Original subtitles

I don't believe anything about gold right now.

I'm not finding any,

and the value of it's plummeting.

So it's kind of a bad time to be a gold miner.

Six weeks in,

Parker Schnabel's strategy is failing.

At the start of the season, with gold at $5,000 an ounce,

Parker decided to run low-grade pay he'd normally discard.

But with gold prices plunging every week,

he's struggling to keep his head above water.

You know, we've had a pretty start

to the season from a gold standpoint.

It doesn't matter how much rocks you wash

if they don't have any gold in them.

He's already spent $20 million on the operation,

while only bringing in $5 million in gold.

But Parker has a plan to turn things around,

going after the ground he believes

has the best chance of delivering big gold.

So now we're focused on Dominion.

We're opening up the Road Cut.

In 2023, when we bought the property,

you know, we were laying out how we're going to mine it,

and it's richer the further across the valley you get.

At the north end of Parker's Dominion claim

lies the heart of his operation.

Two years ago, he mined the Long Cut,

delivering 2,500 ounces.

Last season, he moved into the Golden Mile,

producing 4,500 ounces.

Now, Parker's targeting his richest ground yet,

the 78-acre Road Cut,

where drill results point to 6,000 ounces of gold

worth more than $26 million.

Road Cut, it's a big one. So we're shutting Big Red down.

We have a new plant, Phil, showing up.

I'm excited for the new plant.

Once that thing fires up,

it's got a massive cut to get through.

Parker's banking on his new million-dollar wash plant,

Phil, to power through the Road Cut.

Capable of running almost twice as fast as Big Red,

it should supercharge gold production.

Now, it's on foreman Tyson Lee to get it built and sluicing.

We've got to get the Road Cut ready for the new wash plant.

We won't get to 13,000 ounces.

We won't get to beat Tony Beets without Phil.

So we've got to get Phil up and running.

That's priority number one.

Phil is here finally, so now it's time to start

getting it all assembled.

Usually, the wash plant manufacturers

help with the build.

But today, Parker's mechanics are flying solo.

One thing we got to be very careful of is that this thing

is not heavy enough to hurt you.

It's heavy enough to kill you.

I'm just rigged up on the heavy end of the plant here

so that the loader and the zoom boom can lift the front.

We're going to set it on a couple blocks.

The four-and-a-half ton pontoons are essential

for dragging the wash plant around the claim.

I'm not sure which end goes where.

One's shorter than the other.

I would think the longer end would be on the back

with the pre-wash.

Yeah, maybe it goes to the front?

Yeah, I don't know.

We're just about to set the pontoons underneath

and pin them.

We're just not sure which direction they go,

because usually Jeff from Macon's here when we do it,

and so we don't have our expertise.

We just are looking at and hoping

it goes together right.

Which side has more length, the conveyor side

or the pre-wash side?

The jury's out right now.

I had phone call in to Jeff

and yeah, long end towards the conveyor.

Long end towards the conveyor. Spin around.

This one can go on the other side.

OK, and start cranking left, yeah.

Curl up a little bit.

There.

- Nice. - There's one pin.

There, we're good.

That's half the stress load gone.

You get the other one under there, then it's a lot safer.

Yeah, keep coming.

We're pretty close right there.

Push ahead a little bit.

Holy.

Wait, hang on a minute.

You're good to go down, yeah.

How are we looking there?

I think I can get that.

OK, so I've got to pry it forward, backward.

There you go.

OK, we're done.

Next, the pre-wash and sluice runs.

That's getting pretty close there.

Come my way, yeah.

Hold her there.

Sluice runs are on.

We're just waiting on the final piece now.

Big conveyor.

I need your hammer.

This was my great-grandfather's,

and he built our first house with it.

This is a very delicate piece.

It's big, and I just want to get it in place

without something happening here.

Think Steve's got a stick in, and then you can rotate

in to finish.

- That's good. - Right there.

You guys got her put together?

We have the cable hooked up to the pre-wash end.

We'll hook it up to the excavator,

then we'll drag it.

We just want to be careful and make sure

we're not damaging it.

The sluice runs sit pretty low on it.

OK, you can pull.

To get the 45-ton wash plant onto its new pad

in the Road Cut,

Tyson needs to first maneuver it up a narrow track.

You want to stay to your left there, Tyson.

Yeah, I just got this pile of rock here

I'm trying to avoid, too.

I'm going to thread the needle here.

Gotcha.

Just want to make sure it's not going to get

hung up on anything.

It's getting quite close up here, Tyson.

Just got to make sure to keep it to your left.

