Yeah.
So, things are going really well so far.

You know, we’re like coming out of the gate moving, and we’re over 2,000 ounces, but I’m waiting for something to go massively wrong, cuz things don’t go this smoothly for very long.

Six weeks into the season, 30-year-old Parker Schnabel’s plan to mine more than $35 million in gold is right on schedule.

Over the last six weeks, Mitch has dug out all the pay pockets of the two-acre cut and is sluicing the last of its stockpiled pay.

But Parker believes the old-timer’s dredge missed even more gold and thinks the pay streak extends up to the road.

He wants Mitch to expand the cut by another two acres and sluice all of its pay before the water license runs out.

If Parker’s move pays off, he could bank another 500 ounces.

Worth one and three-quarter million dollars.

Just when we thought Sulfur here was coming to a close, in typical Parker fashion, now he’s saying, you know, hey, I want even more dirt out of there.

We’re pushing this project all the way to its absolute limit.

So, I’m just hoping we can get everything done here in Sulfur, but uh, I was just messing with our timeline, brother.

All right, the cavalry’s here.

We can certainly use the help.

Woo.

We’re here.

Happy to help, man.

To give Mitch a fighting chance, Parker’s sent in the big guns.

So, we got five trucks, two excavators, and the loader feeding the plant.

We’re on a hot streak right now.

Let’s stay with it, finish it off, and get every speck of gold we can get out of here.

You know, everything up here is risk over reward.

And uh, right now the risk is we got ourselves a lot of dirt to move here.

Not much time.

But Parker thinks it’s worth the reward.

Unfortunately, you know, with 220 being down right now, we’re going to shut Roxan down.

Shutting down Roxan could mean losing over $8,000 an hour.

Parker has all these ambitions and things he wants us to do this season, but we got one old loader out here.

And right now, we’re not sluicing.

To fix the loader, Mitch calls in mechanic Taylor Matika.

I’ve got an alarm for low hydraulic oil.

You can see there’s nothing on the sight glass with the machine running.

The transmission oil was way high.

It should be at the bottom of the sight glass here.

We’re way over full.

So what caused this is the parking brake, and it’s got a piston inside with seals that release the parking brake.

These seals have failed, and the parking brake is dragging, and it’s filling the transmission with hydraulic oil.

Just going to pull the drain plug on the transmission here, and we’ll let her buck.

There it goes.

Hopefully it’s just the seals, but if a piece got between the piston and the housing, we might have a piston, and that’s going to be a huge problem.

The 220 loader’s parking brake is spring-loaded and controlled by hydraulic pressure.

To access the brake, Taylor will first cage it by using three bolts that compress the springs, releasing the brake and securing the piston to the brake cover.

He will then remove the sixteen bolts that hold the cover in place and lift off the caged parking brake piston.

Taylor can then remove and replace the damaged seals before reinstalling the brake, uncaging the springs, and refilling the hydraulic oil, allowing the parking brake to function properly.

We’re just buzzing the parking brake out here.

We’ve got it caged with these three bolts.

There we go.

We’ll take it out, put it on the back of my truck.

Hopefully this thing is not, cuz we can’t afford a down loader.

You can see here there’s no real damage to the piston, but the parking brake seal is completely gone.

We need to replace it.

Sean was right to give me a shout right away.

We’ll swap the seals out and put this thing back together.

Let’s get started.

We’ll peel these seals off.

We’re at the assembly stage now, just putting these seals in.

Hey, Taylor, you got a copy, Taylor?

Yeah, go ahead.

How’s it going over there, man?

We’re putting new seals in the parking brake right now.

Thank God it was just the seals, and we had them in stock.

Give us about an hour and a half, two hours, and this thing will be up and running.

All right, man.

We’ll be ready for it.

Mitch is chomping at the bit to get this thing up and running.

Then it’s just, you know, race against time to get this thing back together.

It’s all good.

Fill it with transmission oil.

We can be back to making money.

Transmission’s full.

Parking brake’s reassembled, resealed.

Everything’s hooked up.

Lay down.

Good boy.

I’m going to take it down to Sean so they can go fire up Roxan.

Yeah, buddy.

Thanks, man.

Five hours after shutting down, and with $40,000 of gold production lost, Roxan is back in the game.

Washing rocks.

Roxan shaking.

Getting that gold.

Now it’s time to find out if Parker’s move to extend the cut at Sulfur will pay out.

Fifty.

One hundred.

One fifty.

Two hundred.

Oh yeah, keep going.

Two fifty.

A little bit more.

Three hundred right on the dot.

Plus this.

We have another one.

It looks like it’s got a little in there.

Ready?

All right, we’re going to keep adding to her.

There’s another forty.

Eighty.

One-oh-six point five.

Four-oh-six point five ounces.

Okay.

Yeah, that is a boy.

Mitch, go ahead.

Go ahead and take everything up there.

With just one plant, Mitch has nearly matched Tyson’s two-plant run.

Dude, that’s a lot for one week.

Yeah.

So this week our total is 827 ounces.

Sick.

Is that crazy or what?

I was not expecting that.

Eight hundred twenty-seven ounces at record gold prices is worth $2.89 million.

The most cash Parker’s ever banked in one week.

That’s Parker’s happy face.

There we go.

Eight hundred ounces, dude.

You got to be happy about that in a week.

Yeah.

I just hope we can keep it up.

There’s still so much season left.

Good way to start it, though.

That’s a good way to start it.

Thank you, guys.

We love to do this.

After several years of just moving from the Indian River and getting set up in a lot deeper ground on Dominion, it’s taken a long time of stripping and prep.

And finally the season, like, I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s looking really good.

We’re coming out of the gates running.

So hopefully we can just keep that up.

Right?

And then Sulfur is just killing it.