[narrator] As the winter freeze
threatens to shut down operations...
God, I miss Palm Springs.
[narrator] ...the Hoffman crew must find a way to extract
a cool quarter million dollars
in gold from the frozen ground...
[Dakota] That's not supposed to be there.
[Sparky] Huge ice chunks are just destroying the Holy Roller.
[narrator] ...or return home at a heartbreaking loss.
[Jim] There's gold getting left behind.
[narrator] But to glean the 136 ounces they need
to turn a profit...
[Hunter] If we can get some more good pay,
we might get out of here without losing our ass.
[narrator] ...they'll have to break
the conventional rules of mining in the Arctic.
It's definitely a Hail Mary.
We've had some pretty crazy ideas this year,
but this one tops all of them.
[Todd] Winter's knocking at the door.
It's very, very cold. Sometimes it's wet.
It's almost impossible to mine right now.
[Todd] Keep going, guys. Good job.
[Sterling] You betcha.
[Todd] Plateau dirt gave us a great payout last week,
but even that's starting to freeze up.
We're 136 ounces short of our goal.
And the winter's trying to kick us out of here.
But we're not gonna stop until we get it.
The weather's gonna make it tough, but we're tougher.
Hey, Sparky, you wear your long johns today?
Nope.
[Sterling] I did.
It's getting cold, dude. It's nippy.
[laughs]
This pay is frozen solid.
For right now,
we're dropping all our pay in
kind of our small tailings area,
because we are processing it.
Right now that's what I'm doing.
I'm crushing up any of the big pieces.
We got trucks bringing pay to me.
So I can
smash up some of the bigger ice chunks.
So we got to throw some extra steps.
We're running out of time this season.
And it's just inefficient
with this short amount of time that we have right now.
[Jack speaking]
10-4.
Let's go. Go ahead and fire it up.
[Hunter] Sadly, the Black Pearl somehow caught on fire.
And right now we're running Jack's plant
as one of our main plants.
We did some modifications on it
to try to speed up our yardage.
We just need enough gold
to try to get us at least over a thousand.
Then, uh,
you know, we might
get out of here without losing our ass.
I never ever thought
that I'd be running a plant that I built
on the last season, mining. You know?
My plant's saving their butt.
The plateau pay,
we know what it pays.
121.7.
That's pretty good, boys.
Yeah! Woo!
[Jack] But it's frozen, so it is what it is.
We're gonna run this up, and, uh,
it will run fairly easy
through this plant.
[Sterling speaking]
[Dakota speaking]
[Dakota] The hopper's got a pretty thin chute up there.
We don't have any grizzly bars on it.
So all this big frozen pay
is just getting stuck up there right now.
So every time too big a one gets stuck,
we got to shut down and get it out.
I mean, we got to do it safely,
so everything's got to get shut down every single time.
So it just costs a lot of time.
[Todd] At this point, every minute that we're down
hurts my bottom line.
Every time we have to stop the Holy Roller
to get these ice chunks out,
we're losing thousands of dollars.
[Andy] It's gonna be a battle for a bit.
It just sucks.
But it is what it is, okay?
- Yep. - Thank you.
- Push that up to the back. - Hey, maybe we all grab on.
[Sparky] Maybe we grab on. Tug of war, dude.
Tug of war with pay.
- [Dakota] Oh, yeah. - [Sparky] Oh [bleep]!
[Dakota] I don't think this is a normal thing on a mine,
but it's happening right now.
[Sparky] Yippee!
That's not supposed to be there.
[Sparky] You know, the plateau is a nice idea,
but we're way too late in the season.
Huge ice chunks are just
destroying screens on the Holy Roller.
I have no idea how long we have
to run this through.
[Dakota] You know what that'll do to the screens?
[Dakota] But it doesn't fit through the hopper.
And I can't go through the chute
with the plant on or the water on,
so I have to shut it down.
[Dakota] That's what I've been doing,
but I have to shut off
when it gets stuck inside the chute.
- [Dakota] Are we clear? - [Sparky] Clear.
