Parker Schnabel: “LUCKIEST Day Of My Entire Life!”

Gold hunting is known to be a lucrative venture.
But when miners begin to go deeper and become
more experienced, they end up discovering things
different from gold, some of them as useless as
scraps of metal and others as valuable as gold
itself. What happens when gold miners stumble
upon items that have nothing to do with gold?
What would they do if they found something more
valuable than gold? Join us as we dive into how
Parker finds Mammoth Tusks in his hunt for gold.

Parker Schnabel’s Unusual Discovery

Parker Schnabel is not a stranger to getting
down on the ground and getting his hands dirty
while hunting for riches. He started working
on the family mine in the first season as a
teenager. Starting in the second season, the
young man took the reins of the family mines,
and since that time, he has consistently been one
of the most successful gold miners. Whereas other
mining bosses often struggle, Schnabel seems to
have the Midas touch, hauling in thousands of
ounces of gold per season, resulting in hundreds
of thousands of dollars for his team to take home.

After ten appearances on Gold Rush, Parker has set
aside a dime fortune for himself, estimated to be
about $10 million. And he isn’t slowing down any
time soon. But gold isn’t the only thing the miner
has found in the fields; he revealed he had found
some other unusual objects during his excursions.
It is safe to say here that a lot of stuff
is buried underneath the earth. Among
all the digging and excavating, miners have
likely found strange things in their travels.

Forget gold as Parker stumbles into what could
easily be the delight of many archaeologists. He
shared the unusual discovery he made while mining
for gold in an interview with The Maelstrom,
where he talked about what’s arguably the most
valuable thing he had that wasn’t gold. He
revealed that he had found a well-preserved pair
of woolly mammoth tusks, which was fascinating.

The tusks are remarkably well preserved
because they are made of ivory and were
buried in the permafrost, shielding them
from the harsh weather. Some came up in
pristine conditions even though the woolly
mammoth became extinct thousands of years
ago. This discovery of preserved remains in
fossils reminds us of what makes a creature.

It is not entirely unusual to discover mammoth
tusks in Alaska. They hold considerable value and
fuel a thriving industry. Since these tusks are
made of ivory, when well preserved, their value
can be pretty insane. They can fetch a price
shooting up to and exceeding $1 million each.

While Parker and his team on Gold Rush may
not uncover anything that will surpass the
value of gold, mammoth tusks rank
very highly among valuable finds.

Suffice it to say that the mammoth tusks he
found would be worth a pretty good amount
since there are people out there willing to buy
virtually anything. However, despite the value
and potential worth of the tusks, Schnabel reveals
that he would not sell them. To sell things like
that would require obtaining various permits,
a process he chooses to avoid going through.

Instead, he has a different approach to the tusks;
he prefers to keep them. He thinks they’re so
cool and should be kept rather than sold. And
one cannot blame him. He already makes hundreds
of thousands of dollars from the gold he finds,
so holding onto the unusual finds along the
way makes sense. Especially when he can proudly
declare ownership of well-preserved mammoth tusks.

So, if you ever find yourself in Parker Schnabel’s
house, don’t be surprised if some massive
mammoth tusks are there waiting for you.
The mammoth tusks are the icing on
Parker’s successful career choice.
Since there’s no indication that
he’ll halt his career anytime soon,
it can be said that more discoveries await him.

It seems like the discovery of an unusual
treasure on Gold Rush is yet to end, as a
prominent figure on the show, a gold mining
legend, stumbled upon something stunning.

Another Unusual Discovery on Gold Rush

Tony Beets stumbled upon a significant discovery
on his new site in Paradise Hills. Rather than
the usual gold discovery, he unearthed
a tusk that held a peculiar significance
for this part of Alaska. He noticed the
tusk protruding from the ground while
exploring the site, and with the help
of his son, Mike, and their machines,
they successfully excavated the find, which
Mike initially thought to be a jawbone.

Tony decided to bring in paleontologists
to examine it closely. Regarding the tusks
found on Gold Rush, experts believe that
the woolly mammoth skeleton found earlier
may be part of the same family as the
tusks. Miners have continually uncovered
such bones since the Klondike
gold rush over a century ago.

The Yukon area is especially renowned for
its record of ice-age animal discoveries.
Although Tony mentioned that he had found
skeletons of horses and zebras in the past,
this, in particular, caused people to remember
the woolly mammoth. According to Gold Rush,
the baby mammoth is estimated to be at
least 30,000 years old, and the preservation
of ice-age animals is attributed to ice
conditions and the ground in the region.

The mammoth tusks are not the only
strange things seen in Gold Rush.
Miners have seen things other
than the gold they set out to find,
and Parker especially came face to
face with something that blew his mind.

Face-to-Face With the ‘Welcome Stranger’

Parker Schnabel could hardly believe his
eyes when he found himself face-to-face with
a replica of “Welcome Stranger.” The object is
the largest gold nugget ever found. In Season 4,
Episode 2, titled Installment of Gold Rush:
Parker’s Trail, we saw that he was half a
world away from the Klondike Gold Rush trail
as he pursued new adventures and opportunities.

At the beginning of the episode, Parker and
his associate Fred Lewis were welcomed by 4th
generation Aussie gold prospector Tyler
Mahoney, who swung open her truck door
to reveal the two-foot-long golden
boulder placed across the back seat.

According to legend, the Welcome Stranger
was so large that to fit on a bank scale,
it had to be broken into three pieces on an
anvil. Based on the rate at which gold is
sold in the present day, the nugget
would be worth around $4.7 million.

The original Welcome Stranger had long
been melted into gold bars, but two exact
replicas continue to live on. One is owned and
in the possession of the descendants of Deason,
and a second is on display in the Old
Treasury building in Melbourne. The
one pulled from Mahoney’s truck is assumed to
belong to the Deason family. Erected in 1897,
an obelisk that marks the location of the
nugget’s discovery still stands in Moliagul.

It wasn’t Parker or any other modern-day
gold miner who found it, so the question is,
who made this monumental discovery
that left even Parker dumbfounded?

In the 1850s, thousands of people with hope
for significant finds traveled to Victoria,
Australia, in search of fortune as
part of the Victorian gold rush.
They came from across Australia and
from other parts of the world. The
euphoria didn’t last for too long.