A new golden era: gold rush in the Yukon The technology of sluicing - rinsing gold from sand or gravel - has changed over the years, but both the original Klondikers and the 21st-century types practise placer mining - 'placer' from the Spanish for alluvial deposit. The gold here began encrusted in hard rock and eroded over millennia. If there's gold in sediment from a stream or a glacier, it will be found underneath a layer of vegetation and earth (called 'overburden' when miners remove it), within a layer of gravel and other finer material. This, literally, is pay dirt. Where the Klondikers famously sorted gold flecks and nuggets from sand and stone in pans, modern operations employ giant bulldozers to strip the overburden and expose the pay dirt. It's late May when I arrive at Dawson City Airport, and gold is trading at $1,523 an ounce, causing exploration to explode. In figuring my own prospects for garnering some of this wealth generation, I had turned to someone I knew, my friend Stuart Schmidt, to offer my services as a perfectly useless greenhorn. Schmidt, 59, a lifelong miner whom I met as a reporter, is the Yukon's second-largest placer gold operator and, to my surprise, he agreed to take me on. 'Have you ever worked with heavy equipment?' he asked. One summer I drove the lawn tractor at a provincial park, I offered. Right. Uh, don't tell the guys that.' A week into my new career, I collapse on the mattress in my trailer, mosquito-ravaged and exhausted. An instant later, it seems, the buzz from my alarm jolts me awake. I'm still in my filthy overalls. The grit of dried sweat and insect repellent permeates my T-shirt; my hands are sore and swollen. Another 12-hour shift beckons. I'll work 37 of these in a row before my first day off. I stumble out and head for the cook shack. Inside, my fellow crew members are putting lunches together; I join the sandwich-making fray. Then there's breakfast to contend with. In my former life as a reporter for the Whitehorse Star, I preferred cigarettes and coffee for breakfast, so I'm struggling to stomach bacon and eggs at 6am. In my first week I'm part of a three-man crew felling trees large enough to provide 10ft poles for a pen Schmidt wants constructed for his four horses. I signed up to go gold mining, not log the backcountry, but I'm at Schmidt's disposal and, with no mechanical skills to offer, it's fence-building or nothing. In our marathon shifts, there are no coffee breaks and only a 30-minute lunch break. Once mining starts, there will be no lunch breaks. The following day, I'm sorting hydraulic hose and storing motor oil when Schmidt takes me out back to look at the spare machines, parts, trailers and junk vehicles. 'This is like what you'll be operating,' Stuart says, gesturing at a Hitachi EX700H. I gawp at the huge machine. A standard piece of kit for today's placer outfits, it is 150,000 lb of earth-eating muscle, an excavator used to dump pay dirt into 'the plant'. In a sluicing operation, the plant performs the same task as an old-fashioned dredge. Hulking wooden corpses of former dredges, replete with their iron innards, remain in the region where they were abandoned; a remnant of a bygone era. Stuart's blue beast, constructed of steel and outfitted with bulldozer tracks, is pulled from job to job, where it remains until all the pay dirt is gobbled up. The excavator keeps the plant fed while a bulldozer razes the landscape to replenish the feedstock. Feeding the hopper - a large metal mouth at the front of the plant - with a steady supply of pay dirt is paramount. Water pumped into the plant washes the material through a trommel, a giant rotating cylinder where larger rocks are separated and ferried off the back of the plant on a large conveyor. Those rocks - tailings - continually stack up and must be periodically levelled by the dozer. Gold is washed from the finer dirt and collected in mats called miner's moss. More than 300 sq ft of this rubber carpet is laid out in chutes flanking the plant. Because gold is 19 times heavier than water, flecks of the yellow prize are trapped in the moss while the lighter material is washed away. Preparing for my part in this process, I take the controls of a smaller model of excavator for about 20 minutes, then survey the mess I've made. I've got a steep learning curve ahead. But if I can't manage this, there's not much else I can do at the mine. The pressure's on. Diary entry, June 13 My first day of mining. I miscalculate and ram the excavator's bucket, loaded with dirt, into the big blue wash plant while Stuart and some guests stand on a large gangplank next to the conveyor. The plant shakes violently. Stuart admonishes me with a finger wag. His guests frantically reach for the railing. After they depart, a perturbed Stuart climbs aboard the Hitachi and takes over. At the age of nine, Stuart learnt to run heavy equipment at his father's gold mine. 'Part of your job is to keep the plant filled with dirt, and not to hit the plant,' he says while offering pointers. 'We used to tell operators that if they hit the plant, they're fired. So don't hit the plant.' Every 18 hours, we shut down for a clean-up, and gold is rinsed from the mats. One day in July, after several decent cleans, I drive a truck back to camp loaded with four 45-gallon drums containing approximately $300,000 in gold. This stuff is the 'fines'; the gold finally emerges when the fines are processed back at the camp in a scaled-down version of the plant. The portion of the claim we're working is tens of thousands of square feet in size. Every 45 seconds I must dump a bucket, the equivalent of slightly more than 80 cubic feet of dirt, into the hopper. Dale Bulmer, operating the dozer, radios me when I'm falling behind. Bulmer is from Choiceland, Saskatchewan; he came to work for Schmidt in 1993 at the age of 18. He's tough as nails. When I brag to friends about my longest stretch of work days in a row (37), I contextualise with Bulmer's record of 102 days. Bulmer loves his job, particularly working outside, and wouldn't have it any other way, save for the scant time he spends with his children during the season. 