"A remote corner of the North American continent." "A subarctic wilderness, unchanged for millennia... ..until gold was discovered here at the end of the 19th century." "News of the find triggered a global stampede - the Klondike Gold Rush." "And for two brief years, this place was utterly transformed as tens of thousands of gold-seekers from around the world raced from the Alaskan coast," "600 miles north to the Klondike gold fields, hoping to strike it rich." "Now, 120 years later, a team of adventurers are here to take on that same journey in search of their own gold, and to experience what it was like to be a Klondiker." "The team are led by historian, Dan Snow." "The amazing thing about the Gold Rush in the 1890s is it's just luck." "It was the guys who got here first and then dug in the right places." "He's joined by medic and engineer, Dr Kevin Fong." "We need to stick it into the stream and just wait to become rich, that's how that works." "And polar explorer and scientist, Felicity Aston." "The theory is that all the gold is so heavy that it sticks to the bottom." "So nothing running out will be valuable." "They'll need to survive icy torrents..." "Quick, quick, quick, quick!" "(That's cold!" ")" "..dangerous descents..." "Whoa!" "..and surging rapids..." "That was...an experience." "Nice work!" "..before they reach the Klondike, where they'll mine for gold the old-fashioned way." "Oh, my God, look at that!" "Dan, Felicity and Kevin are on the Yukon River." "They're three weeks into their month-long expedition, following in the footsteps of the original Gold Rush stampeders." "The sail's filling nicely, we are making good progress here towards the gold fields, everybody." "After five days on board their handcrafted 19th-century-style boat, they're nearing the end of the punishing 600-mile trail." "Since arriving on the coast of Alaska, the team have travelled deep into Canada by climbing towering mountains, swimming freezing rivers and navigating enormous lakes." "Now they're just over 70 miles away from the gateway to the gold fields, Dawson City." "They've been joined by wilderness guide and wildlife expert," "Chris Morgan, who's been charged with looking after their safety." "You can see how easy it would be to miss stuff, can't you, you know?" "I mean, imagine a bear, or a wolf, you know." "They're tough to spot when the undergrowth's this thick." "So far, their journey along the mighty Yukon River has been smooth sailing." "But this is no place for complacency." "RUMBLE OF THUNDER" "Gentle!" "Gentle!" "Gentle!" "Gentle!" "Gentle." "As the storm builds, the team decide to head for shelter." "Felicity, hard, Felicity, hard, Felicity, hard!" "Boom!" "Yes!" "But that means rowing across the fast-flowing current..." "Other way, other way!" "..entirely dependent on their crudely-fashioned oars." "Push away!" "That's right." "LOW CHATTER" "Oh!" "Dan's oar has snapped clean in two." "It's fine, we're good." "We're good, we're totally good." "With only one oar, there's a danger of being swept away by the current." "They resort to paddles and fight to get to shore." "And two strokes hard!" "Two strokes hard!" "Soaked through and exhausted, they eventually make it." "Whoohoo!" " That was pretty epic!" " That was great." "Well done." " It was funny, because..." " Thunder, lightning." " ..otherwise we wouldn't have made it." "We've got 120km to go until we get to Dawson and we no longer have one of our two oars." "At least we got into camp safely, we didn't get swept down the, er...the river." "That is very annoying." "At camp that evening, historian Dan reflects on what motivated the stampeders." "Gold is just that one four-letter word, isn't it?" "And it meant wealth and comfort and status and power." "Reading all those diaries, you can't help but just think," ""Is this gold all it's cracked up to be?"" "To better understand what the Klondikers went through," "Dan has been reading Gold Rush-era diaries." "First-hand accounts of those who witnessed the stampede." "Men became excited, giving up good jobs and leaving their wives and children." "Often mortgaging all they possessed to get enough to buy outfits." "For what?" "For many, disillusion, hardship, poverty, death." "You feel sorry for them because of what they had to endure and because of how unlikely it was they were going to realise that ambition." "This was a story about people looking for a better life and a better future." "Especially in the middle of a depression, which there was in the USA at the time, it was their lottery ticket, it was the way out." "The next morning, the rain is still pouring down." "It's wet, it's miserable, we've got 120km to go to Dawson and we've lost an oar." "To truly experience what the stampeders went through, the team are using Gold Rush-era technology, with one or two exceptions." "Beautiful." "Yes." " Let's have a look..." " Shall we have a go at it?" " ALL:" " Ohhh!" "We have an oar." "Kevin, you've just saved the day." "Back on the way, and the weather improves." "But before they leave the wilderness behind, there's a surprise encounter." "There it is." "It looks like a bear." "Think it's a black bear." " FELICITY:" " Oh, I can see him." "I can see him, yeah." "There are two bear species native to the Yukon." "The grizzly bear, and this... the American black