Posted on 12/18/2010 6:43:50 AM PST by matt1234
Here are my observations:
My opinion of the show.....it sucks! Just like ‘Ax-Men’.
Having done both these jobs in the past, I can tell you that this is all phoney boloney scripted for TV tripe.
Just my opinion.
I have not done either of these jobs, but I agree. OH! The bridge is creaking when we drive over it! OH! When they tried to cross the river with ATV’s I changed channels and never went back. Drama Queens.
I have not seen Ax-Men. I'm sure some of Gold Rush: Alaska is scripted...how much I do not know. Nevertheless, I find it entertaining. I takes me back to reading Jack London and stories about the Klondike Gold Rush. I always enjoyed those stories.
Sad to say, but in the history of prospecting, very, very few prospectors have ever made big bucks. The people who do so are the mining companies, and the people who sell supplies to miners.
Most prospectors after a hard day’s work end up with just enough gold to scrape by. Typically they earn less than minimum wage.
Plus the whole business is full of scammers, con men, rip offs, thieves, and bureaucrats who want to horn in. Any field or mine that is sold has probably been salted.
And every sucker will swear to their dying breath that the mother lode (increasing concentration at depth) exists. It does not. This is known to every serious geologist.
Hope to see more of the 90yo that lives across the creek. Did I hear correctly that he makes $20k+/day from his contraption?
It was a show that could have been done in 1 episode and probably would have been the most watched. They instead decided to make every scene 20 times longer than needed with the annoying “run the tense strings soundtrack” music making you think someone is about to die. If course, if anyone died, the show would never have happened.
Matt, it looked to be a S&W Model 500. I own one for my visits up to my place in Alaska, for the same reason. Definately a handful of gun.
The show exposed this fact about the Klondike gold rush. The show includes a little bit of history and science, presumably because it's on the Discovery Channel. If my understanding is correct, modern mining techniques allow gold miners to revisit previously mined areas and extract gold that was overlooked/unextractable using the older techniques.
Yeah, he did say something like that. But does that assume he's already found a vein?
I agree that the neighbor prospector is an interesting addition.
Saw several of these back to back last night. I was laughing my ass off the whole time.
The bear episode? What a joke going jihad on a black bear that crossed the perimeter of their camp.
The idiot Realtor doesn’t know his head from the hole he’s digging.
I love that they have only 3 months to dig and they blow the first 1/3 “setting up camp”.
All that said, here’s one for the folks who have actually mined Alaskan gold. Since the gold deposits are from erosion of the surrounding mountains, would it be possible to take a lightweight, small dredge up into the hills and mine out the higher elevation waterfall pools using a wetsuit and snorkeling gear? Seems like those areas might not have been mined in the early years when the technology wasn’t available.
The realtor (Dorsey) reminds me of the type that every kid wants to johnny-pile while playing pick-up football. I wonder if he gets extra pay/perks from Discovery for being the show’s whipping boy.
The Soup made a lot of fun regarding their constant search for the “Glory Hole”.
Yes, but there is a fierce law of diminishing returns.
To put this into perspective, the quality of platinum ore is now so low that greater concentration of platinum molecules is found in roadside dust from automobile catalytic converters.
“Typical gold ore grades in open-pit mines are 1–5 mg/kg (1–5 ppm); ore grades in underground or hard rock mines are usually at least 3 mg/kg (3 ppm). Because ore grades of 30 mg/kg (30 ppm) are usually needed before gold is visible to the naked eye, in most gold mines the gold is invisible.”
Do NOT google that.
Check out the chart at the link below for gold value/prices for the past 210 years.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-historical-price-of-gold.htm
Here's my observation: The cable channels each can find 24 hours worth of programming in Alaska. I will tune in to the Air Alaska show or whatever it's called, as well.
Sounds like you are trying to prevent years of therapy for everyone. :-)
The #1 thing to remember: Reality television isn’t. I know this for a fact, at least for one show, and I suspect it for all of them.
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