'I always feel like I'm getting out of bed and putting on my socks,' he says of the work. Servicing the excavator is another immense challenge. Everything about it is huge and cumbersome, including the heavy five-gallon pails of hydraulic fluid and motor oil. Bulmer is charged with showing me the ropes and thinks that I move too slowly, so I try to pick up the pace. 'You'd better learn how to eat on the machine,' he warns on my first day operating the Hitachi. As for my performance at the controls, 'I'd thought I'd seen it all' and 'What the f*** are you doing?' are among his assessments. It turns out hauling logs was good preparation for the most physically challenging part of my job: packing pipe. Placer mining requires a tremendous amount of water, and sources can be rivers or creeks or the man-made settling ponds created by the mining process. Each minute, the plant washes down about 100 cubic feet of pay dirt with 3,500 gallons of water, requiring massive diesel pumps and 20ft sections of 10in diameter aluminium pipe. Each section of pipe weighs more than 100lb; crew members are expected to march with them solo. On the first day of mining, I'm nearly wiped out by helping to assemble 300ft of pipe to link the plant with a sufficient water source. Schmidt Mining works 24/7. Mid-July, I'm moved to night shift, where I will spend the remainder of the season. Cleanings aside, only breakdowns and rock jams can bring work to a halt. But a couple of the guys are granted special dispensation during moose season. When Bulmer bags a bull during a shift, Stuart Schmidt takes over on the bulldozer while Bulmer hauls 1,000lb of meat out of the bush. On the first cut at Ruby Creek, about a 20-minute drive from camp, we recover $800,000 in gold. The first few sections bring in less than $1.85 per square foot in gold, but the last section gives us $5.50 per square foot. The value on any given day can fluctuate in the wake of political instability, war or civil unrest far away. Last year's London riots were good news for gold miners. When we're finished with Ruby Creek, it takes three days to relocate nine miles to the south. In the meantime, I'm assigned to monitor duty at a location up the valley called Little Blanche Creek, so named for a dance-hall girl who, in fulfilment of a marriage proposal, received her weight in gold (140lb) mined by her suitor on this very spot. The monitor is a water cannon that propels more than 3,500 gallons a minute, akin to hitting fast-forward on the erosion process. The device, sometimes manned by 18-year-old Hayley Riemer, whose parents and brother have worked for Schmidt, is used when the terrain is unsuitable for bulldozers. Schmidt's hunch proves wrong, but Little Blanche does give up a cache of 30,000-year-old mammoth ivory. It's worth $60 per pound to shops and artisans. An intact tusk can go for $20,000. There are a few lacklustre cuts as the season proceeds, but there is enough trapped in the miner's moss to keep things profitable. What peeves Schmidt is not the rate of return, but the amateur interlopers who moved into the valley at the beginning of the season. When another miner says he is considering selling his claims to the arrivistes down the road, Schmidt snaps them up to prevent the newcomers from moving in on his turf. They are the stars of a Discovery Channel TV series, Gold Rush, and are here filming its second season. During season one, shot at a claim outside Haines, Alaska, the team recovered only $20,000 worth of gold, about enough to keep Schmidt in business for 48 hours. Having been elbowed out of Alaska, the show now films in the Indian River valley under a shroud of secrecy; security guards are hired to keep people off their claim. The miners are led by Todd Hoffman, who believes the Lord intended his crew to strike it rich. They are not the only men in the Yukon who think God is on their side. Marlin McNeil, an ageing prospector and miner from Oklahoma with claims scattered around Quartz Creek, moonlights as a preacher. Every Sunday, he presides over a church service in an old two-room shack located on one of his claims and on the Sunday after Labour Day I turn up at his last sermon for the season; Hoffman and several of the Gold Rush crew are there. His congregation packed into the shack, McNeil delivers a sermon drawn from the Gospel of Mark about Jesus's miraculous healing powers. The congregation plods through a few hymns before McNeil asks those in attendance what they would like him to pray for. Hoffman asks for 20 more days of favourable weather for sluicing - more gold, in other words. When Schmidt, who is not a religious man, learns of this, it peeves him even more. The few days we're granted off from the mine, we blast into Dawson City, looking to blow off steam. We drop our money at the card tables of Diamond Tooth Gerties, the oldest gambling hall in Canada, where the thrice-nightly vaudeville show gets more ribald as the evening wears on. For the younger guys on the crew, gambling gives way to copious drinking and late-night hottub parties at the Downtown Hotel. After a few weekends of watery mayhem, management wises up to our shenanigans and the tub is drained before 10pm. If there's one constant through gold mining's history in Dawson City, it's that miners work hard and play even harder. Diary entry, September 10 Day 90 of mining. Three months in, the weather is turning and the leaves have gone from bright yellow to a dark golden; now we need only