bear." "Wow, he just crossed the Yukon River." "That is amazing." "What an incredible swim." "What on earth would make a bear do that?" "They have pretty big home ranges, and his home ranges might encompass both sides of this river." "Starving after winter hibernation, the priority for the thousands of black bears who live in the Yukon is finding food." "Must have been terrifying for the stampeders." "Yeah." "I mean, for British stampeders that came over, seeing these creatures for the first time, I mean, and then landing ashore and trying to find somewhere to camp among them, it must have been completely bewildering." "Swept along the enormous river by the current, the first signs of civilisation begin to appear." " It's a house." " Yeah." "You know, when I first heard about this trip and someone said there's a 400km rowing bit," "I genuinely thought it was a typo." "Walked over a high pass..." "You've reached the top." "Well done!" "..rowed along a long river... ..all to get to this place." "After a gruelling 600-mile journey, they've finally arrived at the gateway to the goldfields " "Dawson City." "I genuinely feel a little bit emotional," " getting here, to Dawson." " Yeah." " Oh!" " Come ashore." "Let's go find some gold." "Today, Dawson City still lies at the heart of gold-mining operations in the Klondike." "But with a population of just over a thousand, it's a shadow of its former self." "During the Gold Rush, it was transformed from a small indigenous settlement to a bustling hive of around 40,000 stampeders in less than a year." "One of Dan's favourite diarists of the Gold Rush, a British aristocrat and adventurer called Frederick Stephen Wombwell, arrived in Dawson in 1898." ""No attempt seems to have been made" ""to lay out a town." ""The people live in tents and shacks scattered all over creation."" ""The one street consists entirely of saloons and dance halls" ""and, of course, a few shops." ""Everything is covered with dust and very filthy."" "But the thousands of stampeders weren't here for the distractions that Dawson offered." "They were here for gold." "And now it was tantalisingly close." "From Dawson, it's just a short journey into the Klondike goldfields, a 1,200-square-mile area of creeks, hills and wilderness." "It's here that the team's hunt for gold will begin." "Their destination, Dominion Creek, lies about 40 miles south of Dawson City." "It was at Dominion Creek that Frederick Wombwell started mining in 1898." ""Passed a very sleepless night." ""Thinking too much, I suppose."" ""I often wonder as I write these notes" ""with what sort of a story I shall conclude them."" ""How many disappointed souls will there be," ""and shall I be one of them?"" "Like Wombwell, Dan, Felicity and Kevin will be attempting to find gold here using 19th-century methods and technology." "And they've had a team at Dominion Creek recreating a Gold Rush-era mining camp." "Carpenter Peter Buntain has been overseeing construction." "He's been helped by local miners, Reid Gaven... ..and Aaron Mendelsohn." "Oh, look at that." "The gold mine!" "It's going to be fun, isn't it?" "So this is our very own mine." "This is it, we're going to find gold here." " Good to see you." " How you doing, Peter?" "Good to see you, buddy." " Nice to see you." " Hey, how you doing?" " Hey." "The team have enough supplies for just five days." "Hi." "Felicity." "Hi." "During this time, historian Dan wants to experience the same physical hardships faced by the stampeders who mined for gold." "I'm happy to do that, if you guys want to do that." "It's up to you." "Polar explorer and scientist Felicity is keen to use her geology expertise to help find the gold." "Whilst trauma medic and engineer Kevin wants to get hands-on with the technology that the gold-rushers employed." "The first challenge stampeders faced was establishing a camp in this inhospitable subarctic environment." "The team have arrived in late spring, just like many stampeders did in 1898, joining those who'd braved the winter." "But even in early June, conditions here can be harsh." "This is great." "This looks like a proper Gold Rush-era, 19th-century prospector's tent." "Ah, it's beautiful." "A wave of warm air hits you." "Home away from home." "I've got my great little stove to keep me warm and my bed up off the floor, so I'm happy." "And, Peter, you could camp in this through the winter, could you, even with temperatures way below zero outside?" "I think the coldest I've been out is minus 48." "When you have a little woodstove and a little tent, it's everything." "Temperatures drop to about zero here at night still." "Dan and Kevin decide they need a stove of their own... whilst Felicity tries her hand at another skill the stampeders had to master." "He knows where he's going." "So shall I try giving this a go?" "Timber was one of the very few vital resources in plentiful supply for the stampeders." "It was used for construction, mining equipment and as fuel." "That's starting to go now a little bit." "Yeah, and it's going to go that way." "Watch out." "Whoohoo!" "That's how you do it." "We are digging a pit for the stove to go into." "So we can get the chimney to go out of that hole there." "Looks pretty good." "But Peter's spotted a problem with Dan and Kevin's handiwork." "It's going to need to be higher." "It's too