Original subtitles

Come on, dude. Don't do this.

Dother.

Pick it up.

Everybody's waiting.

Get it.

Get the toy.

Get the toy.

Get in.

All right, let's go.

Because our license is expiring, we have a very real deadline here where this

all has to be done.

We got started flusing early, and that's super important this year. Like, it's a

big year of flusing, more than ever before.

The big push right now is keep plants running and the stripping crew stay out

ahead of them.

Every year we're pushing it, but this year there's no wiggle room in it. So we

can't afford anything that keeps it down for too long.

Let's get some gold.

You know, we've been making really good progress with the keyhole cut.

Right now, while I'm loading trucks, Justin's up running the wash plant while

Tyson's trying to send some pay dirt up to Big Red so we can keep it running.

Jeff, get in.

You know, we have a lot of ground to go through this year.

Really not that much time.

It's twice the amount of ground we mined last year and right now we only have

one wash plant running and it's probably going to stay that way for quite some

time.

Frozen shit.

This is not good running into permafrost here in the cut that we want to be

sleuths in.

The only thing we can do is send the pay to Big Red and hopefully it thaws

before Big Red runs out of pay.

Big Red, she's hungry.

Rosentainer doesn't really mesh well with Big Red. They don't get along very

well together.

I see some frozen chunks that stay up by the plant.

It sounds like Justin and Tyson are having a real hard time with frozen

material. It's just been a really cold spring, and it's bound to come with

issues.

Get out and stretch your leg.

I was just coming to talk to you about this exact problem.

It's called permafrost for a reason, right? Because it's permanently frozen.

I mean, it would help us a lot if it was more than like 35 degrees for at least

like four hours.

We need some warm weather.

Trying to keep up with stripping and sluicing at the same time. And that's

problem is that we're using a lot of our manpower right now to just try to keep

the plant fed. I really feel like we should shut the plant down.

and just focus on thaw and stripping.

But the thing is, with this much area, if we shut the plant down, I don't know

if we'll be able to get through it all by the end of the year. But we're just

going to fight it all season. We don't put our foot on the brakes with the

sleuthing and focus on our stripping, you know?

We're never going to get to the point where we're just digging nice, clean,

thawed pay.

So let's go ahead and just shut it down.

It's a gamble that we're just going to have to take.

We'll fire back up when the sun decides that it's summertime and make the best

use to everybody that we free up.

Well, I'll go up there and shut it down now, and we'll just start working on

getting everything taken care of down here.

All right. Thanks, Mitch. Yep.

So it's not really something that I like to do. Our rule is always that, like,

once we start sluicing, we are running 24 -7. But given the price of fuel and

where things are at, we're much better off shutting it down for a while.

really just hoping the weather warms up for us so we can get this ground thawing

out because right now we're not making any money. We're just spending it.

It's ice.

As long as there's no rocks in here, I'll be okay.

We're using our pump, spraying water onto this ice to melt it faster.

Everything we've done to this point really hasn't done much to dense it.

We're to wait for this to melt.

It may not even melt the whole year.

You know, I promised my guys a 500 -ounce season. We need to be mining now.

Hey,

Brady.

Yeah, I got a map of our claims here.

Let's go see if we can put a mining plan together for the season.

I think if we have any shot at getting to our

farm ground season goal, we've got to find some good ground and quit.

So last year we dipped there and ran about 20 ,000 yards, average 1 .5

ounces. And I'm thinking it was getting better down here because there's two

creeks that joined.

So I think for our plan this year, we should look at spots where creeks join

together.

There is another one just downstream here that looks like it's coming in.

So we should poke around and... Take the excavator, poke some holes?

Yeah, do some toning.

Yeah, I like to hunt that.

Okay, well, let's go do our little treasure hunt.

With the goal that we're shooting for this year, we need a lot of ground, a

of area.

We got bills to pay.

We got to help our family out so we don't find anything.

We might as well go home.

What do you think?

We're starting to get wide here. Yeah. So the water would have slowed down, and

if it carried gold, it would have just deposited.

So let's dig a hole right in this ground here.

Throw that over, get me the gravel, and I'll pound it. All right, sounds good.

It's kind of do or die for not even our season, but for our family.

Okay, Brady, I'm going to get in that hole and drop some gravel here. All

sounds good.

We got a lot riding on this time. We need to see some serious gold.

If we think we're getting 500 ounces, this has to be the time to do it.

Look at this.

One, two, three.

That's pretty good right there. Look at how big these things are.

Six, seven.

There's probably 15 colors in this time.

Yeah. Wow.

If this pond represents this whole claim, we've got to get a better view.

There's so much ground here to move, this is insane.

This is what we need to get to our 500 -ounce season goal, right here.

A man of 5 pounds like this, this is golden acres.

Brady, this is something we're going to have to write home about.

