We are going to run out of pay dirt. There's no way around it.
You know, there ain't no rest for the wicked,
but we're getting down to the last thread.
[narrator] Following government orders
to stop expansion of their Lost Cut mine...
Just when I thought I started getting good at rock trucking,
I guess we're almost done with haulin' pay.
[Todd] A little scary.
We're in desperate mode.
[narrator] The Hoffman crew scrambles to find a new source of pay dirt.
There's exposed gravel up here,
and it seems thawed.
Let's find out if it's really worth it.
I don't know if there's gold here.
This is literally my last ditch effort to just salvage the season.
All right, see you guys after a bit.
[narrator] But when a team member goes missing...
I couldn't live with myself if something bad happened to one of my guys.
[narrator] Hunting gold in Alaska's frontier
suddenly becomes a matter of life and death.
Framer didn't come home last night.
This isn't a little thing.
A lot of people don't survive up here.
It's not looking very good.
Andy, I've got a load or so off the wall here.
Perfect.
[Carl] Not much pay left.
We pretty well milked the cow out.
We're just scraping the wall, trying to get the last little bit of it.
Froze, hard to get.
We'll get a few loads out of it.
But we're just trying to get what we can.
And if they don't get any more pay dirt,
it's not looking too great.
Just when I thought I started getting good at rock trucking,
I guess we're almost done with haulin' pay.
Definitely do not want the season to be ending early.
But by the looks of it,
it looks like we're dealing with our scraps or what we have left.
[Todd] This is it.
We scraped the last peanut butter from the jar.
[narrator] Todd planned to open three times as much ground
to get to 3,033 ounces.
But a couple weeks ago, inspectors came through with citations,
and will not allow Team Hoffman to open up any more ground.
[Todd] The only things we can run right now is pre-disturbed ground
and stuff we've already opened up.
What are you thinking, man?
So we might have a couple more days.
Maybe one or two more map holes and we got her, huh?
Yeah, and it'll be done.
It didn't go exactly as planned,
but we fought through it, you know?
As I often say.
There wasn't any part of it that went to a plan.
Nobody told us there was 10-12 feet of ice.
We moved mud around, We moved water around,
and we're at the mercy of these inspectors.
You know, It is what it is. That's where we're at.
So the guys have stacked at the plants
every bit of pay dirt that we can get out of the Lost Cut.
You know what, our original goal was to get 3,000 ounces.
And you know what? That's not gonna happen now.
I don't even think that there's gonna be enough in that Lost Cut
to even get us to 1,023.
The place has good gold, but it's hard to mine.
Let's, uh... let's figure this out,
If we don't hit at least 1,000 ounces,
we're gonna have a huge loss.
And the guys are not gonna take home what they need to take home.
So, we need to find some more pay dirt
from ground that we don't have to reopen up.
And when I say we, I mean Hunter.
Hopefully, we can come up with some more pay.
Otherwise, this is the end of our season.
All right, let's go.
[wind blowing]
[Hunter] I'm taking the Sherp out.
I'm a little bit off the beaten path.
I'm kind of going out and looking at some of the other areas
on the claim that have a good drill report.
This is not the way any of us wanted it to go,
and it's not the way I thought this season was going to go.
It's a huge bummer that we're facing some of these problems.
This was supposed to be the season that we broke our record.
And now, unfortunately, it's looking like another season
that we're just trying to survive.
The more the time goes on, the more pressure I'm feeling
to try to figure out some sort of a lifeline to save our season.
[narrator] To identify new sources of pay dirt,
Hunter must find thawed ground,
ideally gravel, that has already been disturbed by past miners
located close enough to a road from mine trucks to access.
Let me see.
I'm looking through the drill reports and the maps
to give me some sort of direction.
Before, when I was prospecting, I was looking for our future,
and now it's looking like I'm looking for our present.
If I can see some gravel sticking out on the surface
that means here's not a ton of overburden
and maybe we can just get paid right off of the top.
Right now, the Lost Cut's bone dry.
We're down to our last few days of the stacked Lost Cut pay.
So, the pressure is really on us right now.
[Framer] So, right now the loaders are stacking up pay,
and as a water expert, there's not a lot I can do.
