Aggregates Manager Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/853705
AGGREGATES MANAGER / August 2017 11 During the seventh season of Gold Rush, the 316 Mining crew was working close to home in Oregon. F rom the wilds of Alaska, to the remote corners of the Canadian Klondike, to the jungles of Guyana, Dave Turin and Todd Hoffman — the masters of reality TV mining — have spent the better part of a decade travelling the globe in search of gold. But it's in their home state of Oregon that they may have met their toughest challenge yet. The pair, which is a part of the 316 Mining crew on Discovery Channel's hit TV show Gold Rush, is currently mining a parcel of dry desert ground in northeastern Oregon. Now in its seventh season, longtime fans of the show have witnessed a mas- sive evolution of the crew — once a rag-tag group of inexperienced miners, now seasoned profession- als capable of pulling in more than 3,000 ounces of gold worth more than $3.3 million in a single season. Coming off their record-breaking haul in season six and anxious to tackle a new mining challenge in season seven, Hoffman and Turin set up camp in Oregon, a location much closer to their families and a historically gold-rich area. They entered their new mining claim armed with a highly productive wet wash feed system, along with a combo screen from Johnson Crushers International (JCI) that Turin estimates is capable of increasing operational effi- ciency by 20 percent. But the 14-person crew faced enormous unseen challenges in season seven. Once they began excavating, their struggle to find the pockets of rich gold left behind by the previous dredge became so difficult that it only allowed them to sluice 7,000 yards over the course of the season. That's less than 2 percent of the material they sluiced in season six. That's the risk you run in any new mining en- deavor, Turin says. "Each year, the biggest challenge for us has been trying to figure out how to mine the re- source," he adds. "You can build the right plant and have the right tools that allow you to clean and sort and size your rock, but at the end of the day, it always comes back to the source. Here, we underestimated how successful the original dredge was at capturing the gold in the area, and that's the reason we have such a small pay zone. But you never really know until you get right down in there and start digging." Setting high expectations The Oregon claim they mined is a well-known placer deposit that was once a river channel that meandered through the valley. The secret to mining an area like that is finding the deepest channels in