All right, Sterling, go ahead.
The other one was twice that size.
[Jim] What?
We're just gonna struggle with it a little bit.
We're gonna have to shut the plant down
probably periodically from time to time.
Um, the thing is
that we've got to do is, we've got to get it fired right back up
and get it running, so...
I've done
all this stuff before, and I know it sucks
when you can't get in a rhythm,
but, uh,
we just do the best we can.
[narrator] While the crew battles ice chunks
and downtime at the Holy Roller,
the Jack Rabbit's simpler shaker deck design
allows it to discard ice chunks
without incurring screen damage,
enabling Jack's lower-volume wash plant
to run a more consistent flow of pay dirt.
Trying to get some more ounces on the board
for Jack's last season. We had a...
[clearing throat] Terrible year.
Had a lot of issues.
And, uh,
you know, our gold count reflects that.
And nothing's gonna thaw at this point in the year,
so, time is running out.
But at this point, I'm just
committed to do whatever we need to do
to get as much gold as possible.
[Jim speaking]
It's running a little dirty.
Maybe slow it down just a little bit.
[Jim] You know, running frozen pay
not only plugs up the plant,
now I'm seeing dirty gravel
coming out of the plant, which, to me,
it means we're losing gold.
I'm gonna test it to make sure,
but the pay's frozen.
Chunks are coming through there.
It's not good.
Okay, let's see what the test tells us.
[Jim] I've been down at the plant.
I see chunks of ice coming through.
The gravels aren't clean.
That tells me that
they're just not getting washed properly.
I pan and check the tailings.
A lot of gold in here.
This goes from real super-fine to pretty coarse gold
that's been through our plant.
So that doesn't make me feel good.
We're getting a lot of it,
but there's a lot more that we're leaving behind.
They're pretty proud that they're running
300 yards an hour.
Uh, that makes me cringe.
And I checked.
And unfortunately, I was correct.
Doesn't take a scientist
to figure this out. Dirty rocks.
A lot of mud. A lot of frozen stuff.
I see chunks of ice coming through.
I mean, there's gold getting left behind.
So, uh, it's bad.
We got some stuff to figure out.
Things to do different.
I gotta get ahold of Todd.
We gotta do something.
Okay.
Hi, Dakota.
[Dakota] Okay. The situation is not good.
Not ideal. Less than ideal.
When they're not getting stuck in the trommel,
a lot of these big chunks are just flying out the end
into the tailings.
So what we're doing, we're bringing them back over to Carl,
and Carl's gonna smash them up,
and then we'll run it through the plant again.
It's a little tedious,
but we have to give it everything we got.
[Dakota speaking]
[Jim] Well,
this is a sample I took out of the tailings.
[Jack] What the heck?
[Jim] Yeah.
I saw a lot of mud in the gravel,
took baseball-sized clump of dirt,
put it in the pan, and that is
honest to God...
[Andy] God dang, that is rich.
Yeah, that's been through the plant, so...
It was frozen,
but that's why I called you in here.
We got to do something.
That's not kind of
a little bit of gold.
- That's a lot of gold. - [Andy] Yeah.
We got to make a change, 100%.
$2,000 an hour,
$20,000 a day.
The problem is, no matter what you do,
you're not gonna get balls of it to come out.
- We're not gonna get it all. - [Andy] No.
But that's like several ounces an hour.
[Jim] Yeah.
[Andy] Right now we're having
a lot of problems with the plateau,
and that is because we've got frozen pay in there.
We know there's gold in the ground,
but right now it's going through the plant
and it's coming out with frozen chunks.
It's late enough in the year,
there's just no way to thaw it.
So I don't know how much longer
we can run this material.
Maybe we're going a little too quick, Andy.
Maybe we just take it down a notch,
bring the water down.
Thurber, I think you ought to go down there
and just watch it and try to adjust it.
And with Dakota, too.
- Like, you two work together. - Right.
We'll go with what you guys think.
[Andy] God, it's nasty stuff, though.