So today is my one day off, and I'm taking advantage of it.
All right, see you guys after a bit.
I gotta get ready. I'm going on the caribou hunt today.
[Todd] We're running out of pay dirt.
Coming right to the end of it.
I wish we had more gold.
If Hunter doesn't find, you know, some pay dirt,
and we're gonna be out of dirt,
then it's gonna be a very big loss for the season.
It's not what I was hoping.
We have about two days of pay left.
Hunter needs to find some pay dirt and quick.
If we don't, we're gonna start bleeding money.
When you have an army of guys,
but they're not producing gold.
it gets pretty expensive pretty damn quick.
I won't even break even at this point.
If we don't hit at least 1,000 ounces,
I'm gonna be financially destroyed.
-Is Framer back yet? -[Todd] No, he's not back.
Starting to get worried.
Well, it's gonna be a long night.
And hopefully he knows what he's doing.
Hey, guys, we got a bit of a situation here with Framer.
Okay, here's the deal.
Um...
Framer didn't come home last night.
He went out to shoot a caribou and he went out a long ways.
You know how cold it got last night.
That's not good.
Did anybody know what he left with?
He just kind of left.
Well, I was asking him
what he had in case something happened,
He said, well, he's got two bottles of water and he's good.
Did he have a sat phone?
-He doesn't? -I don't think so.
What do you think, Tater? You're his best friend.
I'm just hoping he's stuck out there overnight because it was dark.
That's what I'm hoping.
Tater was up all night and worried about it,
and you could see the emotion in his eyes.
You know, these guys are... we've become pretty close with each other up here,
I feel a little bit like a failure,
but I just couldn't live with myself.
If something bad happened to one of my guys,
especially at the end of a tough season here.
You just never know out here and when you're by yourself
it's the coolest experience,
but it's also the most dangerous.
Oh. I didn't think we'd be dealing with this right here at the end
but here we go.
Early in the season, he had a leg injury.
Maybe we got a compounding issue or something.
I don't know. I think we ought to call the troopers
-and at least explained to 'em that we got a guy out you. -Yeah.
-[clears throat] -Alaska State trooper.
[phone dialing]
[man on phone] Thank you for...
Yeah. Hi. This is Todd Hoffman out here at Mammoth Valley mine.
I had a guy go out caribou hunting.
and he didn't... He didn't come in last night.
He's a pretty capable guy,
but normally he would try to reach us, you know?
[man] Okay, what's the guy's name, the hunter?
It's Micah Johnston.
[man] Was he on foot?
No, he had a quad.
[man] Did he tell anybody kind of a plan
-or what he was thinking of how long he'd be out? -Yeah.
Here's Andy.
Yeah. He just said he was going out towards, like Navigator and Windy Creek
and was going to make a loop probably 20-25 miles each way.
[man] When did he leave?
About 9:30 yesterday morning.
[man] I can get somebody out there to take a look around.
If you hear something, please give me a call, okay?
Will do.
-All right. Thank you, sir. -Thank you.
This isn't a little thing.
This is his life, you know?
-Yeah. -My prayer is for Framer
to come wheeling back in
and with a happy spirit on and everything.
But I can't say that for 100 percent that's gonna happen.
He would definitely be
under hypothermia if he has not passed away already.
[wind blowing]
[Tater] Framer's out there somewhere.
He never came back last night.
We're gonna go ahead and put a drone up.
It's got a pretty limited range,
but we're hoping that maybe
if he's somewhere close, we might get an eye on him.
It's gonna be a while before anybody gets here to actually go search.
In the meantime, we're going to do everything we can
to try and find him, get him back to camp.
[Andy] Framer went hunting yesterday.
He's been going for 24 hours.
We suspect he's out about 30-40 miles
out of camp with a four wheeler.
It's really vast out here.
A myriad of things could be wrong,
broken four wheeler, crashed, hurt.
It could be anything, and we have no way
to communicate with him, so we don't know.
We have an idea of the route he took and where he's at.
He said he was gonna go up Atlas Creek and down an outer ridge,
So we're just going to kind of scan here.
Up through Atlas Creek
and then out on the ridgeline he was gonna take.