Should be good.

We've made it through the narrows here.

We're on the home stretch up the hill

and on the new pad for Phil.

After shutting down Big Red...

Get the feed bin out of here,

the radial stacker, move that down on to the Road Cut,

and marry those up with Phil.

Yes! Textbook.

Right now, we got Phil on the top of the wash plant pad.

That should work, I think.

Now, just the last two pieces of the puzzle to fit.

The radial stacker.

That looks pretty good from my perspective.

And the hopper feeder.

Perfect, we'll call that the happy spot.

Shaker going up there, Alec?

Yeah, shaker's shaking.

Here we go.

All righty, India, go ahead and throw in the first scoop.

Copy that, I'm on it.

All right, here we go.

It's the moment we've all been waiting for.

You know, it feels good to be sluicing

up here in the Road Cut.

Should be the best gold we've ever seen

here on Dominion.

So we'll find out.

Unlike Parker, the king of the Klondike, Tony Beets,

is on a hot streak with his two wash plants in the Midas Cut

bringing in big gold.

After a late start, last week Tony banked

a blockbuster 800 ounces

worth over $3.5 million,

giving him a 1,600-ounce total.

To hit his season goal, Tony now needs to keep hauling

in 800 ounces every week.

At the Midas Cut,

Tony's younger brother Nick has hit bedrock.

What I'm digging now, it's all

mostly clay with a little bit of bedrock.

It's very important to see how deep you go

and if there is anything in it.

We're trying to find out if there's some gold in there.

Then I know if I have to go deeper, yes or no.

No, no.

Holy.

That's a nice pan, yeah.

Over millennia, gold sinks through mud and gravel

until it hits solid bedrock.

The richest paystreaks are often found right above

this impenetrable layer.

But water can seep into hairline cracks and over time

freeze and expand, causing fractures

that fill with gold.

Tony believes the jagged bedrock in the Midas Cut

could be hiding a bonanza.

Yeah, I can do that.

Now we can dig deeper

because there's plenty of gold left there.

It's very important that we get every last flake out of there.

Overseeing both wash plants

is Nick's second-in-command, Andrew Moran.

I want to keep the plants going for as long as I can,

make a good impression, and then we make some money.

His fellow Irishman, Adam Wall,

is feeding Find-A-Lot.

We got some pay material

coming from the Midas Cut here now.

It's a bit rocky, but we're just doing our best.

It's only my first season driving an excavator,

so I have to keep me eyes and ears open at all times.

Make sure that nothing goes wrong.

If I just looked at me right over here,

we can see Parker running Rocksand.

It's a bit mad, she's probably less than a mile away,

but we're all trying to get the gold out of the ground.

That didn't sound good.

Tony Beets' wash plant, Find-A-Lot, is shut down

after the conveyor stopped running.

I got damage over here with this.

The conveyor. It's no good.

Big rocks?

I don't really know.

While Len rewires the electrics,

Tony clears the mountain of rocks

away from the hopper.

I'm feeling a little bit.

Like I'm a little bit disappointed in myself

for not noticing that earlier.

Yeah, Tony's not happy.

I definitely have to prove that I can...

watch everything that's going on and make sure I keep

everybody in order and make sure

like this doesn't happen again.

Hopefully, once we fire up the wash plants and I make him

some money again, he'll be in a better mood.

Finally firing up after a small little mishap,

but we're all good.

The five-hour shutdown has cost Tony

over $65,000 in gold production.

Now, the crew need to step up to deliver.

Tony's 800-ounce-a-week target.

I think, when it comes down to it, the bit of Irish accent

and the Dutch accent don't seem to communicate

too well at times.

It's only words at the end of the day, you know.

It's not going to kill you.

Yeah, I'm really happy.

You know, the guys have done a lot of work.

They've got the wash plant up and running,

and then we're tearing through a pile of dirt.

Six weeks into his first season in placer mining,

former hard rock miner Greg Gibson is finally

off to the races.

Last week, his Trail Hill foreman, Buzz Legault,

got wash plant HotBox,

sluicing the top layer of white channel pay.

But so far, Buzz has delivered just three ounces

towards Greg's 500-ounce goal.

There's just so many hurdles that are going to jump up in

front of us, because we come up here not knowing what

we're doing in placer.

As much as I've got a 500-ounce target,

we have to learn chasing the gold.

So you know what?

We're driving deeper.

Greg's longtime hard rock mining buddy, Tyler Culhane,

is in the cut, digging deeper into the white channel pay.

We're on the lower bench and we're looking for

the foot wall contact,

the white channel with the bedrock.

