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(Transcrito por TurboScribe.ai. Atualize para Ilimitado para remover esta mensagem.) Nearly 180 years since the first great gold rush, the mining world has gone mad.

Record-shattering gold prices.

Holy smokes.

I'm scrambling, looking for gold.

Have lured thousands of new miners to the gold fields.

I need to find gold and I need to find it now.

In some of the most inhospitable places in North America.

Watch yourself.

You gotta get off.

Many gamble it all.

It's all built on credit cards.

In mining, there's so many highs and so many lows.

You were making about every mistake you could make.

But most catch nothing more than gold fever.

You hope the next hole is going to give you the riches and the rewards.

I've asked myself a million times, why am I getting into gold?

I don't know what we're gonna do.

Fire?

I'm outta here.

This is not good.

I can't believe this is happening.

They are what we all dream about as miners.

Right now I'm the boss.

On this episode of Mine Rescue.

This cut's coming to an end.

I've gotta find a new spot.

A Klondike miner with a 6,000 acre claim.

I'm so tied to the mine, I can't get out there and do the exploration.

Needs a sixth sense for gold.

There's a real good chance we're losing a lot of gold.

Once you think you got gold figured out, that's when it bites you in the hiney.

As pressure builds on the mine site.

No way!

The rescue hinges on a high stakes treasure hunt.

You got a huge property, might be a needle in a haystack.

Did you dig that hole?

To take them from the edge of ruin.

If this continues, my world's gonna fall apart.

For a chance at riches.

Oh wow!

Unbelievable.

Well the mighty Yukon, Fred.

Right here at Dawson, over a third of a mile wide.

It's deceiving how quick this current really is.

Cut off by the Yukon River.

To the west of the legendary gold town of Dawson City,

in a remote corner of the Yukon, lies the fraughtened mine.

In 2024, the Yukon Territory produced over 200 million dollars worth of gold.

With Dawson City's gold revenue rising by 34%.

Morgan here sounds like he never takes a day off.

He wants to make a good living for his family.

Being able to make a good living mining is a possibility.

But it takes a lot to do it.

There's been a lot of people that have come out here to make a fortune,

but have lost their shirts.

I think we need to go down that road. Looks a little sketchy.

Hop on the side by side and go down there, huh?

Yeah, I think so. Let's do that.

Go!

The fraughtened mine sits in the valley bottom,

at the end of five miles of remote road.

That must be them right there.

How we doing?

Good.

Good, how are you guys?

How's it going, guys?

Pretty good.

Juan, Dave, Juan, Morgan.

Chrissy.

Chrissy, Freddie.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, Morgan.

Nice to meet you, Juan.

Nice to meet you as well.

Oh, welcome.

We're so excited to have you guys here.

The road's not that great.

We got to the top of the hill, looked at the road, and I'm like, yeah, we better not.

Yeah, well, it's a good choice because we had so much rain yesterday.

Beautiful spot down here.

Yeah, it is.

It's beautiful.

How many acres do you have?

I staked 288 claims.

It's about 6,000 acres.

We're about two kilometers down to the mouth of the creek and goes into the Yukon River,

and then it's almost 20 kilometers upstream.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

What'd you do for gold last year?

So, we were hoping for 200 last year.

We got 150.

We didn't get as much as we wanted.

We got a lot of bills, and we're trying to grow the business.

We're trying to buy new equipment.

He started with a gold pen walking through the bush.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's so much to love about gold mining for me.

Being outside, exploring the place I grew up.

I was born here, and gold's just in the air.

At 25, I started a job with a prospector.

It turned him into a multimillionaire, maybe $100 million or more.

I couldn't believe how wealthy he'd become, and it was just a motivation for me to try it for myself.

41-year-old Morgan set up his full-time mining operation six years ago.

So, now here I am with a gold mine.

Gold's super hot right now.

The price is high.

I want to find millions of dollars of gold in the ground because it's going to help me grow my family.

I want to contribute to my country's wealth, and I want to build a mining empire.