I mean, there's a lot of area out there,
and if he isn't on the route, it would be easy to miss him.
Framer's a very experienced cutter.
He grew up in southeast Alaska,
so it's not a real big concern for his abilities.
But with the terrain and the animals out here,
you never know what could happen.
He's my best friend.
I don't want it to be like he's stuck under a four-wheeler or something,
because then I wouldn't be able to live with myself, seriously.
We're going down the road just past Atlas.
It looks like there's some faint wheeler tracks down there.
But It's hard to tell.
But I'm not seeing anybody.
I really don't know what to do. This is really bad.
[Todd] Just when I thought this season couldn't get any worse,
one of my guys goes missing.
I don't know. A little scary, you know,
Just sent the guys back to work
to churn through all the rest of the pay dirt,
and then Tater and I are gonna try to do everything we can to find Framer.
[wind blowing]
[Hunter] I'm up here on the Plateau.
I'm a little bit off the beaten path,
kind of going out and looking at some of the other areas on the claim.
I'm hoping I can find Framer.
As of right now, it's not looking good.
So I'm going out on this point here because from the main road,
it looks like there's some sort of gravel
or something out here.
It's kind of a stretch, but right now,
every other place I've looked is frozen or it's too far from a road.
So I'm seeing what looks like old tailings
on part of the Plateau here,
so obviously somebody has tried to mine up here at one point
and there's a ton of exposed gravel.
The weird part is it all looks like bedrock
and not even any overburden at all.
But right now, if it's not thawed ground,
it's really not even gonna be any help to us.
I believe we're right here.
My only concern is we're really far away from the plant,
and I don't even know with three trucks
if we could keep up at this distance.
But I got to just check out every option
and, um, you know, bring it back to the guys and see what we want to do.
I mean, this all looks like thawed pay.
It's different than the Lost Cut,
but this is what we're looking for.
It's not frozen. There's a lot of rock.
There's dirt in it.
It's just not in the most convenient spot.
This was kind of one of the last places I wanted to look
because it has no drill reports.
I don't know if there's gold here.
This is literally my last ditch effort
to try to find something that we can run to just salvage this season.
We'll see what my dad and Andy want to do.
It's a long haul from the plant,
but hopefully this is what's gonna save us.
Hey, Andy, Do you want me to drop this next to you?
[Andy] Yeah. Right there, buddy.
-Thanks. -[Nick] Copy that.
[Andy] We're hauling out the road.
The last little bit of pay that's underneath of it,
a little pit on both sides and that's it.
[Todd] So this is our last ditch effort to scrape every bit of pay
that we can get out of the Lost Cut.
When we built this road, I put several feet of gravel
on top of a base layer of frozen pay.
Carl's out there right now,
removing the gravel to get that rich pay that's underneath.
[Andy] Everybody that's ever been here before us
has failed, literally in over 100 years, and we can see why.
Because the challenges that are here and the logistics of getting things here,
is an absolute nightmare.
So when one thing goes wrong, it can just be a domino effect
of everything else that can go wrong. You know, what do you do?
Quit and go home or you just finish it.
And we're gonna finish it
and get as much as we possibly can out of this.
It's been good pay all the way through here,
and it should be good pay underneath the road.
[Andy] Carl, you want me to pull up?
[Carl] Yeah, please.
But once he's done scraping,
that'll be the end of this cut.
If Hunter doesn't find any other prospects for us to target,
then, might be going home early.
We're gonna run out of pay dirt,
so we're definitely in trouble.
I'm wore out.
I feel like I've aged ten years.
You know what? I don't know if I can handle any more of this stress,
running out of pay dirt.
The troopers are out trying to find Framer.
We don't know if he's dying or what's going on, so this is crazy.
It's not over, so...
What are you finding out there?
-Anything? -Yeah.
I mean, I've gone out into Atlas Creek, over by Joe Creek
at the very top of North Fork all the way down into Carey Creek.
-Okay. -You know, and there's gold at all of them.
But if you're saying we can't disturb the tundra,
we kind of have both of our hands tied behind our back.
And so, the last place I checked,
it was up here on the Plateau, which isn't drilled.
but there's exposed gravel up here and it seems thawed.
And there's pay right on the surface.
