‘Gold Rush’: Parker Schnabel Finally Buys Land And Todd Hoffman Dabbles In ‘Complex Inorganic Chemistry’


There are only a few weeks left of Gold Rush, and the excitement is building to see exactly how much each team winds up mining, and how much money they have made. Clearly, Parker Schnabel has mined the most, reaching over 5,000 ounces of gold last week. Tony Beets is in the middle, while soon-to-be departing Todd Hoffman and his crew have been struggling in Colorado. What happened this week?

Although Todd Hoffman will never beat Parker Schnabel’s feat of mining over 5,000 ounces of gold and will lose 100 ounces of his own total because of their bet, Todd still wants–most likely needs–to make a profit.

His last hope is the Golden Gulch, yet a humongous boulder is in the way between solvency and disaster for this Gold Rush team.

Todd, who often seems to spend more time naming things than strategically finding the best place to mine, named this huge rock the King Kong boulder.

They need to break it up, but according to Monsters and Critics, the team “can’t use pyro due to local permitting rules.”

So, Todd has to put on his thinking cap. He decides that they should drill 12 holes into the “school bus sized boulder,” then pour “an expansive material” into the drilled holes to physically split the boulder. Then, they can finally mine.

Yet, after a few holes, the drill is broken and even Juan’s expertise cannot save it. The Hoffman crew is now concerned because there is no more pay.

The next day, the drill is fixed, but this time the weather is too cold for the chemicals. They managed to get the chemicals in and discover that one hole went all the way to the other side, so the chemicals poured into that hole went all the way through.

They end up covering the boulder with blankets to hopefully keep the chemicals warm enough to properly work.

Did it work? Absolutely! The team is both shocked, yelling “are you kidding me?” mixed with screams of joy, before they get back to work.

Around the campfire, they do their weekly tally. Rusty Red comes up with 74.95 ounces, while Holy Roller weighs in at 28.25 ounces.

Parker Schnabel has splashed out $500,000 for a new claim. This chunk of land, the size of 45 football fields, is located next to Ken’s claim. Parker picked this spot in order to build a run to Ken’s claim, without driving on Tony Beets’ property.

Parker was told that the land was cleared, and was told that there was a nice bonus of 350 ounces of gold for him to mine there.

The plan was to move Big Red to this location, so that the lean and hard-working Schnabel crew could mine there the rest of the Gold Rush season, obviously forgetting their earlier plan to mine Ken’s claim.

In order to get to the new claim, Parker has to drive through Tony’s claim, which appears quite odd, as Parker said that he purchased the new claim to avoid doing just that.

Now Rick needs to dig out a 240-yard ditch to empty the new cut that is flooded with water.

When they put in a test pan to check for gold, Parker is clearly frustrated that the result was two small flakes.

What does put a smile on Parker’s face is that at the end of the week, Sluicifier weighs in at 230 ounces, giving the Schnabel crew an astounding 5,611 ounces for this season!

There was drama for the Beets crew on the latest episode of Gold Rush! Someone was nearly killed when the two cranes were removing the front gantry from the second dredge.

Again, there was no gold weigh in, which must mean that Minnie Beets is frowning somewhere. Maybe next week?

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