That's my dream.

That's why I want to be rich, so I can continue that.

What do you do here?

Do you mine with him?

I don't mine with him.

I'm at home with three little kids that are growing like weeds, and we also homeschool the kids,

and I just do a little bit of the bookkeeping for the business.

Three full-time jobs, really, what you got going on.

Yeah, three full-time jobs.

So, over the last six years, how much have you produced out of here?

I've gotten 600 ounces.

It's all you in here?

I've got a couple employees, but I've still got to show up every day, direct everybody what to do,

trying to make a living at it full-time.

What's your goal for this year?

It's 200 ounces.

Again? Okay.

Yeah.

How close are you to it now?

We're at 40 ounces so far.

We're averaging 8 to 10 hours on a sluice day, but we spent a good chunk of the first part of the season fixing things,

maintaining, but, you know, things are breaking down, and I don't have expertise in fabricating, welding,

and so that's a roadblock for me.

Do you have any gold with you?

Yeah, actually, I brought some gold.

So, that's an ounce of the gold we get.

Yeah, this gold hasn't traveled long, has it, Juan?

That's pretty jagged, yeah.

Closer to the source.

So, how much do you have invested in this mine, Morgan?

I've put over a million dollars into this.

I am investing the gold in this business to this point.

The gold's paying for the excavators and the trauma, the payments to the employees, the fuel.

Do you have a ton of ground left in your cut where you're getting that gold right now?

This cut's coming to an end, and I've got to find a new spot.

I'm so tied to the mine, I can't get out there and do the exploration.

Really?

We usually kind of stand back, just watch what you do and how you do it.

Yeah, and then, you know, we'll go from there.

Before we go, the kids would really love to meet you guys.

Well, let's meet your children.

All right, I'll go get them.

Well, how we doing? Nice to meet you. I'm Juan.

Nice to meet you.

Hey, buddy. How you doing?

Good.

Nice to meet you, young lady.

Nice to meet you.

Pleasure.

Nice to meet you.

Pleasure, sir.

Well, let's go run a test.

It was good meeting you guys.

Nice to meet you.

Morgan actually came down here and found this gold on his own,

but mining isn't just prospecting.

You've got to be able to fix your equipment,

you've got to be able to fabricate and weld,

and he has to know where he's going next.

Morgan's got a lot of ground here,

so we've got to go find where he's got more gold on his property.

Nice-looking plant.

Yeah.

Bends sturdy and it runs.

Doesn't get as much dirt through it as I want.

Now, when you bought it, did it come with carpets?

I don't know. I've never run carpets in it,

so I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

And what kind of yardage are you running out of, do you think?

We're doing 20, 25 yards an hour.

A lot less than we hoped, but I can't get it to 40.

Well, let's watch it run.

First bucket, Juan, start our timer.

Morgan feeds pay into a 6-by-8-foot hopper,

which is then washed down into a 24-foot trommel.

Small material travels down into the 5-foot-long sluice,

where hydraulic riffles help the gold to settle.

If I don't get to my target,

I can't blame anyone else if I fail.

It's just me.

Every year, I get the season started

on high-interest credit cards maxed out.

It might be $100,000 of debt

from a few different loans and lines of credit,

because the bank, they won't touch a gold miner.

And I've just got to hope that it comes back out of the ground

to pay those credit cards off.

Otherwise, it's over, because 21% payment

on a $100,000 credit card through the winter,

it's a lot of money.

Hey, Morgan!

Yeah?

Do me a favor this go-around.

Overfeed it.

I want to see what that water does

coming out the back there.

Thank you!

I had him overfeed it to try to get

what I think would be 40 yards an hour

to see what the issues might be.

That's his biggest choke point.

And that's what's scaring him.

That's why he's slowing down on his feed.

See here, the amount of material coming out?

Oh, yeah.

That's really slow.

Morgan's overall production is half the speed it should be.

But any faster, pay spills out.

You can tell that they're screening really big.