- No, I agree. - Just nasty stuff.
[Todd] We're losing enough gold.
I think we got to make some adjustments to the plant.
But with this plateau ice causing us so many problems,
we're gonna have to come up with a new plan,
and fast.
We only have maybe one, maybe two weeks left
to reach our goal of 1,023.
I mean, we definitely need to make a change.
What that is, I don't know.
Hey, Dakota, what are we gonna start out with on the water?
[Dakota] Do you want to go what we were at
or do you want to go lower?
Yeah, let's just go where we were at
and then we'll adjust from there.
[Dakota] 10-4.
I want to take a look at what we were doing.
Same water, same feed.
We're gonna adjust one or both of those things
to see if we can up our capture rate on this goal.
1,370 RPMs
is where, uh, we've been running it.
I just think it's too much.
With all the ice balls that are coming out
of the plateau dirt.
Hey, Caleb, are you still down there?
[Caleb speaking]
[Todd] Okay, bring me down to 1,340.
[Caleb speaking]
[Todd] Better speed.
It still looks quick to me.
It still looks fast.
Give me 1,300.
Bring it down again. 1,300.
[Caleb speaking]
What's your thoughts?
[Jim] I think it looks good.
I mean, I like the speed
at the water, but...
Because we were going at
45 seconds to a minute a bucket,
is what we were at.
And then they started going, you know, up and up.
[Todd speaking]
Yeah, let's don't go more than one bucket a minute.
[Tater] 10-4. [speaking indistinctly]
[Todd] There's a lot to it
to get your plant to run optimally.
You have to find the right water speed
and feed rate.
That balance can be changed
according to the pay
that you're actually putting through the plant.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a good way
to run chunks of icy pay.
What I want to see is the clean rocks,
but I don't want to see that.
That's a big chunk of ice.
I mean...
None of us want to see this when you're mining.
This is ice. It's not good.
[Todd] I don't know, I kind of like this speed.
Okay, we're gonna run this at
one bucket a minute and 1,300.
[Caleb speaking]
I feel better with the changes we're gonna try and make.
It seems to be washing cleaner,
but we still have the frozen chunks of pay.
And, you know,
running frozen pay, there's nothing we can do
about the fact that we're blowing gold out of the plant.
We're doing the best we can with,
again, what we have, so...
[Todd] Let's just slow it down
and get into a really nice little rhythm here.
It's never easy.
They always say if it was easy,
everyone would be doing it.
Maybe they're more sane than we are. I don't know.
[Todd] It's getting cold.
Winter's coming, man.
It's snowing right over there right now.
I mean, it's getting cold. Any day could be snow. So...
I think we're approaching the end.
I mean, in the plateau dirt,
they're starting to get frozen chunks in it.
[Todd] I can see that. They're getting ice chunks
- coming through the plant. - Yeah.
It's already a long haul,
and now we're having to slow the plant down
to get that material through it.
And we're losing gold
that's not getting washed because it's frozen.
What do we got left?
Think about what we have left.
Upper Dahl, anywhere.
Maybe even 1,000 yards.
Is there anything we can grab?
Anything.
So last year when we were at Upper Dahl...
- [Todd] Yeah? - ...there was a section of the road
built out of tailings from the old-timers,
but we left the road in because we needed the road.
We're not mining up there right now.
It's not frozen.
Think we could take a little bit of that?
[Andy] We could probably take some of that and then
just wash it and put the gravel back in the hole.
[Todd] How long will that get us?
It's not gonna buy us more than a week,
but it's something.
Could be $20,000, $30,000 in gold.
- Who knows? $50,000? Who knows? - Yeah.
Desperate times call for desperate measures,
- I guess. - Yeah.
[Andy] You know, yesterday Thurber was panning the tailings
and it got me thinking
what happened to the guys here before us
when they were mining?
And did they have the same problems?
Because the gravel that's used out of those tailings
is what you build the roads with around here.
And maybe, hopefully, there's some gold in it.
At this point, it might be our only hope
to finish out the season strong.
