Hey, Tyson. You on here, Tyson?

Yep. Go ahead.
Hey, I got a pretty big up here. Can you come have a look?
I’m getting flooded out.
Come on my way. Last thing I want to do is tell Parker that the cut’s flooded and we got to shut Bob down. Man, that’s a lot [music] of melt water. That’s not what I needed, man.
We have a lake in here. We spent so much time getting the bridge cut drain. It’s getting flooded out again. The water’s backing up the ditch line of the cut.

I’m thinking that 8 in culvert is not big enough.
Oh yeah, we need to rattle your hoe over and dig up this road. We got that big old culvert up there. So, let’s throw that puppy in. Let’s uh get this water out of here. So, we got to get this water out because right now the only pay we can truck to Bob is in this square. If it’s flooding out, Bob’s going to shut down.

As the 114 acre bridge cut thaws, melt water seeps into its drainage ditches where it is then channeled through an 8-in culvert under Bob’s only access road. But the narrow culvert is overwhelmed by the volume of melt water, causing the ditches to overflow and flood the cut.

To stop the flood, Mike must dig up the access road and replace the small culvert with a much larger 36-in culvert, then rebuild the road to wash plant Bob.
I’m going to take the small little 8in culvert after and let the water go. If I don’t hurry up and get this water figured out, uh, Bob’s going to run out of pay. That’s bad news. You ain’t sloo. You ain’t producing.

Here comes some water, boys. Let’s go get this culvert. Let’s the only thing I got kicking around here. So hopefully I can do the job. Throw her in right about there. Send it. There’s one way to put a culvert in. See if this bang falls out on me. That could suck, eh? Oh, me. This is sketchy, man. Anybody bring some extra undies.

I can safely say that culvert’s in place. I’m pretty proud of this. I feel pretty good. Mike saved the day.

That was fun. That was exciting.
Nice work, Mike.
Yeah, she’s porking. Right on. See you.

Got that done. Tyson’s [music] happy. Pretty proud of myself. Pretty happy. It was what, what, an hour, hour and 5 minutes. We got her done. Well, you know, Michael sure stepped up to the plate and saved the day. He got that culvert in, got all the water leaving us. He executed it perfectly. We just got to keep the gold coming in. [music]

At Tony Beat’s early bird cut, another $300,000 rock truck has flipped.

The one tooth system seems to work pretty good. If you up something twice, I’ll just fire the And I’ll be the one that’s happy. Did the idiot still by the truck or was it?
Yeah. Okay.
Where was it?
What happened, Mason?
Got a little soft.
Little soft down there or what?
Yeah, a little bit.

Experienced driver Mason McIntyre has flipped his first truck.

Okay, I’ll scoop it out. You can roll in the cap. Let’s get the thing out of there.
Okay.
All we got to do is take a little bit of the dirt out.

Tony uses the 480 excavator to empty the rock truck’s box of dirt and push it upright.

Hopefully, they’ll learn something and then the next time we know it’s bottom. Part of me is happy to see that it happens to other people besides me, but I mean, I feel for the guy. It’s pretty unpleasant when the box slips over on your rock truck.
Hey, Mason, drive ahead of it right off. There you go. See you later, man.
Thank you, Tony. That’s my first truck I tipped over. It was a little scary. Tony was pretty relaxed. I think I had the luck cuz I’m here my second season. Tony’s crew are back in the race to get down to pay before Slooot runs out.

If you want to do X amount of ounces a year, you need X amount of people. So, you better put up with some more, I suppose. But sometimes not that easy, especially when it cost money. You need to turn trucks over cuz sometimes you wonder what the heck are you doing.

I asked Troy to come down and meet me here. Um, I’m basically going to tell him that his contract is bull. I mean, I don’t know what he wants me to do with this. I’m not budging off that ground and I’m not signing this. So, we need to come to some kind of compromise. After moving his crew to a new claim on Lightning Creek, Rick Ness has called a meeting with landlord Troy Taylor to negotiate the terms of the lease.

Hey, Troy.
Hey, Rick.
How you doing?
Good.
Good to see you.
We got to put some signatures on paper and make it um legal.