From our understanding of the area, the juiciest part of

the white channel with gold would be within 20 feet

of the bedrock.

Whoa, baby.

There's an old tunnel. I wonder what's in there.

OK, well, I found an old drift here,

and you wanna come up and have a look?

What do you got going on there?

Wow!

Is that ever cool?

Yeah, she goes a long ways.

Wow!

They didn't do that because there is no gold.

Tyler has unearthed an old drift mine shaft.

During the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 19th century,

old-timers would dig into the hillside, opening up

horizontal tunnels in order to chase gold-rich veins.

They're not doing that much work for nothing.

- No. - That's crazy.

It is.

What's that black?

I don't know.

I'm wondering what you think of it.

See if you can get a good bucket of that stuff

and just dump it over there. We can play with it.

- All right. - -I want to see what that is.

- Yeah, sounds good. - OK, bud.

There's no way that's bedrock.

Not a chance. This is just some kind of

decomposed schist. Look at it.

Look at the graphite.

- Full of graphite. - Just full of graphite.

What are you thinking?

Fault?

Black fault?

It'll be interesting to see how deep it is.

I wanna run some of this.

Let's poke around, see how deep it is, see if we get

- to bedrock underneath it. - Yeah, for sure.

Interesting.

I wouldn't have expected to find this up here.

I've seen it underground, but more of a fault.

But yeah, if there's gold in it, we might be onto something.

Kind of cool.

Greg has mined graphite-rich schist as a hard-rock miner

and thinks this black material could also contain gold.

300 million years ago, oceanic dead plants and animals

created a carbon-rich mud buried deep beneath the earth.

Over millennia, extreme heat and pressure transformed

that organic matter into graphite.

Greg believes that graphite acted like a sponge for gold,

creating a rich layer of black schist.

And a fault has pushed the gold-bearing rock

towards the surface.

If Greg's right, there could be a fortune

locked inside the black schist.

Now he and Buzz are putting the theory to the test,

running samples through a high banker.

It's just a mini sluice.

We decided to go right to the bottom, right where we've

hit bedrock, and we're just going to work our way up in

three-foot sections. This is the very bottom.

Buzzard, get your pen.

That a boy, dump it in the lake.

Really?

That's good. That's good, good.

OK, sample two.

And there's gold.

This is the third one, top of the block.

If there's gold in this, it just means

there's a lot larger mining area.

You were on a picnic with Ness and Kevin.

You're into a banquet now.

With gold in every pan, Greg now wants Buzz to run

a bulk sample of the black schist.

It's different material. It's clumpy, it's sticky.

Gold sticks to graphite.

I think Buzz is going to have his work cut out just trying to

figure out how to process it without losing a lot of gold.

He'll figure it out. We'll get it done.

In the Midas Cut, Tony's betting that sluicing

chunky bedrock will deliver the big gold he needs to hit

his 800-ounce-a-week target.

And it's on Beets veteran, Len Hoekstra,

to keep both wash plants running.

I don't like the sound of that.

The chunky bedrock is causing havoc.

Big rocks are flying off Find-A-Lot's conveyor,

smashing into the spray bars, knocking the nozzles,

and snapping them off.

To prevent further damage, Len gets mechanic.

Corrie Young to build a rubber guard.

Big rocks are hitting the spray bar, so we have

to make a rock guard.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, I have to figure out how it works.

All right.

Yeah, I will.

To install the guard, Nick joins in and gets to play

in Tony's brand-new toy.

Usually found working in scrap yards,

the 28-ton material handler can lift up to 12 tons.

And with a cab that rises 16 feet off the ground,

it allows the operator to be level with the action.

[horn honks.

What are you trying to do, lift the cab?

- Yeah. - Got to be a button for that, right?

All kinds of buttons on this.

Len reading the instructions.

All right, it's the first time we use it,

so we have to read the operator's manual.

It doesn't fill me with confidence if he's reading

the instructions when we're trying to put something in.

I'm just playing, OK?

Don't interrupt me because that might go all wrong.

There we go!

Off to the moon!

Back to business.

We'll install this gadget and then we'll see if it works.

- All right. - You want it out all the way?

Yeah, last pinhole.

With the cab all the way up, I have a direct look at

the guys that are working over there.

Come down a bit.

I'm good, have to swing it a little bit.

Yeah, lift it a little bit.

- Yeah, yeah. - There we go.

How about that? Yeah, there we go.

- I think we should try it. - Give her a go.

Yeah, hopefully my idea is gonna work.

