Original subtitles

I've got a new sidekick to introduce.

This is bosco. Bosco, come here.

He doesn't listen very well.

He's a four or five-month-old chocolate lab.

I just got them yesterday from my mom and dad,

and that was my birthday present from them.

They got him like a month ago, got him potty trained for me. Great grandparents.

They're gonna be doing that with my children.

And here he is.

My mom and dad were like, "hey, do you want a dog for your birthday?"

And I'm like, "yeah, it's probably time."

But I could never pick one out.

You know, it's always, like, "not dozer."

Will he, like, fetch?

Well, that's one thing about labs

is they don't need much training for the fetch, I don't think.

Except on the retrieval side.

But anyways, getting back to work.

It's kind of a mayhem to keep three plants running, you know.

It stretches the people and equipment kind of to the Max.

But with where we're at for gold,

it's really the only hope we've got.

Halfway through the season,

Parker schnabel has a mountain to climb.

After the slowest start of his mining career,

with one bad gold weigh after another,

he's finally turning the corner,

recently banking his first 500-plus-ounce gold weigh.

But he's not out of the woods yet.

You start building a company bigger and bigger,

and then it just becomes a monster that you have to feed.

And the amount of cash that needs to go into the business every week

in order to to pay the bills just consumes you.

And we're definitely at that point.

On the Indian river,

Parker's skeleton crew is sluicing Ken and Stuart's consistent ground.

At dominion, in the huge 114-acre bridge cut,

his team are still running the top layer of pay dirt.

And a mile-and-a-half away...

They finally mined out the first half of the 20-acre long cut.

Hey, Tyson. You got a copy, Tyson?

Yeah. Go ahead, Jacob.

Hey, buddy, we're just about out of pay down here.

Nice work.

No more pay.

Sweet. We're all shut down.

Roxanne just finished in the first section of the long pit,

and we're about to move it to the upstream section.

It's way easier if we pull the plant out of a pit and just haul everything to it

because then the stripping crew

can strip into the cut once it's done.

We want to have ground open for next year

so we're not screwed like we were this year.

Parker's crew spent nearly eight weeks

sluicing the first 10 acres of the long cut.

Now to sluice the second half,

he plans to haul wash plant Roxanne

over a mile upstream to a new path,

where it will sluice into an existing pond.

This lets him fill the downstream section

with overburden from a new cut

that he plans to open up alongside it,

ready to mine next season.

Parker wants the move to happen in a day,

ready for the night crew to start sluicing.

- How's it going, man? - Pretty good.

Roxanne's done here, and I got so much going on at the long cut down there.

I just gotta try and get that done

so that we actually can sluice when we move Roxanne.

Man, I know you've moved a lot of wash plants this season.

You wanna do one more?

Yeah, for sure, man. How are things looking down there?

We're really close.

We got a bunch of material down there,

the wash plant pads pretty well all in place,

but the cut isn't and that's the problem

is like Parker wants to be sluicing

as soon as the plants move down there, no downtime.

Perfect. We'll get her moved.

- Well, right on, man. I appreciate it. - No worries.

- Have a good one. Thanks. - You too.

So right now, trying to pull the feeder out in the long cut

and get the radial stacker out,

get the pipeline dug out, the water pump out,

generator moved, Roxanne moved, sluice runs moved,

and all set up in a new location.

So it's a lot of work, not much time to do it in.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Yep!

First, Tyson moves the sluice runs over to the new pad.

Well, now that we got the sluice runs in place, Liam,

- we'll go back for the shaker deck, okay? - Yeah.

So now it's time to go for the long drag.

Over a mile of distance, we're dragging this thing.

How are we looking, Liam?

I'm almost out of room here.

All righty. Get me on the edge here, Liam.

Yep.

Don't let me drown. That ponds 25 feet deep.

It's beautiful.

All righty. Nice work, guys.

So right now I'm armoring up the bank.

We got the material here, it just needs to be played with a bit.