Right now, there's a sluice box

that has nothing for fine gold recovery,

and that's an issue.

Want to pan it, Fred?

If the pan shows fine gold,

Morgan could be throwing thousands of dollars away.

How's that looking?

You know, there's something in there.

For sure. Little bitty guys.

It's not a ton, but, you know, again,

it was a tiny bit of material.

Every speck adds up.

You know, looking at his jar of gold there,

he doesn't have a lot of fine gold in that jar,

but that doesn't mean there's quite a bit

of fine gold on these claims either.

That's why we want to look at their gold

before we watch their plant run.

Last bucket!

Bueno.

There we go.

We did see a few things that we can definitely improve on.

Pull the box and get it all cleaned up and see what we got.

Yeah. See you in the morning.

Have a good night, guys.

Thanks for coming out.

Yeah.

Turn the water off for a sec,

and then we can push the rest of the material this way.

Okay, you should be able to wash the rest through.

If you're losing a big percentage of that fine gold,

you need help.

Honestly, he needs help with his cut,

and honestly, he needs help with his plant.

I think I see gold!

You can see it over here, yeah.

I got a gold piece!

Put it in the pan!

I've got good gold so far in this spot I'm in,

but when it comes to an end,

I can't guarantee there's going to be gold

anywhere else on these claims.

That could be the end.

If I'm not making gold, I'm not paying those bills.

We're just winging it.

Everything's riding on this.

I think Morgan's trying to make a good living for his family.

Morgan's a great guy, Fred,

but I'm nervous about how he's running things.

He's let the prospecting go,

and now he's got a real problem

because he's got nowhere to move to.

If he wants to succeed, he can't do all this on his own,

the prospecting and the mining.

How's it going?

It's good.

Freddy and Juan meet Morgan

to see the results from the four-hour test run.

Did you get all the gold cleaned up then?

We did last night.

Well, let's weigh it up, huh?

Yeah.

Morgan needs 2 1⁄2 ounces from this run

to hit his 200-ounce target.

Chunky stuff there, Fred.

It is.

Let's see what we got.

2.35.

2.35.

Yeah, it's not bad.

Not terrible, no.

But with roughly a month to go before the season ends,

this would leave Morgan over 50 ounces short.

Honestly, I'm a little nervous because I'm looking at it.

You know, we got a lot of course gold,

but we're really missing a lot of finds.

Yeah, I haven't been able to catch it.

I've tried.

Well, and this gold's easy to catch.

You can catch this gold behind, you know,

a piece of rebar in this loose box.

But that super-fine gold, that's a whole other story.

And that's what I've made my career on,

is recovering dust.

One of the important things is looking for more ground.

And you got a huge property, so, you know,

it might be a needle in a haystack.

I'm nervous about that.

We really need to find a new spot,

or there's no gold coming in,

and the bills don't get paid, and that's stressful.

We're limited on time, but we'll try to help you

however we can.

Well, we'll go put our heads together

and see what we come up with.

Yeah, okay.

We'll get back with you.

You know, two ounces is great,

but the reality of it is, it's all relative to your bills.

When you have excavators, plant, overhead with labor,

it doesn't go very far.

You know, what I'm thinking on that plant, Fred,

you know, and you're the one that brought it up,

you had them overfeed that shoot,

so we got that shoot coming in right here.

Well, right now, it has that little mouth

that goes inside the trommel.

Need to extend it.

I think that's gonna be one of the number one fixes,

because I think we could get him around 40 yards an hour

instead of the 25 just by doing that.

And what do you think about a side sluice?

I like it.

It's gonna be able to be set up for fine gold

and some coarse gold as well.

There's riffles right now that he has under the plant.

Yep.

So we need some undercarpets underneath that.

Everything we do, we're gonna have to do it up here

and then take it down there with a side-by-side

and weld it down there.

Mm-hmm.

Equally as important as this is looking at the ground.

He doesn't have a whole lot of idea where to go next.

He's got a lot of ground.

We're only here a week.

I'd like to look at some of these higher benches.