And let's see, the main thing is,

what are the big rocks doing?

What I think it is already...

He can't get down.

Are you stuck, Nick? Are you stuck?

Nick is all about go, go, go, go, but he's not

very go, go, go now. He's stop, stop, stop, stop.

There he goes.

OK, we'll start her up, I guess.

- Have a look at it, please. - Yeah.

Fingers crossed.

I hope it's gonna work.

We got water there?

Everything is still in place.

I'm pretty happy with it, and I think

we solved the problem.

Making money again washing rocks.

Perfect.

This wash plant, boy, do we need it.

We need to be washing these rocks

and getting the gold coming in.

At the Road Cut, Parker's brand-new wash plant,

Phil, is running ground that he hopes will turn

his season around.

He's definitely chewing through it pretty fast here,

so yeah, let's get to it.

The promise of gold here is better than anything

he's mined in Dominion.

We're looking good up here, Liam.

You shouldn't have to hang out down there.

What's going on here?

Both ends are leaking.

That one's dripping too. It's too much sag.

Yeah, it's not good.

Yo, Alec.

Come take a look.

Oh, did our whole plant come down?

Yeah, so we got to lift the plant.

Our plant settled quite a bit. See this break here?

The sluices aren't level right now and they're hanging down.

And we're going to re-level the plant.

Phil must be perfectly level to catch gold.

With hydraulic legs under each corner,

it should be a simple fix.

It's coming back down.

Liam, our whole plant's sagging on the hydraulics.

Wash plant won't stay level when you jack it up.

It means our wash plant isn't sitting high enough

and we're losing gold as it's flowing out the midsection here.

So let's jack up the front.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hang on!

Shut it down.

We're having to shut the plant down.

Right now, our plant's fallen out of level,

and we're just trying to shim it up with wood.

At the Road Cut,

Parker's brand-new wash plant is shut down.

We're gonna need to block it.

Wash plant Phil sits on four hydraulic legs,

each one designed to level up the plant.

But the hydraulics are failing.

Every time a leg is raised, it sinks back down.

As the plant sags, the sluice runs drop to

the ground, fold at the joints, and start spilling water,

pay dirt, and gold.

Tyson's quick bush fix is to prop up

the million-dollar plant with wooden blocks,

leveling the plant to get back on the gold.

Now let's check it back to front.

It's pretty late in the day.

Like, night shift will be showing up here soon.

Come up with it, Tyson.

Down!

You clear, Alec?

Yeah. Down.

1.3, 1.2... That's good.

Let's get it level, side to side.

It's like playing Jenga.

Just a different day in the office here.

Can you try coming down?

How's our side to side, look, Liam?

Zero point...

zero side to side.

We got zero!

Fire it up!

Let's get sluicing!

- Nice work. - Yeah.

We're sluicing again.

I'm glad she's running.

He.

It, them, they.

The McCracken.

So do you think this stuff's gonna break

- our half-ounce-an-hour curse? - I hope so.

Thanks, man.

Phil's a nice plant. It looks good up there.

It can sit on some wood for a few days

until we can get it fixed.

You know, the Road Cut is supposed to have

6,000 ounces of gold in it.

I'll believe it when I see it.

You know, we hit that old tunnel with this black

graphitey material, and it panned out pretty good.

So, what we have to figure out is, how do we best handle

the black muck?

It's sticky, and when you've got graphite and gold,

it makes it very difficult because the gold wants to stick

to the graphite, so it becomes a big exercise of how do

we separate that gold from the graphite.

Greg's foreman Buzz Legault thinks he has the answer.

He's borrowed a small test trommel that he believes

is the best tool for extracting gold from black schist.

Buzz will feed the graphite-rich black schist

into the rotating trommel, where it slams inside the drum.

As it turns, baffles lift up the material before dropping it

back down again and again.

The constant pounding should break apart the graphite,

freeing the gold trapped inside.

Buzz is shutting down HotBox and sacrificing bringing in

white channel gold so that he can run a 20-yard test

of the black schist.

As well as testing the black schist, Buzz and his crew spent

six days running white channel pay through HotBox.

Are you a hero or are you a zero?

OK, so when we ran our white channel test, we were just

under the ounce per hundred, right?

Ready?

Greg wants to see 30 ounces.

1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11,

18, 19, 20, 25, 27, 28,

30, 32, 34, 35.

35.465.

Worth $150,000.

This is insane.

This is better than the ounce per hundred.

This is pretty good for my first jump

into placer mining,

You know how long it'd take you to get that

in a hard-rock situation?

