Striking gold. Is there anything more ideal than this? The fantasy of getting rich quick is a hallmark of many cultures and woven into the fabric of our history and national psyche. The original gold rush, good or bad, shaped the exploration of the United States and was responsible for the boom of multiple industries. But as many historians would tell you, the people making the most money weren’t the guys mining for gold, it was the people selling the shovels.
A modern warning to be learned is that selling the tools to go after the fantasy is often more lucrative than the fantasy itself. Yes, there were those who struck it rich, but the vast majority were left in decline, stranded in secluded towns struggling to make enough money to start over somewhere else. It’s no different in modern times. Prospecting for gold can be enormously profitable, but carries with it an epic risk. Conditions are dangerous, returns are not guaranteed, and misfortune lurks around every corner. When the economic downturn hit hard for several working men from Sandy, Oregon, they decided to risk it all by turning to gold mining. None of them were experienced and the next nine seasons tracked their epic learning curve as they went from mining just a few ounces to mining millions of dollars worth of gold. It certainly wasn’t easy, but here are 20 Rules The Cast Of Gold Rush Is Forced To Obey.
Learn How to Do The Job Fast
When Todd Hoffman and his crew first started in season one, they knew very little about gold mining. It was an adventure born out of desperation to carve out a new life after the men had all lost their jobs or businesses during the economic downturn.
However, they didn’t let their inexperience or ignorance stop them. When setting up their first pieces of equipment out in Porcupine Creek, Alaska, they made almost every mistake in the book, much to the amusement of their temporary mentor, Parker Schnabel. Much to his credit, Hoffman pushed through his mistakes and committed to learning the trade fast. In fact, much of season one chronicled his steep learning curve and it wasn’t long before he started mining his first little haul of gold.
Pay Rent On Time Or Lose Your Claim
Hoffman and his crew cut their teeth on the now-famous Porcupine Creek site in the first season, but they ran into trouble at the beginning of the second season when Hoffman misses a rent payment. Because of the missed payment, he loses the lease on Porcupine Creek and Fred Hurt and his crew were ready to immediately take their place.
This forced Hoffman to find another site to look for gold, eventually leading them to Dawson City, in Yukon, Canada. From there, they set up a new mine in Quartz Creek, building on mistakes and lessons they learned from in the first season. If lease payments are not made on time, owners generally show no mercy.
Be Smart About Allocating Your Resources
In season three, the Hoffman team managed to hold on to the Quartz mine and continued their entrepreneurial mining activities there. Building on the previous season’s success, Todd Hoffman hired a second team to work on a second mine nearby.
But Hoffman ran into delays and difficulties at the Quartz mine and realized they needed extra manpower. In a smart allocation of resources, he decided to merge his teams to work on the Quartz mine rather than keep the additional team separate. The combined production paid off and Hoffman and his crew mined the biggest haul of the three competing teams. Though happy with the earnings, they would later dwarf these earnings in subsequent seasons.
Earn Enough to Pay Your Crew
In season eight, Hoffman and his crew tried out a new claim near Sacramento, but they aren’t mining long as poor results lead them to re-evaluate the whole operation.
Hoffman concludes that he can’t continue to pay people to mine the Sacramento site. He has enough money to “give people a cushion” and then they can look for other work. This is a double blow because his previous site nearby, which was performing well, was shut down by the county, but Hoffman knows he can’t pay his crew with IOUs. Some quick strategizing with Freddy gives him an idea for a potentially lucrative wager: break new ground in between the two sites. There’s nothing like necessity to come up with an inventive idea.
Follow Safety Rules or Face the Consequences
In season nine, Hoffman’s safety officer, Trey, spends 2 1/2 of “the worst hours” of his life with the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). While visiting their operation, officials from MSHA witness Todd Hoffman’s son, Hunter, horsing around with other workers in a specialized mining vehicle without their safety belts. This is a major safety violation and it happened right before MSHA’s eyes.
Trey reads the crew the riot act and explains that the crew now has an “imminent danger” citation, which destroys the crews’ great reputation. Todd Hoffman takes his son Hunter aside separately and demotes him from a leadership position on the plant to driving a truck. In other words, you play, you gotta pay.
Don’t Flinch at Giant Obstacles
Anything can happen out on a site, and it is wise to expect the unexpected. Obstacles can take many forms, like equipment failure or worker error, but often, it’s just the landscape itself that acts as the biggest challenge.