That's going to be stoked.

We just need to get down here. We've got to get here.

The fuel prices, we definitely don't want to haul from down here, out in

For us to even think about getting it there, we can't pull it on the mud

it'll just get stuck.

Can't drag it through the creek.

Building a road down here would cost 50 grand in fuel.

Kick doesn't look hot.

If we can't figure anything out, our season's over before we started, and we

might as well pack our campers up and go home.

What we are going to do is, because it's never good just to have one cut and

have all your eggs in one basket.

If you have two cuts, our chances for the 5 ,000 ounces, you know, are just

double, right there.

while I was drinking. Didn't work quite so well.

You dink.

We're throwing everything we can to get all this dirt moved before it becomes

too much of a pain in the ass to move the trucks and we're going to end up

having to do more expensive ground.

We're going to have to hurry up with everything to stay ahead of the truck

trucks and excavators.

Move, man.

Move.

You're way too close to me.

There's always the beginning of the year hiccups. That always happens.

You know, if it didn't happen, I mean, it wouldn't be gold mining.

What's going on here?

Mike, do you copy?

What's wrong with that dozer?

I've got a leak.

Oh, me.

Kevin, do you copy Kevin?

Go for Kevin.

Hey, Kevin, the D10L is leaking, so I'm going to send him down to the lower

yard. You want mine checking it out for me, please?

Be right back.

Okay, thank you.

We really can't do this right now. We just need to get this thing fixed as

as possible and then start ripping again.

V10 down. I have a lot less ability to get stuff done as fast as I want.

Very, very, very, very problematic.

We've had to shut the plant down, and we're just super short -handed. And one

our best dozer operators is sat in the office and wouldn't eat up.

Hey, Bose.

You super busy?

A little, yeah.

Can't you tell? Yeah, I know. We're having a pretty rough time out in the

with Froth and just fighting things down there.

I was wondering if you can come out of retirement for us for a little bit. You

have probably more experience in a dozer than just about anybody on this mine

site. So I was hoping to try to use some of your expertise out there.

Okay. Is that okay?

Do you know how long I'll be out there for? Like how many days?

Probably a week.

Okay.

That's fine. Yeah, I can do that for you.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

All right, now we're just throwing everybody in the sand at these pots to

them. caught up and ready to go and because like where we're at right now

there's you know 12 feet of gravel that needs to block

we've

got to do this as fast as we can here to get this ground exposed this is what

it's going to take i mean everybody's got to step up because we just have too

much ground to get through if we don't have everybody pitching in

this gold mining gets in your veins it's in your blood

i

started operating

my dad was keeping me on equipment when i was about 12 or 14 and then four

years ago i got this opportunity to come and work for parker and i jumped on it

because i love

Some of this material was permafrost, and that stuff to rip is

a real challenge.

It's expensive. It's hard on the equipment. I am in a tough spot right

trying to get this done, but it'll come. We'll get her.

Holy.

Come on.

That doesn't seem to be one to come up.

Whoa. What the heck?

What? Oh, my God.

What the hell is this?

Are you kidding me?

The hole is lifted off the blade.

This is not what we need for another machine to be down.

We get nowhere.

Nowhere today.

Hey, Jordan, you got a copy?

You're not going to believe it. The blade's peeling up. Just come and get

Thank you.

This is really thin, and it wore the welds off, so you have to take all these

pieces off and then put the new pieces in that we have.

What's going on, man? Why are you pulling that thing out of here?

The skin peeling right off.

Obviously, that just grabbed the bottom and peeled it up.

Oh, no way.

It's crazy how abrasive that stuff is to wear the steel down that high. Yeah,

didn't think it was going to go away that quick.

Well, yeah, the sooner we can get her back in action, the better off we're

to be. Yeah, kind of timing, but... Yeah, couldn't be any worse.

We spent a lot of money here.

Even known as one of the best pass hitters that we've got, so at a time

this, her skills are needed.

This is... Boys, they're asking for this.

They've got a lot of frozen ground.

Fig Red's down right now.

Our blade skins are ripping apart.

Dan's giving us a hand here. He's cutting everything apart.

We'll get the new skin put on here, and then this D10 can go back to pushing

some mud, and we can keep opening up ground.

We're getting this done as fast as we can. We need this machine running.

It'll be nice to get this thing back out in the cut and ripping some dirt.

Right on. Yeah, she's solid.

Sweet. We'll get the truck ready and get this thing down there.

Mitch, you got a copy?

Go for Mitch.

Blade 6 is back in business.

Yeah! Let's do it.

So I got this done, and now we can get back on track and try to get Big Red

fired up, and we are running out of time.

As soon as we have an update, we're going to fire Big Red up. We can get

of it a little bit. Hopefully Mother Nature works with us. We can get this

rolling again.

The Yukon and Mother Nature working with us don't belong in the same sentence.