dangerous." "If the wind's blowing, it'll put the fire straight on the roof of your tent." "The dangers of these particular stoves, the obvious one is, if the canvas hits the stove, it can catch fire - they're well known to, which is why they earned themselves the nickname "hippy-killers"." "To avoid burning down their tent, the chimney needs to be moved further away from the tent wall and extended higher." "These days, extra sections of chimney come flat-packed." "And, as Dan discovers..." "This is ridiculous." "..they're a devil to bend into shape." "What a piece... of junk." "With the camp feeling more like home, it's time for the team to head down to the claim." " There's a cut right here." " Nice!" " What are we looking at here?" "This is the mine, this bit here?" " Yeah." "Why would you choose this area?" "You would aim for a natural depression in the ground like that," " and this is right across from it, so..." " So that's exciting." "It is exciting, yeah." "Even in gold-rich areas, most of the gold isn't found near the surface." "You need to dig for it." "As gold is one of the heaviest substances found in nature, it works its way down through the soil until it settles in the gravel layer above the bedrock." "These gold-rich layers are known as paydirt." "Old-timers were pulling, like, half an ounce to their gold pan out here, back then." " A day." " A day, yeah." " A day?" "!" " Yep, 15g a day." " Yes!" " There's lots of potential here for us." " Right!" "I think it would be really good if we had a go with the pans just in the creek, to know that there really is something here." "Sure thing." "So we're really lucky to have some virgin ground, but it's such a gamble." "When you see the size and the quantities that you're dealing with, you realise just how small your chances are of striking that absolute sweet spot that has the gold." "The tried and tested method of prospecting for gold has remained unchanged since the Gold Rush." "Take a pan full of dirt and wash it out in the creek." "Felicity is the only one of the team with experience of panning, so she gives the others a crash course." "The idea is that you use loads of water to wash off all the dirt and soil." "And then you start making circles with the pan so that the big stones drop off the edge, so you have to keep the pan tipped and you have to keep lots of water in there." "I'm getting nervous about throwing away the gold that is in here." "Well, the theory is that all the gold is so heavy that it sticks to the bottom, so nothing running out will be valuable." "Small flakes of gold found in the soil near the surface are a good indication of richer gold deposits near the bedrock below." "It's this telltale surface gold that our team are looking for." "Come on, goldy goldy goldy." "What does gold...?" "What does gold look like, were you about to say?" "I think, if you don't know that... ..then we're in a bit of trouble here, mate." "That looks a lot like gold." "It looks more silvery, doesn't it?" "That's probably sort of mica or silica." "Does silica have an enormously high value?" "Yeah, it would be nice if it did, because we'd be rich already." "There's a lot of shiny stuff in there, but no gold." "This doesn't seem to me to be a foolproof system of gold-discovery." "As there's been 120 years of mining in this area, most of the easy-to-find gold has long since gone." "Yeah, I don't see nothing in here." "The same technique." "Same level of success." "How've you done, Peter?" "I'm down to my black sand, but I do see a little bit of colour." "That's definitely gold, man." "That's how it shines, right?" "You can really see it." "That's definitely gold." "That is exciting." "Nice work, Peter." " Yeah, great!" " First gold." "There's gold in them there hills." "We've just got to get it." " Just got to get it out of there." " That's right." "They've found their first piece of gold." "Trouble is, they need a magnifying glass to see it." "This is a genuine piece of placer gold." " They call it placer, don't they?" " Placer, they do." "Yes." "The tiny flakes." "When you look at it close, it's got lumps and bumps on it like a very small nugget." "As the day ends, the team have had their first taste of gold." "They now have only four days to find more." "It's 5:30am." "And someone's already stirring in camp." "It's now a beautiful morning." "Sun is out." "Before everyone gets up," "I can't resist going back down to the mine site and doing a bit of digging." "Ice on the handle of the blade." "It is cold down here." "Dan is determined to single-handedly dig his way down to the paydirt, the gold-rich layer close to the bedrock." "A little part of your brain, every single shovel, is just scanning for gold." "It's a kind of madness." "I think I'm going down with it." "Maybe the most exciting thing about being here is knowing that Wombwell, one of my particular heroes of the Gold Rush, it was here that he put his shovel in the ground and started looking for some gold." ""There must be gold in all these creeks" ""but, really, finding it is mostly luck." ""Experienced miners will search all over a strip of country" ""and not even find colour." ""While a cheechako, who does not know gold when he sees it," ""will scratch about in some unusual place and find it."" "That's the amazing thing about the Gold Rush in