So I don't see any other option.
And you've got some exposed gravel close to the road.
I mean, it checks all the boxes.
The question is, does it have enough gold in it, you know?
But maybe beggars can't be choosers at this point.
No, I mean, I still think it's a miracle
-that we found anything thawed right now. -We just need to test it.
If there's... if there's no gold in that gravel, we're done.
A hundred percent.
There is nothing else.
[Todd] Hunter, take a truck,
go out there, get some of that pay dirt and test it.
Okay.
Let's find the results and then let's find out if it's really worth it.
If not, then we're gonna go ahead and pack it in.
-Go home early. -Okay.
Thanks, Hunter.
I'm getting down to the needle now.
So, Hunter's been out prospecting lately,
and he's doing a damn good job at it.
But, you know, if he doesn't find our saving grace,
we're completely screwed,
and we're not gonna reach to our goal this season.
Just digging into the road at this point.
We basically only got like a couple of truckloads left of pay,
and that's pretty much it for the rest of the season.
We're running every inch of that cut
and get as much gold as we possibly can.
We worked really hard to get it out of the ground
and make sure that I don't leave anything behind.
[Todd] We're going to run out of pay dirt in the Lost Cut
after digging up the road.
On top of that, I've got a guy missing.
Are you kidding me?
It's really hard to actually work
while we know we've got a guy missing out there who could be dying.
That's it, guys, that's enough. No more rush, boys.
Copy that. Last truckload.
That's done.
So I don't know what's going to happen.
[Tater] It looks like there's some faint wheeler tracks down there
but it's hard to tell.
But it looks like that's what we're looking at, there's the road.
Looks like somebody's been out on it recently.
Knowing Framer, he'd be on the road
because that's where we'd be looking for him,
trying to follow the track he's on.
It looks like four wheeler tracks over here.
Which would make sense 'cause the road's really wet.
So this is probably the way he went out.
That's what he said he was gonna do.
Oh. Whoa!
Looks like we have him.
Hey, Todd.
-[Todd] Yeah? -We got him.
He's walking down by Atlas.
-No way. -He's limping.
[Todd] Like, how bad?
Like, he's limping pretty bad, dude.
Well, we better go get him.
-[Todd] All right. -[Tater] That's less than a mile.
[Todd] I'll grab Thurber, and a two quads, and we'll go grab him.
-[Tater] Okay. -[Todd] Couple miles out?
[Tater] Yeah. He's not far out there.
[Todd] He sees your drone.
-[Tater] Oh, yeah. -[Todd] He knows we got him.
[Tater] He knows we got him.
It's good news.
We found him. He's been out all night.
Who knows how long he's been walking?
My guess is, a long time.
[Thurber] They just picked him up on the drone, which is a good thing.
He's walking, limping pretty bad.
So he's been walking a while.
It's been over 24 hours.
He could have broke down the first thing yesterday,
and he's been walking ever since.
So, he's pretty exhausted looking.
He's right there over the hill.
-Am I right? -Yep. Ready?
Let's go.
[wind blowing]
-[Thurber] You survived. -[Framer] Oh, man.
I'm so happy to see you guys.
Hey, what happened?
[Framer] I lost my gas can. Somewhere, I ran out of gas.
[Thurber] Where's your quad, do you know?
Nineteen miles from here.
[Thurber] Did you GPS it?
Yeah, I got GPS... GPS.
So how far have you hiked in this stuff?
-About 19 miles? -As the crow flies.
-Jeez. -Yeah.
[bleep], dude.
How's your leg?
It wasn't that bad until about 8 miles ago.
All right, Well, get on there.
-Let's get you back. -Let's get you back. Yeah.
Yeah.
[engines starting]
We got you, buddy. Let's get you back to camp.
Try to get you fixed up.
Get him some fluids and wrap his knee up.
[Framer] So I've been walking for the last 19 hours
on an injured knee
and never would have thought that I'd be so happy to see these guys.
[laughs]
[Tater] Where'd you run out of gas at?
[Framer] I found some caribou and I started chasing 'em.
And I stopped, I'm like, "I better check my gas.
I'm getting way the hell out of here."
And I opened it, I'm like, [bleep],
quarter of a tank, I'm cutting close.