We've been stockpiling pay dirt ever since we shut the plant down.

You know, the decision to shut down Big Red this week, definitely something I'm

not a huge fan of, but Parker made the decision to focus on stripping ground.

We can definitely use this warm weather that we are getting today here to help

some of this pay fall out.

Yeah, it looks good.

We've definitely got enough dirt to fire the watch plant back up.

Well, man, you know, at least it's not snowing today, so.

Right on.

Hey, Justin, you got a copy?

Go ahead.

Hey, man, we're going to fire this thing back up. Let's get back to Washington

Rocks here.

Sure thing, Mitch. Showtime. Let's go. Let's feed this piece.

You want to do the honors, Mitch? Let's do it, man. Here we go.

Give it, Justin.

Let's do it.

There it is. Big red bat running.

Hopefully, we got a lot of gold in that fleece box at the end of the week here.

No, originally we were going to move the plant.

Turns out it's a bit more challenging than we anticipated.

At the rate we're going, we're not going to make a goal, and one thing, we're

going to lose it, Fred. So I ain't losing.

But we're going to do.

You know, we've invested enough just getting up here and getting started all

repairs, doing the transmission on the dozer, the torque.

You know, we need to try something.

Well, what are we going to do then?

Why don't we test up top, upstream of it?

Like just haul a couple hundred yards or something? Yeah, they do 200 yards.

If we have enough up there, then see if we can get some money from there to go

down to Golden Acres.

I like it.

It's a shot in the dark, but it's worth a shot. I think we're here.

We're a team, guys.

We don't give up.

Then let's give it a go. We'll get dirt double running. We'll wash 200 yards.

We'll see how much gold's there.

Yeah, guys, let's do it.

Kick some ass, guys.

Hell yeah.

Pretty exciting.

You know, we're going to start running our first bit of dirt this season.

I'm going to take the top gravels off.

And we're going to, let's go 10 feet deep. We'll take the bottom five.

So then we're not diluting our facing.

Okay, this is going to be our first little test here.

Let's get into dirt double.

Yeah, I like the sounds of that.

It feels good to be back in the machine.

I'm not usually rock truck, but I don't mind running these things. They are fun.

It beats the hell out of fixing, I can tell you that.

The gravel looks good, but we tried an upper bench last year downstream, and it

didn't pay worth it.

I'm hoping that's not the case here.

Yeah, I'm definitely depending on this. If this doesn't pan out like how I want

it, I don't know what's next.

Dirt devil looks good, eh? Yeah, it's good to be down here.

Just she's got a little rust on her and probably should throw some rocks and

water in there soon and make her sparkle.

We're going to run our 200 -yard test here, and we'll figure out if we can

money at it or not.

Okay, well, let's do it, guys. Let's go fire her up. Do it.

Alright boys, this is it.

This is the first start to turtle of the season, so let's start her up and spin

her over.

She'll go. She'll go.

There she goes.

Okay, feed her.

Yeah, that's looking good, Warren.

Can't afford it.

I don't know what motivates me more, seeing him loose or just having a really

big task over there on our claim, but right now this is kind of pissing me

The ice we have over there and all the problems we have, he could be a month

ahead of us right now.

We're still going to beat his ass.

You know what I'm saying?

We're still going to beat his ass.

Let's quit moping and let's get back to work.

Use this as fuel.

What do you think? Is it going to be good?

I think it's going to be good, Mark.

the ass having only one cat rip.

Hopefully, my brother who fixed it in the detent gets it done quick so I can

that dozer back in here to give me a hand and finish all this ripping.

I am somewhat falling behind on that.

Something's up with the 10L, so I'm going to go check in with cousin Mike

see what it is.

Watch your brake.

Cylinder here.

I looked behind me and I saw oil dripping out really quick.

Inside the cylinder, the rod piece coming out, there's a seal around that.

that is, well, looks like I'm stuck doing a cylinder swap.

And of course, this happens at the best time where, you know, we really need it.

We got to get this machine, the D10L, back up and running ASAP.

So, I'm going to go find so I can find a cylinder or two.

Hey, Cody, got a copy, Cody?

We have a D10 hydraulic leak, so we need to leave a cylinder.

And you know where that's hiding?

We come to the front of our cylinder. We have our ram here. I'm going to keep

the oil on the inside of this here seal.

And right here you can see it's going to hold.

It's not going to hold the oil in.

That's what holds in all the pressure.

Meaning when you engage the hydraulics and that isn't working, you can get like

a 20 foot spray.

It's important to not run it when it's doing that.

This will be the new one to go in.

This one was something I believe we picked up in D .C. It could be as much

years ago. We never tested any of these either.

For all we know, these cylinders are going to leak as well.

This is not quite level. That's okay. I can work with that.

Dang it!

Can I have an entire CPU play?

Does this one work?