So I wanna make sure the wash plant and the sluice runs

don't end up at the bottom of this pond.

You know, in my second or third year,

when we were setting up sluicifer, sluicifer went off the edge.

Only time I've ever seen a wash plant go off an edge.

Me. That is not good.

With Roxanne secured on its pad,

Tyson eyeballs the conveyor into position.

This is a dime and a dozen, this thing lines up for a shot,

and it looks like I might have gotten it, which is good.

Got her first try!

After just five hours, Tyson is ready to fire up.

All right, now we're just waiting for water to get to our wash plant.

Hopefully, this new pump wants to throw some water at us.

Earlier this season,

Parker spent $180,000 on a new pump

capable of sending over 7,000 gallons of water a minute to the wash plant.

Yeah, I haven't even had a burp yet.

Well, this sucks.

Everything is ready, but the pump doesn't wanna pump.

Okay, right on.

Air is being sucked into the pump from a loose intake hose,

creating an airlock and stopping water from flowing.

Just gonna tighten that top one.

It's coming.

Go ahead and start feeding.

We've got water up here, we're sluicin'.

Tyson and his crew have hit Parker's deadline,

and Roxanne is back sluicing 24-7.

You know, right now, things are looking pretty good so far.

We have dirty rocks coming in one end, clean coming out the other.

Now the real race begins. Keeping it fed.

King of the klondike, Tony beets, is way ahead of the pack.

12 weeks into the season,

he's already mined over 2,900 ounces,

$7.25 million in gold.

On paradise hill,

Tony's son, Mike, is on a roll running the trommel 24-7.

At the Indian river, after a week of maintenance,

Tony's nephew, cousin Mike, has sluice-a-lot back running,

churning through 6,000 yards of come back pay dirt a day.

Cousin Mike is tearing through pay fast,

and Tony is now in danger of running out.

To keep his Indian river operation on the gold,

Tony needs to find a new score.

Tony needs all his years of experience to find the gold sweet spot.

If he fails, it could be game over for Indian river.

Running short of open ground on the Indian river,

Tony beets is hoping he's found his next cut.

With a new spot to mine,

Tony sends in his troops to strip the cut down to pay dirt

and build a wash plant pad for sluice-a-lot.

So we've done two gold weighs out of the crew cut,

and the numbers are just garbage.

It's just not even paying the bills

and it's not sustainable.

We're not gonna make a living that way,

we're not gonna walk out of here

with any kind of a profit, it's.

Like Tony beets, Rick ness is scrambling to find good ground.

After a strong start to his season,

his gold production has fallen off a cliff

with the recent crew cut delivering just 19 ounces in two weeks.

Now he's looking for a savior before he burns through all the cash he's made.

There's so much ground here, and where the is it?

There's no sign pointing out where the gold is, it takes time to find it.

And right now I know that I'm not gonna have any money coming in

and I know I need to find it quick.

And going into this knowing that, yeah, it's stressful.

Rick's targeting ground near his bench cut,

a spot that's paid out in the past,

but is now covered in permafrost.

Desperate to find gold, he's hoping to discover a thawed area nearby.

If there's gold here and we get on it right away,

then there's still a chance for us to get our 1,500-ounce gold,

but if I gotta keep poking around for weeks, trying find it,

then that gets more and more unlikely by the day.

The glacier's really made a mess out of this.

I'm not sure what to think about it,

a lot of it doesn't make sense.

Over 150,000 years ago, a giant glacier eroded

and picked up gold from the mount hint on mother lode.

The massive 2.5-mile thick ice sheet

bulldozed through Duncan creek, tearing up the landscape.

When the ice melted, it left behind rocks, debris,

and pockets of gold throughout Rick's vast claim.

There's a lot of metallics in this soil.

I really think there might be gold here, and it's really shallow.

So I think I'm just gonna test it.

After losing time and money at the crew cut

by relying only on the result of a pan,

Rick doesn't wanna make the same mistake again.

I got Heather and Jason coming down here with some buckets.

