On tonight’s target-rich episode of Gold Rush: Parker’s Trail, Australia, once again, does not disappoint the Yukon veteran. He is liking thinking that he may have to expand his mining company and become an international enterprise.
There’s a lot of gold in Australia, and not just gold flecks and dust, but big honking hunks of it. Pure too — as we learned last week. Australia has some of the purest gold ore in the world. This is all music to Parker’s entrepreneurial ears.
Our exclusive clip shows Parker working out the economics of how his costs are much less for mining for gold in Australia than back home in the Yukon. It’s significant.
In the clip, they run a yard of virgin Aussie dirt at Eureka Creek as a test to see if it is profitable to mine —now that he is in his offseason from filming Gold Rush.
Together, Parker and his Aussie guides clean it up by rinsing the pan — in what they refer to as panning it off — and the now cleaned pan yields what looks to Parker’s trained eye as about a gram of gold.
By comparison, where he mines in the Yukon, Parker only hopes for a gram of gold per three yards of pay dirt processed.
“That’s stripping ten feet of frozen mud off the top,” he says to his Australian peers. Parker does the math out loud and he realizes that mining in Australia sure is a heck of a lot cheaper and requires less machinery than back home. You get the feeling that Parker is thinking about becoming an Australian at this point.
Rich gold in the desolate Outback
As Parker works it out, he says: “By comparison, we hope for a gram per three yards, so a third of a gram a yard. and that’s stripping ten feet of frozen mud off of the top…You guys do not have the stripping, and you do not have the permafrost.”
He adds: “It’s [Australian pay dirt] extremely rich ground, the ground is amazing. In the Yukon good ground is $20 a yard for us. We average about $15 and this is $40 with no stripping.”
Past Parker’s Trails
Parker Schnabel has proven over and again that he isn’t afraid of a challenge. Despite the location —a hot and humid or practically freezing location — the heir to a mining family is ready to make some money.
Parker has taken us to the historic Chilkoot Trail of the Klondike Gold Rush and beyond. Over the past three years, Parker’s mining adventures have taken him to Papua, New Guinea, and into Guyana, where his former foreman, Rick Ness, was part of the group.
Watch the exclusive clip of Parker’s Trail
The scene is set where Parker sees how inexpensive and easy it is to pull a gram out of a small amount of dirt versus the Yukon, and it’s apparent that his wheels are turning on where to come mine from now on:
Gold Rush: Parker’s Trail airs Friday at 8/7c on Discovery.