the 1890s - it's just luck." "It's the guys who got here first, it's the guys who got the good areas to dig, and then dug in the right places once they got to those areas." "But times have changed." "Today, the gold is much more scarce, and modern gold miners can't rely on luck alone." "While Dan's been digging for gold, the others have just started their day." "They've been joined by local mining and geology experts Astrid Grawehr and Jim Coates, who they've called in for their knowledge on where best to find gold." "But when Jim and Astrid take a look at the claim, they suspect the team might have a problem." "Layers of silt that look like they've been... ..more recently laid down than ancient times." " Oh, Astrid..." " So if this has been dredged, there's not a huge amount of sense in digging any further into this hill." "OK." "Astrid suspects the bank they've been digging into has been previously mined." "If that's the case, it would mean any gold has already been removed." "She wants to see more of the cut exposed." "Right here?" "And it's not long before her suspicions are confirmed..." "Watch out there, guys." "..by a rogue rock." "That didn't get there naturally." " No." " So, looks like we've got proof now that this is previously mined ground, because that great big quartz rock should be sitting on bedrock, where the gold is, but instead, it's..." " It's up here at the topsoil." " Yeah, like, five metres up." "There's really no point in digging in pre-worked materials." " It's probably been mined." " OK." "Do we look for somewhere else to dig?" "Let's go take a look up the creek." "With their first location proving to be a bust and only four days of mining left, the team splits up to search for a viable gold prospect." "Dan heads for the hills." "Felicity ventures further up the creek to try to find some unmined ground." "While Kevin wants to come up with a more efficient method of extracting gold from paydirt, if they find any." "Look, I'm terrible at this, and if I'm being honest," "I don't think any of the three of us is any good of it." "Not really." "It's craft skill." "But there has to be a better way of getting the gold out than this." "The key to finding gold here is to know where it might be concentrated." "One way that gold gets concentrated is when small flakes are washed down streams and come to rest in areas where the water slows, such as in bends." "Over time, these streams change course, leaving large gold deposits buried under thick layers of topsoil." "The art of successful gold prospecting is in reading the landscape and recognising small depressions that might indicate the presence of an ancient riverbed." " The spot's right there." " Yeah?" "In this depression?" " Why do you like this depression?" " It's a natural trap for the gold." "This depression here." "So we go on that flat spot right here." " You're excited now." " Oh, yeah." " This feels like virgin territory." "Dan is hoping that Reid's experience will lead them to one of these ancient riverbeds." "But the only way to know for sure is to dig down, deep down, to the bedrock, where the stream would have run." "That's nasty." " I see you're hitting permafrost right here." " Permafrost already!" " Oh, yeah." " It's, like, five inches down." "Even in late spring, the Klondike is so close to the Arctic Circle that the ground is permanently frozen just beneath the surface." " That's just a block of ice." " Oh, yeah." "Gold miners would have to break through this permafrost in order to reach the gravel and bedrock beneath." ""A strata of frozen black muck about 15-20 feet in thickness" ""has to be picked through with a pickaxe." ""This is very slow and tiresome work," ""and usually takes about ten days." ""Below this lies the gold-bearing gravel." ""This is frozen hard as flint, and against it, the pickaxe is useless."" "Dan and Reid have been digging for over an hour, but have only managed to get a few inches down into the permafrost." "Just gives you an idea what the old boys would go through." "And sometimes they wouldn't even find anything, they'd have to go over, move right over there 50 feet, dig another shot." "You can see why men either left the goldfields rich or broken." "Yeah." "Or broken is right." "It's clear this plan isn't working." "DAN GROANS" "Meanwhile, Kevin has headed over to a nearby claim owned by traditional mining expert Jerry Anhart..." " Jerry!" " How you doing?" "!" "..in the hope of finding a more efficient way of processing paydirt." "Although Jerry's claim isn't big, he's had some rich pickings." "Looks fantastic." "When I go to town on Friday nights, this is the one I wear." "This is the most important nugget I've ever found." " I panned this one." "It is exactly a one-ounce nugget." " Wow!" "A lot of the old-timers are still saying here that I faked this, cos they wouldn't believe it, you know?" "And the half-ounce one my wife wears was two metres away." "The gold is impressive, but what's of real interest to Kevin is that Jerry mines his claim using traditional methods." "It's three and a half feet, about one metre down there to the perma." "This is my sluice box here, popularly called a Long Tom." "In 1898, the stampeders used every ounce of their ingenuity to make the process of gold mining more profitable." "One of the most widely employed