We're gonna pull a quarter yard out of it

and try to run it through the gold room and see what we got.

It's just kind of a quick way to get an idea of what we're dealing with here.

I saw some gravel poking out of the surface,

so I just moved the bucket around in here and.

Like, 6 inches of mud and moss,

and then a little bit of a mix of gravel and bedrock.

It would be easy to get if there's gold in it.

Let's run up a little sample on it

and just see what we get out of it, and

I'll just pick a spot.

Probably where there's a little more gravel than that,

and I'll fluff it up with a bucket and

- dig me a hole. - All right.

Just gonna give it a shot. It's easy to get to, why not sample it?

If there is a lot of gold here,

I mean, it'll be amazing.

So this is confusing and different from other stuff.

So we're not really sure what to expect from it, but...

But this so far looks pay dirt-y,

and there looks to be bedrock.

So hopefully we'll see some gold in it after a sample.

How many are we up to?

Half a pail more.

We got those buckets all loaded up for you there,

and we should be able to have those samples processed

and back to you later today.

- All right. Get that done. - Okay.

Five hours later, Rick checks on the results of the test run.

Very nervous but very excited too.

Fingers crossed.

What's the scoop?

Dirt.

- You can see the pieces. - There's some in there.

It's right there.

No, it shakes, and then, yeah, the water jets blow off the lighter material.

The gold settles into the grooves and travels to the end.

Shiny gold.

I mean, I'm seeing gold come out of it.

We've never done a quarter-yard test like this, so I'm still nervous.

I still don't know how that's supposed to look.

I saw gold in it, I know that. I have no idea how much yet.

We'll see if it picks it up. It's not very much.

That comes out to...

Just over an ounce per 100 yards, which is mine able.

I feel like we've mined worse ground than that.

Looking at it positively, it is good news.

We have to move on from that ground

that we've been running at rocky.

It's and we can't make any money off of that.

This, a little amount, is actually not that bad.

It's economical to mine, it's shallow,

and it's right there, you know.

So we didn't waste too much time,

and I think we continue on stripping that and get ready to run it.

The numbers add up.

All right, let's do this.

Yeah, guys, let's just have a quick chat about this ground here.

Yo. This next spot down here that I've been prospecting,

we've pulled samples out of it.

It looks like it could be really good.

And the nice thing about it is there's not much overburden,

so it's gonna be easy stripping.

Basically all this dirt sitting on an edge with the bedrock drop,

so let's just call it the edge cut.

It's a pretty good stretch, but you know...

It won't take us the end of the season, I don't think,

but it could be a quick hit and really good gold.

Yeah. Well.

Yeah, let's pack our and get back on that good gold.

Sounds good.

- Let's get out there. Go. - My boys.

Rick's got a couple of ideas going over to the edge cut.

He says it's really good.

Hopefully, yeah, it is. That's what we really need right now.

Just to get up into that 1,500-ounce goal.

So last night we fired up Roxanne up here in the long cut.

Parker schnabel is running three wash plants

to hit his 10,000-ounce target,

but it's stretching his operation to the limit.

We have tayvin in the loader.

Now it's his first time running it by himself,

so he's gotta be quick on his feet.

A lot to keep an eye on.

Roxanne, it's a one-man band out here. It's just him.

So he needs to be able to keep up with this plant.

There's a lot to look for

when you're feeding a wash plant.

So it's pretty hard keep an eye on everything

while you keeping an eye on your bucket and where you're going.

20-year-old tayvin Peterson has run rock trucks all season.

Now, he's been promoted to feeding Roxanne.

It just sucks. I feel so bad that I'm not very good at running the loader yet,

and they want me to start running this wash plant.

But I'm trying my damnedest, and it's so hard.

Whoa!

My goodness gracious. My kidneys hurt so bad.

Tayvin must feed the plant 250 yards of pay an hour.

But six hours into his shift, he's struggling to keep up.

The hopper's jammed.

I'm about to shut it down.