I could see going in, you know, some rounded river gravels up high.

So the river was there at one time.

Hey, Morgan.

How's it going, Morgan?

Hey, guys.

Good to see you.

Yeah.

Freddy, during the test run,

he actually had you overfeed the plant

because the reality is you need to run more.

When I did that, you know that feed chute

that comes off your hopper that goes into the trommel?

Yeah.

It's not in far enough,

and that's why that material's hitting there

and then bubbling back out.

We're gonna extend that chute further into the trommel.

We should get you from 25 yards an hour

to around 40 yards an hour.

What we need to do is work on your gold recovery as well.

So we're gonna put new carpets underneath your riffles,

but on top of that, at the end of the chute,

we're gonna do a new chute with a new sluice.

Fine gold sluice?

That's gonna tell you how much gold you have in your deposit.

So let's say it gives you an extra 10 ounces a year.

That's a big amount of money.

And then you got a big deposit out there,

but at least we can get some eyes on it.

You know, a lot of times a miner will get tunnel vision,

and, you know, they're just gotta run, gotta run, gotta run,

and you don't have time to prospect yourself.

No time.

You know, we're looking at about $8,000 in material.

That's because we're up here.

At home, it'd be $3,000.

And then we'd like 2 ounces apiece,

which pretty much just covers our expenses, our fuel.

There's no profit made in it.

2 ounces apiece, 4 ounces.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a lot of gold,

and having that plant down for a little bit of time

costs a lot as well.

Well, here's what we were thinking.

So we know you're in a bind, right?

So while we're prospecting, fabricating, run the plant.

The end of the month is coming,

and there's a lot of payments that gotta be made.

The gold Morgan finds must cover all his costs,

including weekly wages for his two-man crew.

This is what feeds your family.

Totally.

It's the only thing right now that I've got going on,

so it's important, and, you know, I think I want to go with it.

I trust in you guys, and I think you're going to change,

I think you're going to change my life here.

Okay, deal then.

We're just a couple hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.

You got about a 100-day mining season.

So one of the biggest things to help Morgan out here

is to increase his production by, say, 30%, 35%.

That adds another 33 days in a 100-day season

if we can get him up by a third.

Right now on the first run, he was running 20 to 25 yards an hour.

We'd like to get him to 35 to 40 yards an hour.

I think he's got a good head on his shoulders.

He's done a ton of work already, and give credit where credit is due.

But ultimately, if you're going to be a prosperous miner,

especially with a small crew like this, you have to wear many hats,

and he's going to have to learn that.

You have to constantly stay on top of it,

make sure that you're actually collecting gold,

prospecting as you're going and moving along,

because there's been a lot of miners that have a great first 5, 6 years

like Morgan has, and then they lose their shirts.

We've got a lot of ground here, sir.

I just want to make sure that I've got claims to mine into the future.

Deep in the Klondike region of the Yukon,

the existing cut on the Falken mine is about to run out,

so Freddy takes Morgan on a needle in a haystack gold hunt for fresh ground.

You've got to have a nice family.

Yeah, thank you.

They're everything.

I started gold mining and my family all at the same time.

Morgan's 288 claims lie within a 40-mile radius of gold rush legends

Tony Beetz and Parker Schnabel.

His 6,000-acre virgin property

stretches from a creek deep on the valley bottom

to bench deposits further up the valley.

I'm nervous about prospecting this.

I know there's going to be white channel there,

but is there enough to make a living there?

The Klondike's white channel is gravel deposited by ancient rivers

A high concentration of quartz gives the material a white color.

Since the 1896 gold rush,

white channel pay has produced $80 billion worth of gold.

Did you dig that hole?

Yeah, when we cut the road down there.

The road working has exposed deeper layers of gravel.

I like the look of this.

Yeah.

It's got that white channel look to it.

I'm going to bring in a friend, if that's okay with you,

that knows a heck of a lot more about the white channel deposits than I do.

Okay.