innovations were handmade sluice boxes." "How does this work?" "What you are doing is really imitating mother nature." "Down there is the ancient creek bed that was laid down a half a million years ago or so." "So the heavy gold worked its way down these valley sides through alluvial action." "What we're doing here is compressing that time by making it more efficient." "Down here we have what are called Hungarian riffles." "When this box is set up right, they will be tilted at a 15-degree angle." "The lip over the top will create an eddy current, where below is a low-pressure area, and the gold drops out and gets caught in the mat." "And then the lighter material goes out." "It's like artificial bends in the river," " places where the water slows or..." " Very good, you're learning." " ..or is turbulent." "By separating gold from lighter elements, the sluice box does what panning does, but far more efficiently, and on a much bigger scale." "Wish us luck." "I think we're up against it." "We've only got a couple of days here." "Well, there's an old saying about luck, you know - the harder I work, the luckier I get." "Back at the Creek, Felicity and the geologists have been prospecting for gold further upstream." "But so far, no luck." "There's no gold in there, is there?" "After several hours, the search for a good site to mine is beginning to look futile." "No gold." "Nothing there." "Until Jim chances on what looks like an unpromising pile of gravel and rock." "It could be another layer of dirt that's already been processed, but because it's still piled up in a heap, he suspects it might be something else." " This is it." "We've got pay." " What have you got?" "This is the, probably, bottommost metre that is sitting right on bedrock, that has all the gold in it." "The people who mined this previously would have scraped the bedrock up and piled it, intending to sluice it, and then they never did." "So this is a pile of paydirt that was originally mined, but not processed." "But why would anybody go to all the time and effort of digging out all this dirt, and then not process it to see what they've got?" "Sometimes people forget or they find a better area somewhere else and just leave this." "So this is fantastic news!" "Rather than us having to dig down to get this stuff, somebody has already dug down to near bedrock, scooped up that exact layer and put it on the banks." "Let's be scientific and double-check." "Before they get too carried away, it's worth panning the paydirt pile to check there's some gold in it." "So, we found some gold." " One little nugget." " Yay!" "At the end of their second day mining, the team are back on track." "I just really want to get stuck into that dirt pile." "I just so want to go back to Dawson with a little pot of gold." "I feel like I need that last bit of connection with the story, with the history, with the original stampeders." "That feeling of going back and cashing in what we've found from the ground." "It's day three at the mining claim." "With the discovery of the paydirt, it's time to stop prospecting for gold, and time to start extracting it." "But the team won't get very far with hand panning." "It is going to take a century of Sundays before we can get through all that dirt unless we have a more efficient process, and that process has to be the same principle as panning, but just on a sort of semi-industrial scale," "and that needs a sluice." "We need quite a lot of water, don't we?" "Got to dam the river for a source of water to wash the dirt to sort the gold for us." "I never said it was going to be easy." "I said we needed to do it." "So we've got to find some wood." "You know what they used to do 120 years ago, the original prospectors?" "They broke up their boats." "That's where the wood came from." "No." "We're not breaking that boat up." "The good ship the Bloody Nose carried the team through frigid waters and fierce rapids..." "..over 200 miles of the mighty Yukon river." "Named after Dan was wounded in action." "Kevin grew very attached to the boat." "I always loved this boat." "This is a great boat." "I genuinely don't want to hack that boat up." "I genuinely, genuinely, genuinely don't." "I don't think we've got another choice, to be honest." "I've seen some kit lying around that could saw planks." "How hard can it possibly be?" "They're planks." "Kevin's not prepared to saw up the Bloody Nose, so he's going to try to make planks the same way the stampeders did." "Right, Peter, what are we doing?" "Well, guys, I guess here we have a wood saw stand." "Where the men become men and where the Huskies may be nervous." "OK, so, the fellow on the bottom pulls, the fellow on the top pulls." "Fellow on the bottom pulls, fellow on the top pulls." "Fellow on the bottom pulls, fellow on the top pulls." "Bottom pulls, top pulls." "This was the only tool they had for making the planks for lumber for the sluice boxes or buildings or boats or whatever they needed to build." "This was the early form right here." "Before the mills came in, you were the mill." "Peter, have you used one of these before?" "Oh, Kevin, to be honest with you...no." ""Everybody hates this hand sawing." ""Of course, the teamwork has to be very good," ""as the saw has to run straight down the line marked on the log." ""And if it runs off, the top man is