Dang it!

Can I get you on this side? Tell me how lined up I am.

Maybe like two millimeters up.

Oh, like butter.

Like

if

one thing we're good at, it's making work with what we've got.

She's in?

Yeah. Well, let me put the lines on.

Well, I'm going to get Mike out of the way, so to speak.

Mike's going to lift the ripper up, put the back and forth, force the air out,

see if it's going to fail on us or not, and we'll go from there.

This is the moment of truth.

Let's see what she does.

Hold things all the way up.

Just putting it under a bit of load.

It's not going to one side, which is good. Both sides must be activating.

That all looks good.

How's that going?

Riding. Hopefully this one stands up, huh? Oh, yeah.

All this time, the dozer was down. Mike was by himself, and we caught the 11.

We really need two dozers in there to do ripping.

Yeah, he'll be happy to come back.

If this doesn't pay out, I think we're running out of options. I don't know

else we got.

We need to get to Golden Acres, and we need to find something to fund getting

there.

We'd like to see three -quarters of an ounce per hundred.

Oh, my gut's telling me it's not bad. My gut's telling me I shouldn't be too

worried.

There's gold in there.

Brady, we're seeing gold after the first pail, so that's a star.

Yeah, it's coming.

It's looking up.

It's hard to see, but you can see gold right in these pockets here.

There's a few flakes there, hey? Yeah, there's some gold there, that's for

Okay, boys, this is the moment of truth.

Let's see what we got. Let's put it on the scale and see what it tells us.

0 .3 of an ounce.

And we needed not even a half ounce.

It kind of looked like an ounce. It did, yeah. Closer to an ounce.

Well,

we know that's not going to work, is it?

Nope.

Kind of a kick in the neck.

That's not going to work for the season, so... 200 yards for 0 .3 of an

ounce?

Tough.

Well... Back to the drawing board.

Let's go see what we can figure out.

Yep. Get at her.

We need to pay the bills and help our family out with the debt back home.

So just trying to think on what we can do or how we can make some money this

season.

Kind of just lost for words.

We need to get as much stripping done as we can.

We're trying to open up ground as quickly as possible.

It's kind of just all hands on deck right now, and we're all just trying to

together in this chaos.

Hey, Mike,

do you copy?

I think we're hitting pay here in a blue cut.

You still look ugly.

No, it runs in a family.

Can't deny that.

Is that action pay?

Looks like it.

It does, too.

Actually, that is pay. From there, yeah.

That is pay.

Like you see over here, lots and lots of quartz, big quartz.

Like, look at that. That's just, look at all that rock.

That's how you tell that to stay.

I want to start sluicing. I want to start sluicing.

What's up, baby?

Oh, not everybody.

How did we do this week?

Not too bad. It's at least seven days, more or less.

I think we did okay.

Ran pretty steady.

I mean, we got that gold out of the gold cut, and then we reached pay in the

blue cut, so we're pretty much ready to roll and keep on going, isn't it?

Anyway, we produced some gold that looks good. I suggest we weigh some up and

see what we got.

Everybody ready? Yep. Good. And go.

100, 110, 120, 130, 140, 150, 160,

170, 180,

190,

202 .3.

And if that's not bad for the second weight, then I mean for top gravels,

because I'm going to have enough troubles to keep that trommel running.

with both cuts being broken.

So they're big enough, so hopefully by working back and forth, we can keep on

running pretty soon, 24 hours a day, because 5 ,000 ounces is a long ways

I would wrap it up and get back out there, so I can think of a place to

it, how's that?

No. Bye, guys.

Hey, Mitchell.

How you doing, man?

Oh, not too bad.

What up, what up?

So we had a short run. Obviously, we spent some time with Big Red down.

But, I mean, we did get some thawed pay dirt up to the plant.

Yep. We got it through it.

How much gold was in it?

All right, Dumit, let's see this. Come on.

Short week. Short week.

Can we break 100?

Oh, this will be tight.

40, 50, 60, 80, 100, 120, 130,

140, 150, 163 .5.

Not bad for a short week. No.

For the week, we got to 163 .5, and the season total is 525 .65.

Not bad.

When you look at how early we started, we knew we were going to fight for us.

I'm not surprised we had to shut the plant down, but still don't like it,

because with how much dirt we have to get through, we need that thing running

every day we can.

So I think, by the way, things going, you better order the cold weather gear.

Yeah. And be here late.

Loose until November, Mitch. Oh, dude, I'm getting my Christmas tree ornament

set up. Yeah.

Send me a text on how you did, will you?

Cheers. Cheers.

Thanks, Chris.

Yep. Later. See you, Dumit.

Okay.

No, everybody's doing good.

Equipment's staying together for the most part.

Gold's still coming in.

It's a little sad when you can pull in like a quarter million dollars worth of

gold and still not make money, though.