Every little bit at this point helps.
- [Todd] Yeah. - So it will be thawed,
so let's try.
[Todd] So digging up the road,
obviously, is unorthodox.
It's a pretty crazy move, but, you know,
we need to run pay
while we still have running water.
This whole area is rich,
and we know that there's gold
in the old miners' tailings,
and we know that there's gold in these roads.
Man, let's take it.
- [Andy] Okay. - Let's just take everything we can,
do the best we can.
I know this hasn't turned out the way we wanted.
All we can do is control our effort,
not the outcome.
And hopefully get some more gold.
- Okay. - [Todd] Want to do it?
Yeah, we'll dig it out.
- [Todd] All right. - [Andy] Sounds good.
[Todd] That road might have the gold we're after.
[Sparky] Andy, I can't believe we're running the road, man.
[Andy] There's a little bit of pay in here,
we might as well get it done
and let's get back to mining.
Finish out the season strong. That's all that matters.
[Sparky] You got it, buddy.
All right. Just come up here, guys.
Just whip in.
Back out. Okay.
[Sparky] You got it, Andy.
[Andy] We know that the end is approaching.
Been here a long time,
and right now, it's just get every ounce that we possibly can.
So this part of the road was never mined,
and there is a little bit of virgin ground underneath.
So you do what you gotta do
to get the gold, and it's our last little bit
that we're gonna get this season, so...
It's the only place that I know that's left that's got it,
so we're gonna haul this material down to the plant,
wash it.
At the end, you do what you gotta do to get the gold.
And this is what we got to do to
put more, uh, ounces in the box.
We've had some pretty crazy ideas this year,
but this one tops all of them.
Digging up the road. I've never seen this happen.
But you know what? We have no choice.
This road is just loaded with gold.
Years and years of gold.
So maybe we can bring home a little goal bonus.
Maybe I can buy myself
a new pair of boots. Who knows?
[Andy] Hey, Todd, you copy? Getting the pay ready to haul.
[Todd] Okay, Dakota, let's get going.
[Dakota] [bleep]. Andy?
[Andy] Yeah, go ahead.
[Dakota speaking]
[Andy] Why?
[Dakota speaking]
So this morning we came down and tried to fire up,
and we had some hydraulics get plugged up with ice.
It froze last night.
It's kind of a surprise ice-up we had.
[Andy speaking]
[Dakota speaking]
We got our first freeze last night,
and that means winter's here.
It was 29 degrees this morning.
So Andy's digging up the road,
so we have some thawed-out pay dirt to run,
but...
now the Holy Roller needs thawed out before we can run it.
You got it.
Gotta get some heaters on these.
I can get it fired up here.
[Tater] Ah, four-inch pipes
on the side of that are probably frozen, too.
[narrator] To melt the ice in the hoses,
the crew must build a makeshift heating chamber
out of two-by-fours, a tarp,
and an industrial propane heater.
But while the four-inch pipes thaw...
[Tater] It's gonna take a hot minute.
[narrator] ...a bigger problem emerges
in the hydraulic riffles.
Top's frozen.
[Tater] Is it solid frozen?
[Dakota] Yeah.
Did you grab that torch out of Framers' truck?
[Dakota] No.
I didn't grab it.
[Sterling] So water travels
through these hydraulic riffles,
and they hold water,
and overnight, we had our first freeze.
So we have to thaw these out before we can run.
And right now the best way to do it is with...
a propane torch.
So, I mean, if you look around,
there's bellies in pipes. There's all these places
where water can settle inside
the plant infrastructure.
There's always a lot of, like,
opportunity for frozen water every day.
Then with the weather changing right now,
our first freeze
slows everything down.
And add this to our morning routine.
So this is, uh, with the first freeze,
it's like the final countdown.
[Tater] [bleep]!
[bleep]!
Hey, Dakota, we're gonna need some hose.
[Dakota] Are they cracked?
[Tater] Yes.
[Dakota speaking]
[Tater sighs]
Once the hoses had started to thaw out,
I saw that the ice had caused them to crack,
which makes them unusable.
