Machines on the Fritz | Gold Rush | Discovery
Machines on the Fritz | Gold Rush | Discovery
Copy. >> Copy. Go for it.
In Rick’s Vegas Valley cut.
Yeah, I skipped the rock truck.
The operation is at a standstill.
Are you… Are you all right? Are you okay?
Yeah, I got to pretty good, but uh… Okay, it’s okay. I just need some help.
All right, I’ll be right up there. Jason Roy timing.
Oh, right on the badge.
Me and James have got to get this steel out of here. The steel will be here in the morning and we’re going to start fabricating.
Can you see it all?
See a little bit.
Looks good.
Okay, stand clear.
Okay, that’s better. Just a little bit at a time.
I’ll get it. Hang on.
Okay, just going to have persuaded… Hold on. Down. Down. I don’t know. I’m hoping that we someday get to the stage where we actually can call ourselves miners before I go completely broke.
Todd and Harness try again. This time with a stronger chain.
It’s going to bang a little bit.
Was it loud? How’s the rubber looking there?
But when they see the supports under the old deck, they get a nasty shock.
It’s not looking good. The main supports that hold this thing together across are cracked.
The rails that this narrow rubber on are broken.
The damage to the shaker is much worse than anyone expected.
If the team can’t find a way to fix it, their mining season will end in failure.
That ain’t funny.
Southeast Alaska, the Big Nugget Mine. 40 days into the 150-day mining season. Parker Schnobble’s way ahead of the Hoffman crew and the Dakota boys.
There we go.
So far this season, his wash plant has produced 10 ounces of gold worth around $16,000. His new dump truck allows Parker to carry twice as much to the wash plant, but to fill it, he pushes his excavator to the limit.
Rocket. Oops. There goes a panel. You’ve got to be kidding me. There’s hydraulic fluid flying everywhere.
I don’t know what happened, but I could smell it. Well, that’s not good. Boy, that’s a long hose, too. When this thing goes down, unless we have dirt at the plant, everything goes down.
Without a constant supply of pay dirt, the mine shuts down. Parker needs a new hose fast.
It’s too [music] thick to be made in town.
Going to have to hunt a long time.
Do you think we might have one laying around?
Something like that?
I don’t think so. You’re… You’re having a bad time, Parker. I feel sympathy for you. What are you going to do?
Parker’s under pressure to save his grandfather’s mine. He must find [music] at least 75 ounces of gold worth around $120,000. Parker has two working wash plants on his 61-acre cut. His biggest plant, Slooifer, is running 250 yards of dirt every hour. At the other end of the cut, loader operator Brie Harrison is pushing 200 yd an hour through Parker’s second plant, Big Red.
It’s definitely important that we… we keep this plant moving. We’re… we’re already really far behind. It’s late into the season. We’re about halfway through and definitely not where we need to be.
So, it’s good that we finally got everything sorted, but we can’t afford for any more downtime. It really screws us over. [music]
Why are you beeping?
[music] >> For sake. Got to be kidding me.
I’m saying after another…
Parker, you got a copy?
Yeah, go ahead.
My loader’s got a flat down at Big Red.
That’s just what we need right now. Um, and that’s the only loader down there. All right. Well, we just have to shut the plant down until we can get that fixed.
All right. Thank you.
This is just what we need right now.
Changing a loader tire is a job for mechanic Mitch Blaskki, but Mitch [music] is about to head home to see his family.
Yo, Mitch, how’s it going, man? The loader down at Big Red has a flat and any way you get that fixed before you leave?
Sorry, man. If I don’t leave right now, I don’t think I’m going to catch my flight.
Do you have to leave?
I do, man. I made my wife promise I’d be home for our anniversary.
Of course. No, I would never want to be responsible for Haley being mad. So, you… you’ve got my full support.
Well, I appreciate it, man.
Have a good trip.
Thanks.
The season hasn’t panned out like we wanted it to. The ground’s just not been as good as we needed it to [music] be to pay the bills. In Oregon’s Elorn Mountains, Fred Lewis has poured his life savings into a gold mine. And he’s now burning through five grand a week of his investor’s money.
Financially, this has been an absolute disaster. My biggest concern is the [music] debt and being able to pay back Carl because…
He’s not going to like it very much.