And I looked back and my gas can was gone.
I was out of gas.
[Todd] How long have you been hiking?
-All night? -Started hiking at 4 o' clock yesterday afternoon,
-You hiked all night? -Hiked all night.
I took a about an hour nap about six o'clock this morning.
[Tater] I'm glad you're back.
-He twisted his knee coming in and that's the problem. -[Tater] Okay, okay.
-Yeah? -Yeah.
I... I messed this knee up bad and then limping on it,
now my hip's all messed up, too.
[Jack] A lot of people that don't survive up here.
and it's one of the places that is...
it's severe, you know.
He survived and I'm grateful for that.
The absolute best case scenario happened.
You've got to have a lot of guts to survive something like that.
One more night, It would have been curtains for you.
Well, we're glad you're here.
Where the heck are we going to find Tater a new friend?
Best friend.
-Good luck. -Yeah.
Next step, you need to get off that knee.
-Get some water. -[Tater] Let's get you in here.
Get some ice and get some stuff on your leg.
-[Tater] I'm just glad you're fine, dude. -[Framer groans]
[Todd] He's gonna be limping, but he's going to make it home to his family.
I've gotta call everybody off.
Call the troopers off,
make sure everybody knows we found him and that he's okay.
Could have easily been rolled on, killed by a bear.
Accidentally shot, you know? You just never know out here.
[wind blowing]
[Hunter] You know, right now there's a lot of pressure on me
to try to figure out what we're gonna do
because the Lost Cut's about out of pay,
I'm kind of switching gears and heading in a new direction
to this area called the Plateau.
Just here by myself and I don't really care how I have to do it.
I'm gonna get it done
because the Plateau might be basically our life preserver,
and it's actually close enough to a road where we can get some trucks in here.
It's not frozen. It has gravel.
And so right now I'm just trying to figure out
what kind of gold it has or not.
I got to just go off of my gut and there is some gold.
Try to get some of this gravel into a truck.
I want to try to run 1,000 yards with the Black Pearl.
Maybe it's good. Maybe it's not.
It's a huge risk, but I want everybody to win
and I want my grandpa to have a good last season.
But right now, this is all I've got.
So if the Plateau doesn't pay out,
then I don't really know what we're gonna do.
[wind blowing]
[Spencer] I gotta check and look at your knee.
Yeah. Whoa.
[Spencer speaking]
[Framer] No, if I sit up, I can't.
-[Framer groans] -[Spencer] Yeah.
It's like this tendon right here.
-Right on the outside? -Mmm-hmm.
Does that go anywhere else or is it just all over last--
-Just right there. -Okay, is it constant?
Come and go?
It's just when I try and move my leg,
either forward or back. I just can't pick my leg up.
[Spencer] Yeah, yeah.
[Framer groans]
[Spencer] What about when you extend it?
[Framer] Oh, yeah, I can... I can move my foot.
-Okay. -I just can't pick my leg up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but just the foot.
-Yeah. I'm-- Yeah. -You have a range of motion there?
-Okay. -It's... it's fine.
You feel me touching your toes and everything?
-Yeah. -Okay.
[Framer] I just need to take a shower into the bed.
[Spencer] All right, sir. You are in stable condition.
And by your spirits, I think you're doing well.
We're happy to have you back.
Happy to be back.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
-Framer. -Yo.
What happened, dude?
-We were worried about you, man. -Ran out of gas, man.
Yeah. I'm glad you made it, dude.
Truly, we were worried about it for a second.
What was going through your head when, like, the fricking quad turned off
and it's like, oh, frick, you're in the middle of nowhere?
I was like... this is gonna be a long, long night.
-[laughs] -Dude.
Bring it in, man.
I'm glad... I'm glad you're... glad you're good, dude.
-Yeah. -Holy frick.
[Framer] What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?
It's a super big relief that Framer's back.
He's gonna take it easy while he lets his knee heal up.
I think the guys are kind of renewed
now that we've found Framer.
That's really going to help us push ahead and finish strong.
[man 1] I want to run some more pay dirt
so I can bring home some more frickin' cash.
[man 2] Yeah.
This whole season's been fighting fires.