sure to blame the man underneath." ""Or vice versa." ""They say this whipsawing has done more to break up partnerships" ""than any other one thing."" "Get those knees bending, buddy." "KEVIN LAUGHS" "I've just got this quite surgical view of a bunch of teeth that come towards my testicles." "Yeah, cos every time you pull back, it smashes me in the sternum." "You're worrying about getting smashed in the sternum by a wooden handle, mate," "I'm worried about testicular rearrangement." "Buddy, I'm not WORRIED about being smashed in the sternum," "I AM being smashed in the sternum." "Every single time." "KEVIN LAUGHS" "Seven inches." "OK, we're doing OK." "So I think we're looking at an all-day mission to create one plank at the moment." "Kev, I don't think it's going to happen, buddy." "I'm not sure we can make planks out of this enormous tree." "Yep, I am sorry to have to agree." "We're never going to get there like this." "HE PANTS" "They need about a dozen planks, and as the whipsaw clearly isn't an option, it's curtains for the Bloody Nose." "Broken oar." "My most genuine emotion about this whole thing is I'm really reluctant to chop it up." "I..." "I think it's a ludicrous thing to do." "And I know it is what the stampeders would have done, but the stampeders did a lot of things that we're not going to do." "I know." "But this boat could help us to find gold." "That's what it's done from the beginning, and it's going to keep on doing it." "So let's give it the opportunity to still be part of the story and help us find gold." "But taking the Bloody Nose apart proves to be far easier said than done." "How are you doing there, Felicity?" "In about 20 minutes of sawing, I got through one plank." "For the second time in a day, Kevin is thwarted by a handsaw." "And I rather suspect that the best person to tell us how to take it apart is the man who put it together in the first place, so I think were going to have to talk to Peter, and I'm not looking forward to that conversation." "Cos I don't think he's going to be very happy about us taking it apart either." " Hey." " Peter." "How's it going down here?" "Hey, Reid." "It's an amateur demolition." " It's a hell of a nice boat, though." " Yeah." " Don't start." " PETER:" " Hey, I don't feel bad about it at all, cos I really hope the boat is going to go to a good purpose." "What's it really going to take to take this apart?" " We haven't got much time here, guys." " OK, hang on." "All right, you guys." "MOTOR STARTS" "CHAINSAWS BUZZ, HE SHOUTS" "This is horrific." "Hey, Kevin." "OK, one, two, three." "There we go." "If you have a sluice, you need a dam to provide water for it." "That's good." "Whilst Jim and Astrid dig out the channel that will supply water to the sluice," "Dan and Aaron begin construction on the dam." "Right, let's find some boulders." "How big are we looking?" " A hug's worth." " Yeah." "There we go." "DAN GRUNTS AND STRAINS" "DAN CHUCKLES" "Basically we're just building a barrier here," " like a foundation for the logs, right?" " OK." "Just throw it anywhere you find fit." "Like the stampeders," "Dan came to the Yukon hoping to find an easy fortune." " I'm just go into roll it." " Yeah." "But the harsh reality of gold mining is endless, backbreaking work." "And so far, Dan's exertions have reaped precious little reward." "We want to make sure this beefy spectacle isn't futile." "Yeah, just right there, right in front of your foot." "Yeah." "Perfect." "While Kevin and Felicity have been messing around with boats, we've been up here doing some hard labour and we have achieved something." "We've managed to get a partial dam across this river, that provides a water supply, coming down our little channel here." "At the end of this, Kevin is going to build a sluice." "Into that, we're going to put the paydirt, and were going to wash that dirt and be left with gold." "That's the plan." "And today, I think we just achieved an important step." " OK." " Nice, bud!" " Well done." "That evening, the ramifications of Peter's chainsaw massacre are still being felt." "Something of a sad day today." "We had to break up the boat." "We've come a long way in that boat." "And it was an incredible, incredible journey." "But we've got to get the gold and we haven't got much time." "The team now has only two days left to make their fortunes." "That's a fairly precise angle." "So Kevin needs to get his sluice built." "He's enlisted Jim and Peter to help." "So we now need our..." "What degree again, Kevin?" " 15 degrees for the riffles." " 15 degrees." "Yeah, so we need to cut those." "Here's your first." "That's perfect." "There we go, there's a riffle." "Before the riffles go in, sackcloth is added, creating a mat that will hopefully snare the finer gold particles." "With the same amount of effort, the sluice allows you to process probably 1,000 times more material than just panning." " 1,000 times more?" " This is what you want to do." "It's worth the time that you take to build the sluice." "It's a hazard." "When Peter decides it's too dangerous to do without some safety equipment... ..it's probably just too dangerous, frankly." "The final screw goes in and the sluice is ready." "Now we need to stick it into the stream and just wait to become rich." "That's how that works." "In addition to the sluice, a hopper to feed