When Andy Spinks and Logan Pierce are trying to prepare a site, they run into the mother of all boulders, an estimated 100,000 pound eyesore. Using two backhoes, one holds the boulder in place while the other digs the dirt out from underneath it. They are warned by elder crew members not to have the bucket trapped under the boulder because if it starts rolling, it will take the backhoe with it. Luckily, they handle the boulder perfectly, and with a little work, pry it loose and watch it roll down the hill.
Know When to Hold ‘Em
Combining separate resources in season three worked out well for the Hoffman crew, a chance that earned them approximately $150,000 for the season. Split among the team, it’s a healthy win, but nowhere near the record hauls that they would pull in later.
Still, it serves to illustrate that a wagerer’s instincts of “when to hold ’em” comes into play when mining for gold. It takes shrewd reasoning and trusting your gut to double down efforts on a site as betting on the wrong claim can easily lead to insolvency. And just how, exactly, does one earn a wagerer’s instinct? Some people are born with it, but most must earn it through hard-earned experience.
Know When to Fold ‘Em
And then there’s the opposite adage of a wagerer: you gotta “know when to fold ’em.”
The start of season four looked promising for the Hoffman team, as they headed off to a rumored hotspot for gold, namely, Guyana, South America. South America was an expensive chance to take. Obstacles included mosquitos, venomous insects, ticks, spiders, and all other kinds of critters that the miners were not familiar with. Plus, the climate was the opposite of what they were used to: humid and hot. After dealing with enduring conditions and back-breaking work, their initial haul was only about two ounces. Should he bet on finding more, or call it a day? Hoffman decided to cut his losses and pack up the mining efforts in South America.
Experience Counts
What’s the difference between season one gold hauls and gold hauls over subsequent seasons? At least for the Hoffman team, about $3 million in season six, as compared to $150,000 in season two. That’s quite an upgrade!
A couple of seasons later, Parker’s more experienced team faired amazingly well, too, earning $5 million in season seven. At the end of the day, there’s simply no substitute for hard earned and well-worn experience. Embarrassing failures lead to success, but only if you follow through to learn from those failures. The difference in the Hoffman crews between season one and season eight is striking. It goes to show what you can accomplish if you stick it out.
Get Resourceful About Your Equipment
Brand new gold mining equipment is sometimes prohibitively expensive for a team. In season seven, Tony Beets and his family take a large used gold dredge, invested a sizable amount of money into repairs and refurbished it themselves. This piece of equipment ultimately proved reliable as the Beets family mined 2100 ounces of gold with it; that’s about $2.5 million worth.
In this case, the Beets family more than recouped their investment in one season, but had they tried to buy a brand new gold dredge, they would have still been in debt. If you have the know-how, it definitely pays to get resourceful about your equipment.
Expect No Privacy
It’s already difficult to have a private life when you’re spending so much time out on the claim site, but it’s practically impossible to do so when you’ve signed on the dotted line to allow a reality production crew to follow you wherever you go.
When Parker brings his girlfriend to the site to try and eat a quiet lunch with her, he finds out quickly that there’s just going to be no privacy. He’s instantly surveilled by a drone camera and a camera op, who is no doubt trying to capture any glimpse of closeness between him and his girl. Parker and his girlfriend respond by making faces, but they know they’ve already lost the game. If he’s going to get any private time with her, he’ll have to sneak away like a ninja.
Watch the Road
Even the most well-maintained and immaculate claim sites can have unexpected obstacles. After rocks are cleared away in piles, there is always the possibility that a bigger rock might roll down and become an expensive problem.
Truck driver Juan experienced this fact the hard way when he crashed into a big rock in the roadway, causing approximately $20,000 worth of damage to his truck. The accident was completely needless and had he been going slow enough, he would have easily seen the rock and avoided the crash altogether. It’s easy to get flippant about vehicle safety, but accidents can be expensive, or worse, fatal. At the very least, it’s important to carefully watch the road.
Use It Or Lose It
In season eight, after returning to one of his sites, Todd Hoffman finds half his plant and some of his borrowed equipment gone because he let a site sit idle for too long.