You've got a melting cut
and government agencies constantly want to shut us down.
It's like we've been fighting this whole season for this freaking pay dirt.
[sighs]
Hard freaking work and not anybody can do it.
Last few buckets and the Lost Cut will be finished up.
I think everybody had, you know,
a lot of high hopes for this season.
We wanted a lot more out of this cut
and didn't get what we thought we'd get.
I put a lot of work into it and a lot of long days,
and it sucks to kind of see it come up short handed.
This is my last bucket here and then passing off Sparky
and, uh, this is gonna be it for the Lost Cut.
Hopefully, this is the one that puts us up there,
and it's remembered because clean ups so far haven't been very good.
So I think everybody's hoping
it goes good, and, uh, it's more than we think.
It's all you, Sparks. It's my last one.
[Sparky] All right, buddy. I'll take us home on this one.
Now the Dakota's dropped off the last load from the Lost Cut,
It's a good thing that Hunter's dropping dirt from the Plateau
to the Black Pearl for a test run.
And if there's a bunch of gold in that dirt,
Hunter's prospecting can save us from this bad situation.
Hopefully, we come out here with at least 1,000 ounces.
We'll see how this box fricking looks.
Hopefully, it's shining back, or it's as dull as an unsharpened pencil.
[Hunter] If we're gonna make this move,
I wanna make sure that it's gonna be worth it.
Running some thawed pay through the Black Pearl right now
um, is a good feeling,
because this might just be the thing that that keeps us in the game.
The Plateau is a longer haul, and once we make that switch, there's no going back.
We're running about 1000 yards here,
and, you know, I'm pretty excited to see if it's actually good.
I guess only time will tell, But I have really high hopes for this.
I'm excited to see what's in it.
Hopefully, it's worth it.
Grandpa would always say we're all millionaires.
We just got to get it out of the ground.
Yeah, I agree with that.
So we started out this season, guns blazing, you know,
we were putting up some good numbers, had some good cleanups.
-137.3. -Whoo!
-That's awesome. -Wow.
[Hunter] And then, you know, we're hitting some major roadblocks.
We're getting hit with inspections,
weather, everything you can imagine.
But, you know, we've faced a lot of adversity before,
and I've seen my dad you know, push through and continue on.
So that's exactly what we're gonna do now.
You know, stay positive and just work with
you know, what we've got right now
and and pretty much all we have is this Plateau.
If the Plateau pays out and it does have good gold,
we can run this material for the rest of the season.
Hmm...
High risk, high reward. That's what it's all about.
Hey, Sparky, how many buckets you got left?
[Todd] We're coming down to the wire here.
It looks like we're about... about out of pay here.
From the Lost Cut. Got a couple more buckets and then we're done.
This is where you say something about lemonade.
We're gonna take the gold that we've got here,
and we're gonna make the best of it.
We're gonna do a cleanup.
Hopefully, it's pretty big and go from there.
I'm not happy with some of the situations.
But you know what?
That's gold mining. Sometimes you run into things that you just can't control.
A lot of people can't live with that and deal with that.
And you know what? I barely can, too.
All right. This is the last bucket right here.
The last bucket.
And that's it for the Lost Cut, boys.
That's it.
So this is the last bit of pay dirt from the Lost Cut.
And after this, it's all gonna be Plateau dirt or no dirt at all.
So that's where we're at.
That's all she wrote. The Lost Cut has been picked clean.
All right, let's shut down the Holy Roller and get these maps pulled.
There's gold in it.
If it's in there, it's in there.
Something right there in the middle.
I haven't seen it up there for a while.
You know what, every little bit's gonna count here.
This is it.
Hopefully, Hunter's prospecting is our saving grace.
Let's just pull the whole damn box,
and go up there and do a full cleanup.
[man coughs]
It's pretty clean.
-Wow. -There's a little bit of material in there.
Hopefully, that's all gold.
I'm sure there's several ounces here
-in every nook and cranny, -hopefully.
I got Employee of the Week.
[chuckles]
It was kind of a participation trophy if anything.
It was more just a being here trophy.
But we don't actually have a trophy.
We got some crayons on the notebook paper that we're gonna--
They have crayons. You know that?
