Gold Rush

Something break? Narrator: On this "gold rush"...

That doesn't sound right. It's broke.

It's cracked right off. Ow!

We're .

enough is enough. It's scary.

We ain't got gold in that cut.

You're nowhere near deep enough.

You're going to be well over 100 feet.

So you're telling me that I'm only halfway down?

I'm scared. I'm really scared now.

captions paid for by discovery communications

narrator: At paradise hill,

tony beets is expanding his viking fleet

so he can transport his new dredge

100 miles up the yukon river.

The two halves of his 30-ton barge

must become one massive steel hull.

Okay, up.

Narrator: His challenge -- perfectly line up

two 15-ton steel sections and weld them solid.

Narrator: To make the vessel seaworthy,

a team of specialists arc weld the barge

at over 20,000 degrees.

Narrator: Last year, tony paid $1.5 million

for a second dredge

150 tons heavier than his first.

It was built in 1946

but is now abandoned 70 miles south at thistle creek.

Narrator: To move the dredge to eureka creek,

tony will load it onto his barge

and pull it upriver like tugboating.

Tony's foreman, gene cheeseman,

has worked on the tugboat,

kid commando, for three weeks.

He's split it into three parts,

ready to haul it down to the yukon river,

15 miles away in dawson.

When we it down to the river,

then we've got to put the top house on it

and the wheelhouse and get all the systems hooked back up.

It's a lot of work.

Narrator: While the barge gets a coat of paint,

tony enlists his family to transport the tug.

Narrator: Son mike is the point man in the oshkosh,

a 22-year-old 12-liter,

8-wheel-drive combat transporter.

Get moving, 'cause I'm not stopping.

go, go, go, go!

Mike: Only concern I have is might be too high.

Mike: Oh, yeah, I know.

It says 5.3 and you guys were estimating 5.2, right?

Mike: If it doesn't fit, we'll just cut the bridge.

Minnie: Just keep him going, mike.

Narrator: Even if tony's math is correct,

kid commando has just four inches' clearance.

One wrong move from mike

could damage the tug and the bridge,

putting the whole project back by weeks

and cutting off access to the city.

Minnie: It looks really good from the back side.

Mike: Go, go, go, go.

Minnie: It's awesome, mike. He's fine, tony. He'll fit.

todd: Buckland is our second chance.

Let's hope it's not our last chance.

Narrator: This season, todd set a massive

$6 million, 5,000-ounce target,

but so far, he's only mined 138 ounces,

worth just $165,000.

Things are so bad, todd's not paying his crew

until they strike more gold.

Spinks: The bottom line is is that we all have bills to pay.

You know, logan just bought his first house.

Kevin had another baby.

We all have families.

Hunter: All these guys, they didn't

so they're obviously all not super happy right now.

My dad has the pressure on him

to get some gold for the whole team

and their whole families.

Narrator: They're running buckland

but no one knows if they've hit the pay streak

that would turn their season around.

Todd: We're going 50 feet deep to get to this pay dirt here.

Oh, what a nerve-wracking situation.

You know, kevin, all these guys,

they've dug just a monster cut down there.

Let's hope that there's gold in the bottom of it.

I've heard lots of stories and I just -- I don't know.

That's -- that's the truth.

Narrator: Now, after two days of running,

dave and kevin shut down to see if they're finally on the money.

Hiatt: That's it. We are done for the day.

Let's go check the sluices and see how much gold we got.

There's no gold on this side.

I don't see a single piece. I don't see anything in here.

I'm not seeing any gold up in here.

There's nothing here.

That was 1,200 yards we just ran through there.

It ain't good enough.

Back to the drawing board.

we got all our eggs in this basket right here,

and if this doesn't work, I mean, we're done.

I mean, we're done-done.

This is it. This is the last chance.

Marvin better have some answers.

Narrator: They lease the buckland mine

at 50 feet, it's the deepest cut todd's ever mined.

His whole operation hangs in the balance.

Dude, we got a problem.

We ain't got gold in that cut.

I'm telling you, todd. That doesn't sound right.

We dug down probably 50 feet, tested all the way down.

Well, I'm going to tell you this.

You're nowhere near deep enough.

What?

You're going to be well over 100 feet.

You're telling me we're not even halfway there yet?

Todd, that's a whole different level of mining.

We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars'

worth of fuel, labor, time, energy.

Listen, todd.

If you open this up, you can't run out on this

if it doesn't work out exactly as you planned.

The question that I have

is do we have the ability to dig that deep?

I'm going to be honest with you.

If you're not smart enough to do it,

you might as well just go home now

and just save everyone the trouble.

There'll be gold at the bottom.

Let's kick some ass!

I was really hoping for a ton of gold in the box today.

Narrator: A third of the way through

parker schnabel has just 787 ounces of gold,

worth $944,000.

Parker: Gold's not really coming in

narrator: To stand any chance of reaching his 4,000-ounce,

$4.8 million goal,

he needs sluicifer to run klondike pay dirt

for 12 straight hours a day.

Parker: You know, I thought we'd be up there

at three ounces an hour or so, but we're more like two.

That's a pretty big difference. You know,

over a 1,500-hour sluicing season,

that's 1,500 ounces short we'd be.

That doesn't sound right. No.

Doumitt: Rattling going on in the wash plant

somewhere doesn't sound quite right.

We're not sure if it's a rock or broken spring or what it is.

narrator: It's foreman rick ness' job

ness: Wow.

Holy .

What do we got going on?

There's a plate that goes

from the prewash to the shaker deck.

It's broke. It's cracked right off.

Something break?

Yeah, bad.

The whole plate that transitions

from the prewash to the shaker deck

is in three pieces.

's sake.

Narrator: Every hour the wash plant is down

costs parker $2,500 in lost gold.

I don't know what the we can do about this one.

Narrator: It's down to mechanic mitch blaschke

to fix the problem.

How's it going? Not good.

Oh, it's . Why?

the screen cage is in half, almost.

We've got something major going on.

It's basically tearing itself apart.

Narrator: When the plant is running,

the inlet chute never gets closer

than three inches from the prewash.

But as the machine shuts down,

the irregular vibrations cause the plate

to hit the prewash,

resulting in a series of cracks.

Blaschke: Right now, we're just going to get it welded up,

but for the amount of hours we've got on this wash plant,

we've got big problems.

We've kind of pushed everything back up in place.

We're welding it from the top side,

welding it from the bottom side,

should make it a lot stronger.

We're just trying to get through it as fast as we can.

They cut the lip down on it, took about a half an inch off.

So we gave it a little bit more clearance.

oh, ! Ow!

I'm watching a forest fire start in parker's hair.

parker: Mitch and jordan have done a great job

of getting this thing fixed.

Now we're just putting things back together.

And we'll be -- we'll be sluicing again

in 20, 30 minutes.

Narrator: In just two hours,

mitch welds the cracks with an ingenious bush fix.

And you can see all the welding

we had to do here where the tray broke,