Fred’s just opened up new ground, the mayor’s cut, which delivered his best cleanup so far, and everyone’s working flat out in the hope they can turn their fortunes around.
If we don’t get on some good gold real fast, this could be the end of my gold mining career. All right, let’s go. [music]
Fred’s foreman, senior airman Kendall Madden, is tasked with keeping the aging wash plant running.
At this point, we are limping along so hard, you know. We’ll just keep going. Just keep doing it. See how much we can actually get. We’ll see.
It’s not looking good though.
After 5 months seeing precious little gold, the crew is losing faith. Infantry scout sniper Steuart McKenzie has left his young family at home in Washington State in the hope of striking it rich.
We’ve ripped this place apart and… uh… the gold’s just not here. Morale’s actually pretty low right now. I’m thinking that if we actually had decent equipment and a decent mindset, we would be kicking this season’s ass. And you know, unfortunately for the fact… it’s not that case. You know, we… we inherited a rigged pile of… and we’re trying to polish it.
Hey, Alex, how’s it looking up there?
Looking good so far. We’re at 25. We are at 25 PSI. It just started dying.
The old pump supplying water to the wash plant has lost half its working pressure.
Hey, try to shake the… out of that thing. See if it’ll put it or something. All right. You know, we’ve been relying on this old pump forever here, and it keeps giving us more and more problems. So, you know, if we… if we see things like this, we got to work on them as fast as we can to get up and running. Try to run some more pay here. Let’s go 25, man.
With this PSI, all we’re doing is clogging up the sluice. So, you know, we’re just washing gold away. Oh, come on. It just dropped again. The pressure is too low to wash the pay dirt down the sloes.
All right, let’s shut it off. This thing… All right, man. I think it’s losing suction on here, dude.
I mean, it’s obviously leaking and we start firing this thing up and it starts sucking air, dude.
What the guys? Why aren’t we running now, Fred? The pressure just keeps dropping. It’ll bounce up for a couple of minutes and then it just completely drops out. This thing is a hunk of junk. [music]
This cut is a gamble. We got to get back where we know the good gold is. And you know, it’s going to be a risk. We’ve got a limited amount of time this season. And, you know, if this water license doesn’t get renewed, this will be our last chance here. So, I got to get to paydirt.
Rick Ness is making the greatest gamble of his mining career in what could be his last season ever at Duncan Creek. Rick staking out 400 of the 900-plus ounces he made from Rally Valley on his new cut, Vegas Valley.
I know the guys trust me. They’re gambling their bonuses on this. As I expected, they were all in. Everybody’s behind this, and that’s what we need to get this done. But at the end of the day, we got to… we got to haul ass. We don’t know if there’s going to be million dollars worth of gold down there or… nothing at all. So, it’s a big chance that we’re taking to get to the bottom here. It’s a gamble, but Rick seems to like to gamble, so it should hopefully pay off for us.
We could have all gone home with money in our pockets and all been doing extremely well, but we came here to conquer Rally Valley. Took me 2 years to get to the bottom, and this cut’s just as deep as that. I mean, it’s 210 ft of bedrock, and I’ve only got two months to get to it, not two years.
Right now, these trucks are setting the pace. You know, they’re hauling about 10,000 yds of overburn a day. These guys are making great progress, but there’s a lot riding on this. It’s going to be a stretch.
At Duncan Creek, half a mile downstream from Rally Valley sits Vegas Valley, where Rick’s risking it all to find the same nugget-rich past streak that lies under 160 ft of overburden. To dig down, he’s bench cutting, carving step-like zones into the hillside to reduce the risk of landslides and reach the 50-ft pay layer that Rick hopes will deliver over $2 million in gold.
80 plus degrees. It’s not my kind of day. It’s dusty out here right now. It’s just a dust bowl. Makes for a long day when you’re chewing on dust.
To hit pay and run it all before the end of the season, Rick’s crew must haul at least 230 truckloads of overburden daily. Despite the heat, everybody’s doing a really good job.
To be as efficient as possible, Rick’s sending the full truck loads downhill to dump the overburden while empty trucks make the uphill run, cutting fuel costs.
We’d actually like to come in here and not spend very much money.
The less we spend, the better it is. Makes a good, efficient operation. We’re trying to keep the roads as good as we can, but I mean, they get pretty beat up. We are pushing these rock trucks pretty hard.