So now we need to replace them before we can run the plant.
Uh, this will probably set us back an hour and a half,
two hours, just this morning, because we weren't prepared.
Pretty sure this means the end of the warm,
and now the real fight begins with freezing temperatures.
We can expect this every morning,
probably from here on out.
[chuckles] And there's still ice in it.
That means less running time.
That means less gold in the sluice.
We just gotta fight it and make the best of it.
That's all we can do.
Try not to get angry.
We gotta do a little better.
Hey. So the plant's frozen over here.
Don't know how long it's gonna be.
Well, as you know,
gold mining doesn't come with term and conditions, man.
The winter is pretty unforgiving.
I guess, uh,
we have to figure it out.
I mean,
what else we got?
[Tater] Welcome to Nome when it's cold.
Don't get much better than this.
[Tater] It's a good time. It's what we do at Nome.
We thaw things out.
[Todd] We got new pay coming to the plant.
How's it coming, guys?
[Tater] It's coming. We're working on it.
[Todd] I know these guys are doing their best,
but we are literally running out of time.
We have new pay on the way, and we need to get
this plant up and running now.
This hose has just been here for a couple years now.
It's all worn down, so it just caved in on itself.
So we got some new hose.
We're gonna have to swap this side out,
and hopefully be running here by this afternoon.
After this, that means probably no more thaw.
It's gonna be probably cold from here on out,
so it's gonna be a lot more work
and a lot more tedious,
but just gonna have to push through it.
[Tater] We got them all covered.
You know what we didn't bring is any dish soap, did we?
Point the heater at the end of that hose for a minute.
Don't get it too hot.
We can't mess these up.
If we do, we're out, officially.
[Dakota] I hate winter.
[Tater] So overnight, the hoses froze,
the hydraulic riffles froze.
It's just a whole mess.
We knew it was gonna be a little cold.
We didn't know it was gonna be this cold, did we, Dakota?
[Dakota] No.
[Tater] There you go.
We're gonna fire it up,
see if the water all flows where we need it to flow,
and get to work.
Be clear of the trommel. Clear the trommel.
[Todd] You guys ready?
[Dakota] Yeah, everything's looking good so far.
[Todd] Let's get to it.
This is the pay dirt from the road.
Hoping it's great.
I need it to be good.
How's it going, Sterly?
[Sterling] It's good. Um...
Maybe this section of the road just has all the gold.
[Todd] This looks actually pretty damn good today,
but it's definitely a Hail Mary.
Let's just try to get every ounce we can, man.
Best we can do.
You know what? I never thought
we'd be running the road, but we just gotta do,
you know, everything we can.
Just not... It's not ideal,
but we take whatever we can get at this point.
Get it to the clean-up room and see what we got.
[Jim exhales, sniffles]
Oh, yeah.
Slurpee. 7-Eleven from a hose.
Perfect.
Come on, baby.
Cold morning.
Just... It's that time of year.
As you can see, this is laid flat.
I can't bend it.
It's solid ice.
That lovely building right there is the back of the gold room.
That pump fills up this pond.
We have to fill it deep enough to get the pump
in the water.
This pump here feeds the gold room.
Without water, I can't run the jig.
Without the jig, I can't screen.
Without that, I can't run the gold table.
Can't just throw the pump down the mud,
'cause that's what you'll have in the gold room.
So we have it suspended.
Right now, it's not really suspended,
'cause the water is so damn low.
Uh, here it is almost noon, and I'm still not running.
But the sun is gonna help us here.
Once the sun hits this dark blue hose,
it should get enough heat,
melt the ice,
and then I'm running.
Just got to wait for Mother Nature
to help me out here and thaw this out.
Right now, you could be in Palm Springs,
or you could be here where it's freezing.
God, I miss Palm Springs.
Come on, baby, let's go.
Andy's digging dirt
like a madman on the road, dude.
We're running the road now? All right. Okay.
Uh, you can bet your toothpick.