Upon noticing the owner of the equipment, he is told that because the equipment wasn’t being used for weeks, it was moved to a mining site that was performing. The exchange was heated and the owner basically called Hoffman a bad miner. Afterwards, Hoffman tried to cut a deal, but the owner stood firm. Hoffman learned that if you’re using borrowed equipment, you had better be producing, or in other words, use it or lose it.
There’s No Easy Gold Left
Hoffman and his crew aren’t the only guys to give up everything to go looking for gold. The economic downturn turned quite a few people into desperate adventurers, flooding the field with new prospectors. But as many of them found out, there were already plenty of gold entrepreneurs out their mining, and they had the advantage of experience and expertise.
The long and short of it is that all the easy gold is gone. All the areas that have had a high return are already swarming with miners. To get any meaningful returns on a new claim requires a huge investment with no guarantees, plus, you have to go through all the work to find the claim in the first place. There is definitely money to be made, but like almost everything in life, it won’t be easy.
Competition is Good, Embrace It
Starting in season two, different teams began to compete with each other on who could find the most gold in each season. In the beginning, Parker’s team was generally favored as he had the most experience and the benefit of generations of wisdom from his grandfather. But as the years went by, the seemingly impossible challenge of beating Parker actually became achievable. Hoffman beat Parker a few times, with most other times coming really close.
The competition was an amazing motivator, and embracing the challenge caused all teams to work harder and mine more than they thought was possible. There’s something about a rival that creates that extra fire to make you want to win.
Be Prepared to Move at a Moment’s Notice
In season four, Parker didn’t like the look of the returns he was getting on one of his sites. His instinct was that it just wasn’t going to perform and he needed to act quickly. Parker’s idea was to relocate the entire operation to an area across the river. Though this could be done, the move would be expensive.
Some of his crew, on the other hand, thought this was wishful thinking and that Parker was living on a “fantasy land.” But Parker retorted: “Fantasy land might just be our next cut,” moving along with the operation. Parker was right. His chance paid off and the site across the river helped earned his team record profits and he would later shatter that record easily.
4. Work Hard, There is No Substitute
Out there in the wilderness, the conditions can be absolutely punishing for mine workers. The labor itself is already difficult, but if you factor in freezing temperatures and a long workday, you have the perfect recipe for low morale.
In season five, several of Parker’s workers were thinking about quitting because of the bitter cold with one stating simply, “Everybody’s worn out.” But Parker pushed them on, and they decided to stay, and it was a good thing, too. At the end of season four, Parker and his team brought in way more than they expected. When he gathered his workers at the end, he told them “that’s $3 million right there on the table.” The hard work paid off, and the workers were definitely glad they didn’t quit!
Don’t Lose Sight of What’s Important
Parker’s grandfather, John Schnabel, was featured often on the show as both a cheerleader and mentor to Parker. He would give Parker valuable advice and often visited to see how the operation was shaping up. At the end of season five, Parker had once again brought in a record $3 million and broke the news in front of Schnabel. His grandfather was overcome with emotion, saying: “Parker, you don’t know how pleased and proud I am of you. I’m lucky. I’m a very fortunate man… I love you Parker.”
Despite the sadness of Schnabel’s passing, Parker was probably glad he left nothing unsaid. Gold mining may be important, but there’s nothing more important than family.
Be Prepared to Go Big
Sure, big chances don’t always pay off, but sometimes they are necessary. And if you don’t have any wagerer’s instincts at all, it’s probably best to stay out of the gold mining business altogether.
In season seven, Todd had to take a huge chance to mine 1000 oz of gold at a Colorado site in order to pay his crew what he owed them and avoid insolvency and there was no guarantee he would be able to achieve this lofty goal. But in the end, it did pay off, and Todd Hoffman’s team brought in more than 1,100 oz of gold, which was enough to do just a little bit better than breaking even. In a season where he was worried about losing everything, breaking even was a huge win!
Don’t Be Afraid of Bears
The challenges of the environment on a mining site sometimes comes in the form of harsh climate or difficult terrain, but sometimes, it is the hairy beasts of the wild that can be the real danger to a mining operation.
Bears are notorious for finding and taking human foodstuffs, though, some that are experienced with the animals have some success in leading them away. One wrong move can lead to a fatal altercation, and unless you have a powerful weapon, you are not going to win a fight with a bear! It takes true grit to be a miner and those afraid of bears need not apply.
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Are there any additional rules you think the cast of Gold Rush should be following? Let us know in the comments below!