Half of the hopper's jammed up with mud, so I have to shovel it out.

Tyson never mentioned what to do in this situation,

so I never got the memo for this.

Kind of just winging it.

I just keep running around like a chicken

with my head cut off, I guess.

I am actually just stressed right out and have no plan.

Tyson, do you have a copy?

- Tyson. - Hey. What's up?

Hey, Tyson, half the hopper is jammed up with mud,

so what am I supposed to do?

I'm just feeding half the hopper.

Mitch should be up there soon.

If you can get Mitch.

Holy cow.

Mitch, do you have a copy? Mitch.

Half of the hopper is still plugged up.

But if I'm able to feed it for now

and hopefully let that other half dry out for a little bit.

I just got a radio call from tayvin here.

Came across pretty staticky,

so we're just gonna see what he wants here.

But definitely can tell he needs some help up here at the plant.

How's it going?

Half the hopper's jammed up, and I'm not too sure

what to do when it gets like that.

The first thing we'll do here is we'll have a look in there.

Yeah, you can see we've got that big rock there.

Yeah.

A large flat rock has slipped through the grizzly bars

and landed on the belt,

preventing the compacted mud above it from moving through the hopper.

When it gets all built up with material like this,

you certainly got to shut it off.

I mean, obviously, we want to keep running.

- Just go hop out. - All right.

Turn on the both of them and just give me a minute.

- And when I yell, turn this off. - -Okay.

Ready, Mitch?

Yeah, go.

Right now, Mitch is shoveling

and putting it on the conveyor,

and I'm ready to stop it if anything goes wrong.

Boy, am I glad Mitch showed up.

All right, go ahead and shut it off.

- Watch your fingers and toes. - -Yep.

Put this on the conveyor or throw it out?

- Just Chuck it out. - Yeah.

There you go.

- You good? - Yeah, I'm good.

- Yeah, if you put... - lucky I didn't get that on the nuts.

If you

looks like it's clearing out pretty good.

- Thank you so much. - Yeah. You good, dude?

- Yeah. - Okay.

Good to get back in the loader

- and start washing rocks again? - Yeah.

I think you can throw some more at it, buddy.

Perfect.

Back running again.

Man.

My arm hurts from slipping on that belt, though.

It definitely could have been a lot worse.

He saw he had a problem, and he got a hold of us on the radio.

If he would have kept running it,

that rock starts cutting the belt,

we could be doing a belt replacement right now, so...

At the end of the day, this thing's got to have dirt going through it

if you want to have some gold at the end of the week.

We're out of pay in this area.

It sucks that we don't have any pay

to feed the wash plants with.

I got to shut the plant down.

After three months of near non-stop running,

Tony beets' wash plant, sluice-a-lot,

has finished running the last of the comeback cut's pay dirt.

To stay on Indian river gold, he plans to haul the plant

to the newly-opened corner cut.

We want to have the plant in place

and, be sluicing as soon as possible.

Now we're going to drag this plant about a mile.

Cousin Mike is in charge of the mammoth plant move.

I'm trying to stay on the right side of the road,

without getting too close to the trees.

But I have to stay away from this edge because that's a deep drop.

Because we've got the creek on the one side

and the road is in a little bit of an angle towards the creek,

I gotta make sure that this plant doesn't slide sideways.

Because once it's going towards the hole on the left, there's no stopping.

We wide the road, but it's still a

a tight spot.

With the bridge on one side

that I don't want to hit with the sluice runs.

And the plant is moving to the left quite a bit.

You can see where my tracks are.

The plant is moving half a dozer width over to the left,

towards the creek.

I hope the excavator gets out of the way

because he's gonna be stopped.

I can feel the dozer struggling.

I can feel I'm having trouble steering.

Well, we put in this road that I'm on right now.

It's still pretty narrow because we couldn't Bury the culvert.

At Indian river, cousin Mike is dragging Tony's 45-ton sluice-a-lot

to its new pad in the corner cut.

I got to make a wide turn with the dozer

because the plant is gonna take a shortcut.