I'm a redneck geologist, but Jeff used to be the head geologist for the Yukon.

He knows this area better than anybody.

Taking some quick measurements for his main plant.

At the mine site, Juan begins work on Morgan's plant.

We're going to take that plant that was designed for 20, 25 yards an hour.

We're going to actually make it a plant that's going to be able to handle 40 yards an hour

and do it efficiently.

The more of that material that he runs, he'll be able to catch more fine gold.

On Morgan's plant, the feed system clogs,

which causes material to overflow and spill out.

Juan will bend a half-inch thick steel extension chute for the feeder

to allow increased amounts of material to enter the trommel drum.

Then, to trap every speck of fine gold, looped mats will be added to the rifts.

And as an extra security measure,

Juan will use whatever materials he has to make a 14-foot sluice

to try and catch the fine gold being lost.

I'm hoping to be able to get it all designed out of one sheet of steel

so we don't have a ton of waste.

Juan gets going on the build,

cutting out steel pieces ready for the wash plant's sluice.

One of the things that we've got to be careful with is,

we travel with as much material as we can handle,

but honestly, it's not a tremendous amount,

so we've got to use every piece sparingly.

We've also got the extension chute and distribution box to build,

so there's a lot to do.

How's it going, Jeff?

Good to see you.

Good to see you.

Hey, Morgan, I'm Jeff.

Nice to see you.

Out on the claim, local geologist Jeff Bond

arrives to help Freddy decode the land.

Here we go.

So, Freddy kind of got me oriented here.

You've got a tremendous amount of bench claims on here.

You've got some really nice grades.

It's generally like this yellow line on the map.

If we can find a piece of that pastry up on the bench,

you've got a potentially big deposit,

because that runs a long ways up the valley.

So that's reworked white channel left up on the bench?

Ideally, yeah.

White channels, it's your oldest gravel in the valley.

Any gold that's in your creek

has been reworked out of that white channel.

Over hundreds of thousands of years,

rivers cut through the ancient white channel pay street,

reconcentrating gold

and making even richer bench deposits

on the side of the valley.

You've already got a pit up there, so that's great

to start there and go deeper.

But until we test it, we won't really know.

First step, Freddy takes Jeff back to the gravel pit

that showed signs of possible white channel pay.

White channel, it's a very, very thick sequence.

You have to dig deep to get to the bedrock contact

to get to that pay street at the bottom.

Here we go, Jeff, first bucket.

See what's down there.

The Klondike is a unique area.

It's an ancient landscape.

It's been very, very geologically stable.

That means the landscape has not changed.

It's just been exposed to weathering by water,

gravity, and wind over a long period of time.

Then you get this really, really high-grade gold deposits

in the creek.

Yo!

Next one, give us some of that!

Thank you!

We're going to take a sample from the 25-foot level

and see if there's any color in it.

Well, let's have a look at it, huh, Jeff?

Yeah, let's get her down, see what he's got here.

No gold.

Nothing.

So this is going to be the start of it?

At the fixed site,

Juan is kicking off his first fabrication.

What I'm going to do, first every 2 inches,

just like that.

We're going to come and we're going to do a relief cut,

and what that relief cut's going to do, as I cut it,

we're going to cut it a little over half

of the way through this plate.

It's going to give us a place

where we can actually bend that plate.

Once we get it to the radius we need, we'll weld it,

and then that way it holds that shape, that form.

This extension, although it seems small,

really it's going to be a big fix.

On Morgan's plan, material isn't falling far enough forward

into the trommel, causing it to back up and fall out.

By making multiple relief cuts

across a half-inch thick steel plate,

Juan will be able to bend an extension chute

that should bridge the gap into Morgan's feeder.

That's going to allow us to be able

to follow the contour of the chute, extend it,

and that way it's like an additional piece

with the same radius.

Now we've got it all welded back together,

Freddy's going to get it installed.

More material means more gold.

At the end of the day, that means more profit.

See where he's at now?

Back out at the road-building pit,

Morgan has now dug down 30 feet.