a windstorm to leave the effect of a landscape waiting for snow. This mining adventure is drawing to a close, and the final push on. With most of the cuts underperforming, the plan is to drag the plant back to Ruby Creek, where the gold has been most plentiful. By the end of September, there's a territorial election in full swing, and the socialist New Democratic Party proposes ramping up the royalty tax on placer gold. Currently, and since 1906, it's 37.5 cents per troy ounce mined - a rate based on a $15 ounce of gold. Schmidt hits back on local radio. He says that the government should drop the placer tax altogether, because its revenue-generating purpose was taken over long ago by the advent of progressive personal income tax. Even with a $1,600-ounce gold, Schmidt notes, there are relatively few new placer miners (there were 602 placer claims in 2010, and 841 in 2011). Operators such as Schmidt reap millions of dollars' worth of gold from scratching the hills, but the real buzz in the region is much deeper underground. Placer mining remains the domain of die-hards and dreamers, but the majority of the world's gold is extracted via hard-rock mining, a more environmentally unfriendly process that uses deep shafts and caustic chemicals to get at the valuable minerals encased in rock. In 2008 13,834 hard-rock claims were staked in the Yukon. Exploration soared to 83,261 hard-rock claims in 2010, covering some 6,500 square miles, about 3.6 per cent of the territory. The following year was even hotter, with 114,587 hard-rock claims. More than 100 hard-rock exploration companies are searching the Yukon for silver, zinc or copper (all rising in value), but the ultimate prize is gold, and it's only a matter of time before the hard-rock guys find enough of it to warrant a ful--scale operation that would dwarf any placer operation. In undisclosed locations around the Klondike and beyond, men such as 34-year-old Billy Bromell trudge through the bush loaded down with claim posts, tags and bear spray. Since the beginning of April, Bromell has been staking non-stop for a host of hard-rock exploration companies locked in a game so secretive that even Bromell has no idea whom he's driving stakes for. Bromell, who can make upwards of $500 a day, tells me that destinations are also kept secret until he's in the air. After a 54-day stretch, I find him in one of Dawson City's watering holes, enjoying a self-imposed break. 'If I wanted to, I could work through to April next year and there'll be guys who'll work right through Christmas, more or less,' he says. At the beginning of 2011 an aptly named business, Golden Predator, hired the Yukon government's chief geologist, Mike Burke, and bought the region's complete stock of 70,000 claim tags from the Yukon Mining Recorder. The audacious move effectively prevented Golden Predator's rivals from getting a foothold, sending the exploration industry and government officials into a tizzy. 'If we [Golden Predator] didn't do it, maybe somebody else would have and then we would have been snookered,' Burke says. Golden Predator, with exploration holdings in excess of a million acres in the territory, is one of dozens of companies looking to plant the Yukon's first active hard-rock gold mine in almost a decade, and if it gets one up and running, the company is likely to poach seasoned workers from the placer outfits as well. I've been working nights since the middle of July, and tonight, October 4, is the penultimate shift for sluicing. In a few short hours, my work at Schmidt Mining will be finished - 133 days all in. When we're done, we will have sluiced 1.4 million square feet of land and washed 362,880 square yards of dirt through the plant. From chewing through all this landscape, we have derived about 3,000 ounces of gold, which is a lot in dollars and cents, but barely enough to fill one five-gallon bucket to the brim. The season produces about the same amount at Schmidt Mining's other camp, farther south. Over the course of the season, the price of an ounce of gold has continued its zigzag progress upwards: from $1,523 on the day I started to $1,622.30 in my last week. It's been a good year for Schmidt, whose take was worth about $8 million, while expenses - fuel, wages, exploration and maintenance and new equipment purchases that included a new excavator - were about $5 million. It would be impossible to say how much gold is left to be found placer mining in the Klondike gold fields, though one of Schmidt's crew tells me he thinks there's at least 50 years' worth of mining left in the valley. What is known is that the quantity of gold recovered since 1900, the unmatched season that witnessed one million ounces and several fortunes made, has diminished each year, as has the amount of coarse gold and nuggets discovered. 'People talk about [untapped gold reserves] but any number you threw out would be wild and crazy,' Schmidt says. And miners just laugh when you ask them that question. Me, I'm done with mining. It's the toughest job I've ever had, and though I'm glad I had the opportunity and proud that I endured, it's not the career for me. The payoff, however, is amazing. I've got back the body I had when I was in my late twenties, and a renewed confidence in my ability to do things that before I would have never thought possible. And I'm back in the black. With my bags packed into the bed of one of Schmidt's industrial-strength pickup trucks, we slowly weave up the valley to deposit me at Dawson City Airport. We pass a row of giant conveyor belts that have been ferrying overburden to the top of huge dirt pyramids. 'It's a thing of beauty, don't you think?' he asks. We drive in silence for a little while before I ask him if he ever imagines himself retiring. 'Yeah, I'll probably retire, but I'll never stop mining.'