the dirt into, and a flume to regulate the water flow, have also been constructed." "ALL:" "One, two, three." "Almost." "And there we go." "So..." "The finishing touch is an old metal grille, which will filter out large rocks that could block up the sluice." "It totally looks the way a sluice should look." "It's clearly working." "We can watch it sinking out the heavies, floating out the lights." "And what we're seeing is the hydraulic mimic of the creek." "So it's working perfectly." "With the sluice fully operational, it's time to get some paydirt through." "Further down the creek," "Dan takes charge of the hauling operation." "This pile that somebody has chosen..." "HE CHUCKLES" "..better have a lot of flakes of gold in it." "Otherwise I'll be annoyed." "I've come a long way for this." "They have their paydirt." "But they won't know if they've got any gold until they take apart the sluice at the end." "So it's a lot of hard work and a big leap of faith." "This is the old-fashioned way of getting the paydirt to pay you." "Labour-intensive." "People shovelling." "People pushing barrows around." "People sticking stuff through a sluice like this." "And it's horribly inefficient." "My role in this has now been reduced to just dirt mover." "Dirt shifter." "I just do what I'm told now." "But Felicity and Kevin know what they're doing." "Great." "Everyone appears to have left!" "That's enough gold mining for today, obviously." "Whoa!" "I guess it's late." "Time for a beer." "The evening of day four at the claim." "It's time to relax before the final push in the morning." "Is it cinnamon and brown sugar?" "I think it's a good start." "I wish we had more time out here." "Tomorrow we've got a lot of work to do." "Meanwhile, Felicity has headed off to take a closer look at an unusual landscape nearby." "This place is surreal." "It feels like you're on a vast, glacial moraine." "But I already know that this wasn't created by any force of nature." "This whole place was created by man looking for gold." "When the miners first came here, they were mining on a really small scale, with hand tools and small teams of men." "But within a few years, things had evolved so that they were using huge machines to look for gold on an industrial scale." "The first gold dredge appeared in the Klondike as the stampede ended." "By then, the easily accessible gold had all been taken." "But the dredges industrialised the mining process." "They were able to extract profitable amounts of gold, even from poorer ground." "From down here, you can't really appreciate the true scale of the change." "So I want to get a different perspective, just to see how big these workings were." "You can already see that these are not natural formations." "They've got this very even, regular ripple on the top, as if some massive earthworm has come through, excavating behind it." "People did this to the landscape in desperation." "They needed that gold." "They needed that money." "It stretches as far as the eye can see." "Right the way to the end of the valley." "We're just looking in one valley." "These dredgers went up every creek, every valley, for kilometres and kilometres." "It's the final morning of the claim, and with precious few hours left to strike it rich, the team make an early start." "So this is the day of days." "I'm feeling the pressure a bit." "My God, this is the last chance." " I mean, are you not feeling..." " Yeah." " ..just a little bit anxious?" "I'm desperate." "Desperate to get some gold." "But desperate Dan is going to have to do some more desperate digging to get any gold." "What you call a man with a shovel in his head?" "Doug." "We should get the guys to bring us a bit more of this dirt, otherwise we're going to run out." "Where is Dan?" "He's probably in his vest somewhere." "This creek is so cold." "It's lovely." "Everyone's busting a gut to put as much paydirt as possible through the sluice." "But after hours of back-breaking work, they're running out of time." "Oh, Dan." "Please, stop!" "The last shovel load goes through the sluice." "All right, let's get my sluice out of this pit, and see whether we're rich." "One, two, three." "Here we go." "Any gold should have been captured by the mat at the bottom of the sluice box." "But the only way to be sure is to dismantle it." "I can't bear to watch." "Careful with all our gold!" "The mat is washed into a bucket." "It feels a bit weird, washing it all out into a bucket now." "But that's our only way to get it concentrated down with our pans and the only way to find out how much we've actually made." "I thought we were done with panning?" "This feels a lot more pressurised than when you're just panning on the side of the creek and not expecting to get anything." " Knowing there's something in there..." " Yeah." " ..raises the stakes a bit." "I mean, I don't know how I would go about spotting the gold in that much black sand." "Oh!" "Oh, my God!" "Look at that." "Look at that!" "That just caught the sun then." "That is huge." "Holy smoke!" " That's biblical." " I didn't think we would get anything that size." "No, neither did I." "They've found a speck of gold." "But they still need to carefully pan out every last ounce of mud and rock." "Because just as for the stampeders, the success or failure of their mission hinges on how much gold