From the time you drilled your hole until the time

you built your mine,

10, 12 years? To me, this is bananas.

OK, so that's our channel. What about the black stuff?

OK, you ready?

Twenty yards.

That's two ounces a 100.

Holy bald-headed Moses, buddy.

That blows the white channel away.

Wow.

How do we get that into volume?

This changes the entire season.

You know, I'm saying come up the first year

and do 500 ounces,

this could blow it right out of the water.

Buzz, find me a big trommel.

OK, make it happen.

You know, I put a lot of trust into Buzz.

I'm not gonna blow sunshine up his ass, but for that kind of

gold and a small test, let's see where he takes me.

So how are things on the hill, Mike?

Hester Cut keeps flooding. It's full of silt.

So I'm around with pumps and pumps and pumps.

- Yeah, basically. - You have no choice.

Well, and then you guys got a new toy here, didn't you?

- The thingamabobber. - Yeah.

Well, there are so many buttons in that thing.

And then you have to press that button to get that button

- and then to get things going. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh man.

No, I never read the instructions.

That's funny.

So how has Sluice-A-Lot been running?

- What about Find-A-Lot? - I hope we're doing all right.

Last week, Tony's two wash plants delivered 800 ounces.

Now, he's gunning for more.

I guess let's find out how much Find-A-Lot did.

10 ounces. 20 ounces.

There we go. 40, 70, 190,

230, 270, 300, 360, 370,

378.48.

Pretty damn good.

Should we do Sluice-A-Lot now?

20, 30, 50.

70, 73.

80, 100, 140, 160, 190, 200

250, 280, 300, 330, 380

400, 450, 460

464.46.

It's pretty consistent, too, isn't it?

- Yeah. - Almost 843 for this week.

Worth over $3,600,000,

bringing the Beets' season total

to over 2,500 ounces.

You're not going to believe it, but about 300 ounces more

- now than we are from last year. - Wow.

Pays off.

I think that's all because I'm here, right?

Thanks, folks.

- What up, what up? - Hey.

- Hello. - Hey, Junior.

- How you doing, buddy? - Good, how about you?

- Good to see you. - Good to see you too, man.

Kind of a bizarre week this week.

- We had five plants to clean. - New wash plant.

- Yeah. - Phil McCracken.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

Heard you guys had a little issue

with the hydraulics there, trying to keep her level

when you fired it off.

Yeah, it kept bleeding down,

and we just shoved lumber on it,

and then fired up, and then it was good.

Been a long past couple days.

How'd everything go for you guys down there?

- It's good. - Good?

Just hammering away?

Yeah, I mean, just finding gold.

- We're sluicing away. - Doumitt, what'd we find?

Well, since we're talking about Rocksand, and yes,

she's been running top gravel, so,

let's see what we did here with Rocksand in

the Quagmire Cut.

We got 15, 30, 45, 70,

80, 94, 99...

101.4.

- Broke 100. - Broke 100!

Is that your first triple digit?

- It is. - Yeah.

We are running a lot of top gravels.

Yeah, yeah.

And talking top gravel, we got the Goose here.

Golden Goose has been sluicing in the Airstrip Cut.

All righty. 10, 35,

- 44.35. - No.

- No. - Seriously?

There's like another one or something.

That's it, Chris?

Yeah, I'm sorry. That's it.

One more time, Tyson.

Let's see how the Bridge Cut did.

This is Bob, and here we go.

We got 20, 40, 100...

117.55.

- It's over 100. - Right?

I mean, we're going somewhere now.

This is Big Red.

Before being shut down,

Big Red was running a stockpile

of leftover top gravel from the Golden Mile.

Seriously?

- Is that it? - That's it.

Didn't even get to say a number before you were done.

I know.

- Well, 25.7. - Yeah.

That's all I could squeeze out of her.

Big Red, we knew that was just going to be a flop, right?

So her replacement, Phil.

The brand-new wash plant has been sluicing for three days

in the Road Cut.

Ground Parker is banking will turn his season around.

Here we go. Let's see how Phil did.

Got 20, 50, 85,

- 110, 150, 162.15. - Nice.

- That's better. - Yeah.

That's what happens when the plant's running pay dirt.

All right, Chris, where are we at?

So this week, we have a total of 451.1 ounces,

Worth close to $2 million.

And our season total is 1,505.55 ounces.

Like, it is the best out of what we've done so far,

but the truth is we're making money,

- so you can't like throw it away. - No.

But we just have to hammer through the gravel we've got

and then get through the pits

and get them finished. All right, thanks, guys.

- Thank you. - Yeah.