Lots of weight on the back of the dozer,

so I can't just make a sharp turn right away.

There she goes, just slide over.

And now, it's just straight ahead.

So I'm in the yard right now.

There's some stuff on the side of the road.

That is going to be very tight.

I've got a trailer on my right that I also don't want to hit.

Yeah, we made it through.

Almost there.

I got the pad on my left.

Right now, the challenge is,

turning this plant around.

Yeah, it doesn't matter if Tony is watching or not.

Either way, you don't wanna do it wrong.

Just got to back it up from here on.

We did it.

Yeah, it looks good. I'm happy.

Just got to get it forward into place.

There we are. Landed in place.

Plant move accomplished,

now, Tony needs cousin Mike to get back in the cut and build up a pay pile.

We... we can't,

sit down and relax because we've got to keep stripping and stay ahead.

That doesn't feel right.

That's not good.

This is not promising at all.

That feels like frost.

Yeah, that's very frozen.

I was hoping to get to pay easy,

but, I found some permafrost

that we didn't expect here.

So, this is gonna slow us down.

It's not good.

We really can't have frost right now

because this is, gonna cost us a lot of time.

We should try another spot.

This spot is not any better.

This is all frozen, too.

Tony, do you copy? Tony.

It's all frost here in this cut.

I think we've got to come up with a new plan

because, we were hoping to get some pay here quick,

but that is not gonna happen here.

Yeah, it's all frozen.

It's right over there, right over there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tony's plans for Indian river gold are on ice.

Right now, we're just clearing a strip of overburden

in this new cut here, on the edge.

So we're gonna try to get this stripped as quick as we can,

and get the pay in the plant and run it

so that we can keep the gold coming in.

We've got a long ways to go to get to 1,500 ounces yet,

and, we're not going to get there if we're not sluicing.

Rick ness is betting big on the new edge cut

to get him back on the gold.

We sampled it and we got gold.

I should feel comfortable that

you know, that this is definitely worth our while.

Every single one of us is in a machine right now trying to move

move this overburden, because right now,

that's the most important thing on site, you know.

We've got to get this cleared,

we've got to get down to gold,

so everybody's here and everybody's pitching in.

What the is going on here?

I'm just scraping the moss off,

and there's no gravel.

With, like, a few little pebbles here and there.

But that's... that's just really weird. That's

it's like the gravel layer completely disappeared on me.

I would think that that would mean that there's no gold.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about this.

This is... this is not looking very good.

I think we're gonna have to run another test on this.

Before Rick spends any more money stripping the edge cut,

he wants to double check it holds the gold he needs.

I want to do a larger test, a bulk test.

We'll do a 1,000-yard test.

And if that shows us that there's gold in it,

well, then I can commit to this.

There's a fair amount of stripping to do here,

but if there's gold here, it's gonna be worth it.

If there's not, then we need to be moving on.

After pulling out a 1,000 yards of pay,

Rick stops stripping to feed it through rocky.

Fire it up!

The bottom line is at this point,

we can't afford to be running dirt with no gold in it.

So we're doing a 1,000-yard test.

Fingers crossed that there's a bunch of gold in it.

If there is, we're all set.

Should we get my wu-tang rock in here?

Dude, you haven't seen this?

Perfect w. Look at that.

How sweet is that?

Wu-tang forever.

My collection of rocks.

This one, I think, is part of a mammoth vertebrae.

This one's a big heart.

I keep that one because I don't have one.

This one's the,

serving tray, like platter.

Put stuff on it.

I don't know why I grabbed that one.

I guess it's just really weird looking.

Got a bunch of cool stuck to it.

Little stone sandals.

I like the sandals, though.

I'm gonna take the sandals home this year.

Gotta admit, those are pretty sweet.

- Hi, guys. - Hello.

How are you feeling?

Well.

Anyways, what happened this week?

Unable to sluice from the new corner cut this week at Indian river,

all Tony has is the last gold from the comeback cut.

