffle plate will encourage the fine gold to drop into the box.

That'll get her.

Having these guys out here right now,

just the labor and the cost alone was way out of our budget.

They even remotely come up with anything of the sort.

And the fact that they're doing it pro bono, it's just a godsend.

The small hard rock plant should generate some income in the short term.

But in the cut trailer, Juan looks to Jeff's long-term future.

The hammers that Jeff has are completely wore out.

So we're going to build him a set.

Juan will lay the groundwork on Jeff's.