[Hunter] For me, this is what it's all about, just being out here.
We're on a crazy adventure at the end of day,
and so,
you got to just roll with the punches,
and that's what we're kind of doing right now, so...
If we can get some more
good pay out of this road
and anything else we can scrape up,
then, uh,
you know, we might
get out of here without losing our ass, so...
You know, maybe we'll be able to do this again someday.
[Todd] How come we're not playing Lynyrd Skynyrd?
What's going on?
Okay, let's just pull the whole damn thing, guys.
I know there's at least 10 or 20 ounces
in this bottom half.
Little Caleb, your bonus is in there, brother.
[Caleb] Yeah. My bonus could be in here.
[chuckles]
[Todd] Hey, Thurber. Thurber.
Bring all the guys. Bring everything.
We're gonna do a full pull.
[Jim] Yeah, that's not gonna happen.
We don't have a clean-up room right now.
I'm working on it.
[Todd] [bleep]!
[Jim] Well, same problem I've had all morning here
is, uh, I got ice.
I'm not getting much help from
Mr. Sunshine up there.
So...
I'm just gonna chase it all out of here
'cause I can't wait for the sun,
that doesn't
seem to be doing
much good right now.
It's okay. I would just take it off,
turn this on, blow it out,
put it back together.
[Jim] Jack's ready to start that pump, I'm sure.
The guys are pulling mats as we speak.
And we don't have water to process the gold
in the gold room.
Seriously pissed off right now.
You ready?
Hey, Thurb,
if it just gets a little bit,
it'll thaw it right out.
[Jim] Yeah, uh-huh.
- [Jack] Uh-huh. - [Jim] I've been doing this all morning.
[bleep]!
[Jack] There's no clean-up.
And if we can't clean up,
we can't mine.
Why mine?
It's just a game that you have to play.
- Okay. Are you ready? - [Jim] Start it up!
[Jack] All right!
[Jim] Someone just [bleep] snipe me right now.
Just boom, it's all over. I don't need to know.
[Todd] Well, how are we looking, boys?
- Not too bad? - Catching some flakes.
[Todd] There you go.
What's going on, Thurb?
- What is it? - [Jim] Ice.
[Jack] That's it. It won't throttle up any higher.
How much ice is in this thing?
It's solid.
It's from here to just over the bank.
[Todd] Anything coming out at all?
[Jim] Trying to.
Basically pushing a slushy
up the hill, down the hill.
This is just what happens at the end of the year.
We're gonna be fighting Mother Nature
from here on out.
It's always a battle.
It's basically us against ice and water.
Here it comes.
Let it run for a bit, yeah.
That's it, Thurby. Come up.
Come on up. Let's hook it up.
Let's get you some water and let's do this thing. Grab that end.
We got it.
Thurber's been busting all this ice up in here.
Finally broke loose.
Then these guys can start to just clean up.
We're getting caught
a little bit behind on some of these hoses.
So we just got to remember now
that time is drawing near to us pulling out of here.
So we got to hurry up, grind out what we can get.
We're out in the [bleep] boonies, dog!
Being stuck out in the middle of nowhere
on a mine with a bunch of dudes is
pretty much...
It's horrible.
There's no women around at all.
You handing out sausages now?
What's going on?
[man] Uh, is there a first thing
that you're gonna do when you get home?
Yeah, probably the first thing
I'm gonna do when I get home,
uh, I can't talk about.
Well, I can't tell you what the first thing I do
when I get home, but, uh...
You don't want to know the first thing I'm gonna do
when I get home.
Cuddle with my dog.
[Jack] You know what, Jim?
This mine is such a pain in the keister.
- I mean-- - Well, we're learning.
- We're in a different area and we... - [Jack] Yeah.
- ...found out what a pain in the butt it is. - [Jack] Yeah.
What do you think about digging up the road?
Well,
we gotta run something.
[Jack chuckles]
You know,
out of Fairbanks one time,
I was down there and they, uh,
they literally...
The government had come in and taken
material off of their claim.