-Yeah. -I eat 'em.
This team right here,
all these young guys, man, we've got a great team.
Who cut Luke's hair? You cut your own hair?
-My God. -He's lucky, he got ran over by a lawn mower.
Little baby. [chuckles]
Don't... delete that one.
It's really nice seeing these two guys work together.
They've been fighting a little bit.
Yeah, yeah.
-Yeah, but that's just-- -That's just the end of the year.
-I love you guys. -That's the state of nature.
There's no more pay on the Lost Cut.
We've scratched every pebble that we can get out of it.
This cut is officially done.
So what we have to do in reclamation is we have to take
all the overburden that I pushed off,
and we'll just bring it back down into the cut,
smooth it out and put a dozer on top of it
and just kind of round it off and contour it back
to the contour of the landscape.
And then this material has a lot of seeds and organics in it.
It will just revegetate itself.
And in a few years, It'll look like nothing was ever done here.
How many ounces per 100 are you hoping for?
You know, we'll see what it pays out at,
but I haven't seen too much ground around here.
that's worse than an ounce a 100, but we'll see.
Right now we're about to do the cleanup
for the Plateau test, and we ran about 1,000 yards.
You know, we can get a good idea now,
but we're not really gonna know until the cleanup is done.
You know, we don't have a lot of options left.
I'm going to set this in the end.
-Is that cool or no? -Yeah.
Honestly, I don't know if I've ever been more stressed out than I am right now,
but everybody is under a lot of stress.
The gold that is or isn't in these mats is basically going to determine
the outcome of our mining company, our paychecks and, honestly,
the success or failure of my grandpa's last season.
So, there's a lot of pressure right now.
We'll see if it's gonna be enough for us to save our ass.
[Jack] I'll take anything.
As long as it's gold, I'll take it.
You know, right now, we're running the Plateau cut.
We need this to be really good.
We're in desperate mode
and desperate people will take risks sometimes,
and I think that maybe this is worth the risk.
The Plateau could be good.
You just have to run it weigh it, go from there.
If this is good, we're throwing all the eggs in the basket.
We're going to run it until we're done.
There's gold in here.
We just have to find out how much there is.
Guys want to take gold home,
We need it.
Tough part of the season. I hope it's good.
So, guys, we're hoping for at least 80 ounces this week.
Where are we at with the Lost Cut?
So what Jack's got in that jar is... that's the end of it.
There's no more. That cut has fought us from day one.
Mudslides, water problems, ice lenses, broken dozers.
-I mean... -We're hammering the reclamation,
bringing that dirt back into the cut.
In a year, year and a half from now,
it'll be all lush green and look good again.
Like the... like it was before we touched it.
-So... -So how did that Plateau go?
1,000 yards.
Uh, it went really good. It's easy to run.
It's easy to get to, a lot of gravel.
-Yeah. -We didn't have to strip it.
The material runs really good through the plant,
and so I think it went as good as it could.
All right, so we'll see the last of the Lost Cut.
Dad, just pour it right on there.
Twenty, 27, 20... 36, 45.
So that was 46 ounces from the Lost Cut.
-That's it? --Final.
Now, let's weigh what Hunter got from the Plateau.
Let's hope it's good.
It's do or die.
[Jack] Ready. Here we go.
Five, 10, 13, 14.
14.6.
Wow, I'll take that right now.
That's almost an ounce half a 100.
Can't complain about it.
What do you guys think? Andy?
If it runs easy and then we can run it fast,
I think it's probably worth doing.
It's the only gold we've got at this point.
Well, good job, Hunter. You found something good.
I'm sure it's not gonna be easy. It's a long ways.
But, hey, we got some pay dirt next week.
We'll be digging that stuff and running it through the plant.
We've got 60.6 ounces.
What's our total?
765?
[narrator] The total combined cleanup from the Plateau
and the last of the Lost Cut brings in 60.6 ounces of gold,
about $115,000 for the Hoffman team.
And puts them 265 ounces away from their season goal.
So we're... we're getting there.
Everything's expensive, though, as we well know.
So let's keep grinding and push forward and head towards the Plateau.
Hopefully onward and upward.
Good job, guys. Let's get back to work.