There’s no way. I have gone over the contract and uh a lot of things that I don’t like. It says that you have the right to change the mining plan at any time. You can pull my equipment and my personnel when [music] you see fit. There’s an awful lot of power going into your hands here. I mean, I would like to think that our last contract went pretty smooth. I think it’s kind of down to a trusting… and you know, for me right here in this contract, it looks like you don’t trust me at all. And so, I’m kind of wondering why I trust this, you know.

Yeah, I get that. It’s nothing personal. It’s [music] just since the last agreement, things have changed so much with the water licenses these days. If there’s any blemish, if you are doing anything wrong, maybe you weren’t here on a day that something’s going sideways, [music] it will be reflected on me. It could result in getting my water license revoked. I want to keep mining, so I [music] have to I have to have some teeth in this uh in this agreement.

I can kind of see where you’re coming from, Troy, but I don’t believe that this level of supervision is necessary. I mean, I I don’t I don’t want to feel like I’m looking over my shoulder all the time. And that’s why I brought this um you know, off the bat, that’s the 100 ounces that I owe you. That’s the minimum royalty on this deal. And I’d be willing to give that to you up front right now today and get rid of this.

Oh boy. From my perspective, if I don’t have some control in the agreement, that’s all I’ve got. I I can’t I can’t back up on that. I just can’t.
I understand. It’s got to be a tough one to tough pill to swallow. Um, [music] what if I buy it?
That’s um, it’s a big one for me. [music] I would need another another 200 ounces on top of this.
So, 300 ounces total.
Yes. How about by the end of the month and then we part ways. This is gone. Your name’s [music] off it. I take over the ground
in a month.
In a month.
Your liability is gone. You’re paid.

Rick, that’s a lot of gold to produce in a month. You got a lot of stuff to do. So,
if that’s what it’s going to take to mine this ground mine way, that’s that’s what we’re going to do. I’ll make it happen. Well, I like your determination.
Let’s do it.
Call good.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Deal done.

Well, we don’t need this anymore. Rick Ness has just purchased another 1600 acres of land for $700,000 in gold.

I’m not sure what I just did. I think I came out on top. Gold prices are higher than ever, but right now it seems that a a ground with a water license on it is even harder to find.
He owns [music] it. It’s all his. So, hope it’s good ground and I wish him the best.

The guys are probably going to question this. This ground is… We haven’t even seen it yet, but we did test it. We know there’s gold. So, I need to get us ground. I need to get us going. This was the only way I saw how to do it. [music]
Do you want to see the fruits of your labors? Last week, the early bird cut delivered 214 [music] ounces.
You ready, Mike?
Yep. 10 20 30 60 70 80 100 110 120 130 140 142.14 worth [music] nearly half a million dollar bringing Tony’s total to 774, but it’s a drop in production if Tony is going to hit his 6,500 ounce goal. His extension of [music] the early bird cut will have to deliver a big improvement. [music]

So, we’re still a little ways off from our goal.
Still pretty early.
We’ll get there.
Said I think everybody should go back to work.
Yeah, [music]
sounds good.
When do you guys go make us some more money?
Okay. Take your video, Mike.
Bye.
Yeah. Bye. Don’t go away, Matt. Guys,
love you.
Yeah. Here [music] we go. Slooifer

Wash plant. Slooifer’s been running in the golden mile all week and Parker’s hoping to see an uptick from last week’s 112 oz.
Let’s see how the Golden Mile did. 10 30 40 70 80 100 O. There’s 120, 130, 150, 152. Even worth over $530,000. A 35% increase from last week.
Perfect. That’s a lot better. A lot better.
Picked up a few ounces over the last week.
Definitely working some kinks out. Yeah.

Next up, Bob at the Bridge Cut, which is averaging 143 ounces a week. We got 30, 50, 80, 100, 120, 140, 150, 156.2.
Worth almost $550,000.
Wow, that was close.
Yeah, those two plants are 4 ounces off each other.
Just a couple ounces off of each other.
That’s weird.
Yeah, that’s crazy.

This week we got 308.2 2 oz, which give us a season total of 707.9.
Tyson has nearly doubled their season total.