they can recover." "I'm so relieved." "I cannot tell you what a weight this is off my shoulders." "I was really feeling the pressure to come up with the goods." "We have gold." "Something that I'm going to be really proud to show the guys." "So, guys." "I need you all to remember that trying to get gold out the ground was always going to be a massive, huge ask." "Even to find one little flake is a huge achievement." "And so, have a look at this." "Look at those babies." "I wasn't expecting to find anything this kind of size." "Really, you were expecting less than this?" "Aw, come on, this is a big celebration, Kevin." "Look, we have gold out of the ground." "Look at it." "Dan, what do you reckon?" "I'm not going to quit my day job just at the moment." "But..." " Guys!" " ..it's quite exciting to see gold that we got out of the ground." "Well, in my head, we have struck it rich." "We found gold in the Klondike." "Yeah, that's great." "We found the motherlode." "THEY LAUGH" "Good, well done." " If you kept it up for a couple of days, you'd probably..." " You" " BLEEP!" " I was really impressed that, and you both just" " BLEEP - on it completely." " Looks like you get to keep it all, then." " Yeah, I think so." "I was impressed." " I think that's a good start." " Look, there's little bits here as well..." "The Klondike Gold Rush began after gold was discovered in 1896." "But by the summer of 1899, with all the easy gold gone, the stampede was over." "During this four-year period, over 18 tonnes of gold were mined - worth more than half a billion dollars at today's prices." "The team return to Dawson City to cash in their hard-earned gold." "The first stop is the smelter's." "This freshly smelted 50-ounce bar is worth almost 60,000." " There you go." " Wow, that's heavy." "Now, Wombwell pulled 1,400 ounces out of the Klondike." "He had to give half of it away to the owner of the land that he was mining, so he got keep a stack of 14 of those." "The really weird thing is that he says in the last line of his diary, he got home having neither made money nor lost money." "So the whole thing was break even." "Just getting here and getting the gold out, then getting it back," " cost him 14 of those." " Yeah." "Is there a minimum limit for what you can smelt?" "You know, you can melt small amounts, about an ounce, an ounce and a half." " When you say small..." " Yeah." "..how small?" " Oh..." "Erm..." " THEY LAUGH" "Not so much..." "Oh, no!" "So are you telling me it's not enough to be worth melting and pouring?" "I..." "That..." "Yes, correct." "They may not have enough gold to melt down, but they can still try and sell it at a trading post in town." "This is what we have." "Just out of interest, how much money do you think that is?" "A little bit of black sand in there, but that doesn't weigh much." "So, you got... 0.2 gram." "I would guesstimate probably..." "About 20." " I'm sorry." " Yay, we made money!" "20 Canadian dollars is 10 British pounds." " We have just walked for a month and paddled for a month..." " Dan." "..to do a week of mining." "And we're going to make £10 out of it." "Can I add something to that for all of yous?" "The real gold value is in your heart." "You're right." "I feel personal pride in that amount of gold." "No matter what you say, I'm proud of that." "The worst thing about this entire situation is that's the amount of gold we've got." "It's got to go three ways!" "Of the estimated 100,000 people who took part in the stampede, it's thought that less than 4,000 found any gold." "And only a few hundred became rich." "Coming to the Yukon cost most of them everything, some even losing their lives." "And many of those who survived the harsh conditions returned home destitute and physically broken." "There is one place in town where the team are guaranteed to strike gold." " Hello." "Can we get three golds, please?" " Three golds?" " Thank you." "It would have been fun to find a bit more gold, though, wouldn't it?" "I think you're forgetting just how remarkable it is that we found anything at all." "The gold wasn't what I was hoping to find here." "It was the experience." "You can learn a lot from the diaries written by the people." "But you can't ever grasp the full picture unless you come out here and walk the ground." "I think I understand a lot more about the toughness, the resourcefulness, the motivation of those people who came deep into the north of Canada with dreams of gold." "And that is very eloquently expressed by Robert Service, who wrote a poem about the Gold Rush." ""I wanted the gold and I sought it," ""I scrambled and mucked like a slave." ""Was it famine or scurvy" " I fought it;" ""I hurled my youth into a grave." ""I wanted the gold and I got it " ""Came out with a fortune last fall " ""Yet somehow life's not what I thought it," ""And somehow the gold isn't all."" "There's no doubt this was something that people who were in desperate circumstances threw themselves into as their last hope." "Although I got a huge thrill out of finding those little gold flecks in the pan, if I had invested my entire future, and that of my family in being there, there'd be a lot more pressure and it would be a lot different." "Like my hero, Wombwell, I'm going home... none the richer." "But it was brilliant." " Cheers." " Cheers." " Cheers." "Aah!"