They went out there and took the road and ran
the road through it like a steeze highway.
- You know, they ran some of that material through... - [Jim] Oh, my gosh.
[Jack] ...and then put it back.
Okay, well...
Gold is where you find it.
- [Jack] Yeah. - Period.
[Jack] They did. They got gold.
I'm not looking in the outhouse.
I draw a limit.
[Jack chuckles]
You know, I appreciate Todd. He...
He's desperate.
He wants to make sure those guys take gold home.
[Jim] Sure.
[Jack] He's willing to take a chance there and...
No, that's who Todd is.
- [Jack] Yeah. - [Jim] Everything and anything.
Todd's running the road now,
so it kind of looks ludicrous,
but I'm proud of him that he stuck with it.
He pushes sometimes where most people won't push,
and I think that he's gonna come out a winner.
I'm willing to clean it up
if he's willing to dig it up, so...
That's long and the short of this job.
Yep.
[narrator] The team still needs
136 ounces of gold
in order to reach Todd's new season goal
of 1,023 ounces.
And if they don't reach at least 1,000 ounces
before winter shuts them down,
Todd will be going home with a deficit.
All right, guys. Winter's here.
Everything's freezing.
Yeah, it is.
[Todd] We don't know how long we have.
Maybe one, two weeks left.
I don't know.
The other morning, um, hoses froze up.
So we ended up having to replace some hoses.
So it took a bit of time. So it's that time of year.
We got to plan going forward.
Think on that.
- Training them? - Yeah.
How long were you guys fiddling
- with that... - [sighs] A day.
- [Todd chuckles] Jesus. - But then we were
thankful that you showed up...
- Yeah. - [Jim] ...and fixed everything. Like...
It's like one of those guys that comes in
and you got it loose, the jar loose,
and he comes in and goes, "Hey, that wasn't even tight."
- That's what happened. - Yeah. Yeah.
At least we got it going.
- You guys got it going. - [whistles]
[Todd] We were getting ice chunks.
We had to switch over to the road.
But hey, we're still sluicing.
- [Jim] Yeah. - [Todd] And, uh,
some of these roads
are old dirt
- and they got good gold in them. - [Jack chuckles]
We did always know that the roads were built with tailings
and that we would run them eventually someday.
And someday just came a little earlier
than what we anticipated, so...
[Todd] Exactly.
When we rebuild them, hopefully we won't
put that kind of material back in there.
Am I right, Thurber?
[Jim] Absolutely.
We've ran a bunch of it already.
Where are we at with it, Dad?
Well, let me tell you.
Number one is, it's...
it's not bad.
- [Todd] Wow. - [Jack] I'll lay it out, Thurb.
[Jim] 10.
Fifteen.
Twenty-two.
Thirty-two.
Forty-eight.
Fifty-two.
Sixty.
Seventy-four.
- Oh, my God. - [Jim] 77.
78.2.
[Todd] Yeah!
- [Jim] All right. - Yeah.
- Good job. - [Jack] Thank you, old timers.
- [Jim] That's awesome. - Yeah.
[Jim] Way to go.
The yellow brick road. Let's go.
[Todd] Yeah.
Even Nuggets.
I know.
Hey, Dad, that nugget there's got a tire track on it.
[Jack] There you go. Yeah.
[Todd] I know we're getting close to 1,000.
What's our total?
964.9.
[Todd] All right.
[Jim chuckles] Close.
Real close.
[narrator] The Hoffmans have pulled in
964.9 ounces
of gold this season.
But they may have less than 72 hours
until the first snowfall
shuts them down for good.
We only got a few days left
for running most of the road.
I think it's just about gone.
I don't know where else we're gonna get any pay dirt.
But, hey, I thought we were gonna get
sent home early. I really did.
And I'm thankful that we're...
Even to this point,
here we are, fighting our way through.
- You know? - Yeah.
[Todd] Everybody should be proud of that.
- Guys, that's a win. - [Jack] Yeah.
[Todd] You know?
All right, guys, let's get back to work.