Gold Rush (Discovery)

Abefroman_sl said:

I don't think his regular mining operation would make a good show. People who know what they are doing and run a profitable business makes boring fucking TV.

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This is true, it's way more fun watching Todd fuck up or breakdowns from the mines using old equipment with no real backups. Then you get to see how good their engineer guys are to pull something out of their ass to keep shit running.

I wonder how many mines Tony visits like Parker's to collect his % anyways. Dude probably doesn't have to do shit if he doesn't want to.

Tony is a great character. I do hope we get to see the dredge actually pull some gold out of the ground. If it ended up working out would be pretty cool to see.

Kind of excited for this season. After Todd's comeback last year, might have all 3 of the main operations (Parker, Todd, Tony) all pulling some serious gold out of the ground this season. Really want to see if the dredge can pull out big gold like Tony thinks it can too.

joz123_sl said:

Just started watching this show. I couldn't stand Deadliest Catch but for some reason I like this show a lot. Watching re-runs so no clue what order I have been watching them in.

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The short backstory for the 3 guys they're covering now is...Todd Hoffman and the Hoffman crew came up to Alaska super green, didn't get much of anything first year or two. Then they finally had the first "big" year of any of the crews with around ~900 ounces. Todd got greedy, probably was doing coke, and decided they were going to go pipe dreaming jungle mining in South America and basically completely struck out. Somehow made it back to the Klondike last year and convinced his crew to return with him and his dad, ended up getting like ~1350 ounces in a pretty nice season. Todd can be kind of stupid, but somehow talks people into helping him out all the time. His partner, Dave, is basically the man and anyone watching the show thinks Dave is cool as fuck and should have his own operation.

Parker is this young kid who started out working on his grandfather's mine which was kind of small potatoes. He had some small seasons until 2 years ago he moved up to the Klondike with the big boys and made a deal with Tony to mine on land he owns. He became the new king of the heap getting over 1000 ounces his first time out up there, then over 2500 ounces last year. He's annoyed though at how big of a cut Tony takes from their deal, and all of the demands he makes on how it should be mine, some of which makes the work more expensive for Parker (not that Tony cares, he just wants to get as much gold out of that ground as possible). Parker also completely overworked his guys last year, and his main boss/engineer isn't coming back.

Tony is short version pretty big land owner up there and is trying to bring back the old way of mining with this huge dredge he took apart and moved/rebuilt last year. He hired away Parker's boss from last year to help run the dredge. Curious to see if the dredge really can hold up over a full season of mining because it makes it seem easy as fuck cost wise once it's set up and going.

Yeah was crazy seeing how little gold they were getting the first few seasons. Also was kind of funny looking back on last season, even though Parker was kind of a dick about them staying the extra week to get more gold Gene and the other guys were shitting on his choice of ground but they ended up getting like 471 ounces in one cleanup from it so was pretty clear he was right about where to mine that last week.

Abefroman_sl said:

I think the majority of them are already wealthy. The whole on the verge of bankruptcy is all bullshit for the major players. This is basically a hobby for Todd and jesus crew. It takes a lot of fucking money to get an operation like that started and to fuck up as much as they do and still be able to keep coming back.

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I don't know, I feel like Todd manages to con people into thinking he's some serious miner so they loan him money for equipment and shit. Dave last season was talking about how he borrowed money from his family to come in as a partner with all the new equipment and how at the end of the year he'd be paying them back in gold. I'm sure none of them are really bankrupt or whatever, but I don't think they're pocketing as much of the profits as we might think they should be.