Aggregates Manager Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/661453
AGGREGATES MANAGER / April 2016 13 A nyone who's ever tuned into "Gold Rush" knows that the entrepreneurial spirit runs strong in Parker Schnabel's blood. The 21-year-old miner-turned-reality-TV-star and his family are no strangers to working hard and chasing their dreams. Since the tender age of eight, Schnabel has been following the path of his grandfather, John Schnabel, a now-retired gold miner at Big Nugget Mine in Haines, Alaska. Today, he's a beloved regular featured on Discovery Channel's "Gold Rush," now in its sixth season on air. Since his early beginnings as an inexperienced rookie at Big Nugget, Schnabel has matured into a professional miner and crew leader, one who has proved his prowess at experimenting with equipment, taking risks, and scoring record amounts of gold in the process. This season, Schnabel took his mining operation at Scribner Creek to new levels by investing in a completely new spread of equipment, including a SuperStacker Telescoping Stacker, radial stack- er, and feeder, all from KPI-JCI and Astec Mobile Screens. Through his investment, Schnabel was able to reduce operational costs by 15 percent and downtime by 25 percent by eliminating the use of trucks and the amount of manpower necessary to transport the pay dirt to the wash plant. "We've always set up our wash plant on a high pad and let our tailings fall off a ledge to keep the site clean," Schnabel says. "The problem with that is that you have to truck all of your pay dirt up adverse grades to get it up to the wash plant. "We had about the same size crew as we did last year, so my thought was, 'OK, we know how to move dirt. We know how to mine gold. We've proved that, but we need to start cutting our costs and getting more out of the equipment and the people that we have,'" he adds. "By conveying the material to the wash plant, we were able to eliminate the need to truck the material, which was costly and time-consuming." Going for gold Before leaping into a new equipment set-up, Schnabel spent months scouting new ground and traveling around to other sites around the Yukon, researching what new technologies other miners were using and how they were cutting costs in their operations. "My day-to-day job does not always take place right at the operation," Schnabel says. "That's part of my life that the show doesn't see. I don't have my boots on the ground every day, so I rely on