Gold Rush

I'm just driving up against it.

At Paradise Hill,

King of the Klondike, Tony Beets

is battling to save his chaotic season.

His constantly changing plans

have banked less than 500 ounces,

well-short of his 6,000 ounce gold.

Tony is now focused on mining Paradise Hill,

and his main money maker,

the 40-foot long trommel

is his only hope of saving his season.

But he still has to finish assembling the plant

before it can start catching gold.

There's no place like Paradise.

Nice weather trap.

It'll be interesting when we get to the top,

see what everything looks like.

I hope they realize just, like,

through our absence, how much we did on site.

Yeah.

At the start of the season...

Tony's eldest son, Kevin and partner Faith

dropped a bombshell.

We've been thinking that perhaps this year,

we might take it off.

Without chief mechanic, Kevin.

Tony struggled for months

to get his trammel reassembled.

And last week, daughter Monica took action.

What's up?

I figured you guys might wanna come up

just to help out.

Do you think it's gonna be show?

I'm a little worried about how things may be.

Yeah.

Me and Tony have to figure out

how we can both play in the sandbox

without getting in each other's way.

- Hello there. - Hi, strangers.

Look at you all clean in your town clothes.

Right?

No. Someone gave a desperate cry for help.

Desperate cry for help.

It looks close until you stand right here.

I think your gearbox is too high on the front.

You got the ring replaced, it looks like.

I think at least a week,

assuming nothing goes sideways.

Si. Si.

It was a little surprising to me

that Kevin and Faith agreed to come back up,

but I'm glad they did.

But I think Tony's got a hard time giving up the control.

He's a micro manager.

Look at that.

You're late.

- Good to see you. - Same. Same.

- Got one. - Good luck.

How you been? What's happening?

What's going down?

Why ain't it set up yet?

There's a lot of assembling to do here.

If we can get on that, you can keep everyone away from me.

That'd be pretty excellent.

Trust me. It's not hard.

We got so much that needs to get done.

Well, let's get to doing some of it, I guess.

Well, it was good seeing you all.

Same.

Mixed feelings coming back.

I expected the trommel to be further along.

I think it's been almost 10 months

since the trommel has run,

and it's very frustrating with Tony.

I don't think he quite realized

how much of that me and Faith took on.

So far,

Tony and Mike have replaced the trommel's broken drive ring

and moved the wash plant onto a new pad.

Now, Kevin and his crew must bring in the sluice deck.

Attach it to the trommel with a distribution box.

Then, connect the water supply,

bring in a conveyor,

and finally, the hopper feeder.

And the kicker,

Tony wants it all done by the end of the week.

Kevin's first task,

hauling the gold catching sluice deck.

Forward a bit.

Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.

No, I think that went well.

So you have to back up a bit and we'll swing her over.

Next, Kevin will install the conveyor

that feeds pay dirt into the trommel.

So we have our excavator on the back end.

We have our crane on the front end.

We're about to lift the conveyor in.

We're gonna have to walk forward slowly.

Yup, that's good. That's far enough.

To bolt the conveyor in,

Kevin must line it up with pinpoint accuracy.

Okay. Just a hair more, like a foot.

Okay. Bring it back this way.

How the that's supposed to line up.

Just not lying up as a around

we don't really need right now.

Okay, just hit the pipe again, let's see what that does.

A little bit of a close start.

So that's hasn't changed.

Like most of the stuff here, I can already hear Tony...

The issue is that's bent

when these holes line up, these don't line up.

The only holes that this thing even remotely lines into

is the angle piece in the middle.

But then, these are about a foot too far back.

I had them in.

But they didn't line up back here.

That don't work. Okay. New plan.

So we'll slide them in there

and then I'll play welder.

The conveyor can feed

350 yards of dirt an hour into the trommel,

but the struts that support the conveyor

are bent and won't line up.

To fix them,

Kevin will cut the struts from their crossbeams

and pull them into alignment

before welding the crossbeams back

to lock everything in place.

It is incredibly too hot for this.

Hot metal bull.

Got that.

All right. Len, we're gonna pit them in the first two.

All right.

And then I'm gonna get out the welder

and the torch and make the rest fit.

Nice, like a glove.

Perfect.

And we're happy right there.

Let's leave it here and go on to the next one.

- All right. Sounds good. - Okay. Lead on.

This plant got built for this property

by one of the owners many years ago

and it's one of the biggest wash plants

ever ran in the Yukon, actually.

It's a beast.

I bet there's a bunch of gold hidden in this plant somewhere.

I might need to cut it apart.

But for now, that'll have to wait.

I mean, there's a mountain of work to do.

In the heart of the Yukon,

Parker Schnabel is in uncharted territory.

Having three different projects

going at once is just brutal.

You know, we're like halfway through the season,

we're sitting on like just over 2,200 ounces.

I knew it was gonna be a rough year

financially at least, but, you know,

there's just so much change and so much going on.

But we'll get there.

After gambling $15 million on Dominion,

plus millions more to strip it,

Parker opened Ken and Stewart's

to keep the cash coming in.

When Dominion began sluicing,

he found himself stretched thin

and thinner still when four weeks ago,

he broke ground at a third claim,

Australia Creek.

We're all spread all over the place

and, you know, it really hurts,

but the clock is ticking very fast.

Like, the second half of the season

and it's, you know...

It's a lot.

Now, down at Ken and Stewart's...

We're done here.

His El Dorado cut is tapped out

and he's shutting down the operation.

It's the last time Sluicifer will be

catching gold down on Ken's for this year.

Hope to do it again next year.

Now I have to start trying to get this stuff

up to Australia Creek.

We're at Australia Creek,

we are trying to get ready for a wash plant.

Once we get the pad all in place and ready,

we're gonna start bringing up components from Sluicifer

and start getting ourselves ready to just wash rocks.

Until Sluicifer moves to Australia Creek,

Parker's once again down to just one wash plant

to bankroll his season.

We're spread pretty thin right now.

We need a nice clean transition

into Australia Creek and.

Parker, do you got a copy?

Yeah. What's up?

Hey, the berm for Big Red's resurge just blew.

Water's flowing out of here pretty quick.

I'm gonna need a hand down here.