Five, ten, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35,

50, 60, 70.

75.66.

Worth $190,000.

So this is the trommel, Mike.

Ten, 20.

Mike's trommel has been running 24/7 on paradise hill.

190.

Yeah. He has another jar, you know.

210, 220, 240, 250, 280, 290, 300, 340, 370.

374.34.

Worth $936,000.

Just about, yeah.

That's pretty nice.

Okay. I'll get her done.

Now that all your gold is poured out,

I assume you wish for us to leave.

All right. Sayonara, arrivederci, ciao.

See you later.

Just flock off.

So we'll see you for the next one.

Yo.

- Yo. - That's a downing yo.

I don't know. Not a downing yo.

Just a confused yo.

Yo.

Well, I mean, one way or another,

we're at a crossroads, at the moment.

I mean, kind of, what it boils down to is we're having, you know,

a bad few weeks, and

I mean, we can absorb that,

but we can't keep it up, you know.

Rick has run a 1,000 yards of pay dirt from the edge cut.

To be worth mining, he needs to see ten ounces.

Well, should we weigh this up, see what it is?

All right, well.

Two.

2.59.

Worth just $6,500.

So this is where you're,

pulling out another jar from under the table, saying, "joke."

I wish.

I think we all do.

Two, yeah. Two point.

Just over 2.5 ounces. That's pretty bad.

I don't think we'd ever make the decision to mine ground that bad.

So either you've got to do a drastic reconfiguration on how you want done,

or where you're going to move or

yeah.

Just pack it up.

Yeah, as far as gold weighs go,

that was, the worst one, by far, I've ever had.

I mean, it was only a 1,000-yard test, but still it's bad.

It's a bad result.

We need to find better ground fast.

Does he bark at all?

- No. - That's awesome.

Well, Mitch, how was your week?

Buddy.

You know, we finished the downstream in the long cut,

and now, we got the plant moved.

We've got, you know, tayvin in the loader up there.

And he had a pretty good jam up in the hopper feeder,

so I had to show him all about getting that cleared out and

- yeah, get these green guys... - Yeah.

Used to the real... the real problems.

Tayvin seems to be doing good, though, hey, so far.

Yeah, he's learning a lot.

Because I told him for, like, a week,

you know, everything can go fine.

And then, you know, second you get comfortable, that's when stuff piles up.

So it's good he caught it.

Yeah.

Wash plant rocks and has been sluicing all week

in the new section of the long cut.

After averaging just 138 ounces a week from the first section,

Parker's hoping the new area picks up.

Rocksand had a big thermostat this week.

Let's see how we did after everything up there.

Chris had the grunt picking that up.

We got 20, 40, 60, 100,

110, 120, 130, 185, 190.

Two hundred.

- 222.5. - Nice.

Worth $556,000.

So you want to see how big red did?

Let's check it out.

- All righty. - Okay, here we go.

Big red has been running pay at the bridge cut...

Ten, 20, 60.

Running the top layer of pay dirt.

Eighty.

82.80.

Worth $207,000.

- Nothing wrong with that. - Yep.

Then we got big Bob.

And I'm not sure how much more you got to do down there.

They probably only have one or two more cleanups.

Is that right?

We got 30, seventy.

Bob has been running 24/7 at Ken and Stuart's.

260, 280, 290, 300, 310, 320, 330, 340.

346.80.

Worth $867,000.

I didn't know that scale went that high.

That must be the best one of the season.

- It is, yeah. - Yeah.

So this week, we got 652.1 ounces.

Gives a season total of 2,345.3 ounces.

She's climbing fast now.

Everything's an improvement if we can keep it happening.

We'll aim for better for next week.

Let's do it.

- Yeah, all right. - Sounds good.

- All right. Thanks, guys. - Yeah.

Like, I'm happy with this result,

but it's really just a matter of sustaining that

because there's hardly that many weeks left in the season.

So we just got to try to hammer these pits out

and try to keep the plants running.

So we'll see.