Parker Schnabel Faces MAJOR Losses as Gold Season Falls Apart

本站添加: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Our goal this year is going to be just getting plants running early as we can and keeping them running.

[00:00:06]>> Parker Schnabul is facing major losses as his gold season falls apart. And what he does next is something no Yukon mining boss is ever supposed to do on camera. He is standing in a dusty equipment yard watching a stranger circle his own tractor. And Parker is the one who needs the deal to close.

[00:00:25]Three wash plants, 8,000 ounces promised, two already shut down.

[00:00:30]>> I think the best thing to try to do is for is to try to know where Roxan's going to go. We can like bring a mini hoe over with the little test trauml.

[00:00:39]>> The whole question is how much of the gold did they get? And uh >> which is a [music] good reason to come in with a smaller plant and do a test.

[00:00:47]>> One cut came in 700 o short. Another delivered half of what it pitched. The ground he gambled the season on is not paying, and the next 30 days decide everything. A costly learning curve.

[00:01:01]Parker stands at the edge of the [music] Dominion cut. The wash plant in front of him sits idle. The cleanup table behind him is light, and the gravel pile to his left is the source of both problems.

[00:01:12][music] Wind moves dust across the open ground. The cut walls show the scrape of every yard the crew has pulled this season. And the gold in those yards has not been there. The season, Parker says, has been complicated. The season has been [music] expensive. Dominion has been a learning curve, and the lesson has cost him in a way he is not ready to put a dollar figure on yet. [music] The ground here is bad. Not bad in the way a minor shrugs off and keeps pushing. Bad in the way that means the gravel feeding into the wash plants is not carrying the gold he needs it [music] to carry. Bad in the way that turns a budgeted season into an emergency one.

[00:01:50]>> Dominion's been quite the learning curve. A lot of very very bad ground.

[00:01:56]>> Parker knows the future of Dominion could still be bright. The geology supports it. The historic [music] numbers from this district are some of the strongest in Yukon history. But none of that matters when payroll is due Friday and the cleanup tables are coming back light. Future gold does not pay for diesel today. The math is sitting in front of him in real time. Diesel for three plants. Wages for a full crew.

[00:02:21]Lease payments on a piece of ground that has [music] not yet shown him the gold the projections promised. Insurance parts. The cost of moving Roxanne in the first place. [music] Every one of those numbers is fixed. The output is not. The cleanup tables tell the story. Week after week, the wash plant on Dominion is running yards through that [music] comeback light on the mats. Light on the concentrate, light on the final pour.

[00:02:46][music] Light is the word that has defined this entire season's relationship with Dominion ground. Light gravel, light gold, light cleanups.

[00:02:54][music] Heavy expenses against light output is the equation that ends with a tractor in a sailard. The numbers on the cleanup table are not catastrophic. [music] They are quietly, steadily wrong. For the first time in his career on this scale, Parker is admitting on camera that he needs to come up with money. He is selling things to do it, and it kills him to say so. The tractor deal. The tractor sits in a dusty yard, sun glinting off the cab. Brian walks the length of the machine, eyes the tires, eyes the hours on the meter. He calls it the nicest one he has, a fairly tight tractor. And he is not wrong. Equipment like this in the Yukon, in this condition, in the middle of the season, is rare and is needed. Parker is not buying, he is selling.

[00:03:39]>> The fact that I'm actually needing to come up with money and like selling things kills me.

[00:03:46]>> Brian asks where Parker is at on price.

[00:03:49]Parker says 200 grand. The buyer pauses.

[00:03:52]He had been thinking closer to 150. The number lands. $50,000 below ask is not a soft counter. It is the kind of opener a man makes when he can sense the seller does not have the time to wait for a better one. Parker had been hoping to land closer to 175. He meets the buyer in the middle. 165, he says. The buyer counters 162. Parker says fine. He says it the way a man says fine when the calendar has already won the argument.

[00:04:20]$38,000 off the asking price. At current Yukon gold prices, that gap is roughly 11 ounces of recovery. Parker just gave up to make payroll this week. 11 ounces is a full day on a wash plant in a good cut. It is the kind of number that in a normal year, Parker holds the line on without blinking. He does not hold the line. He says, "Fine." In a normal year, the buyer is the one sweating through this conversation. In a normal year, Parker waits a week for a better offer because he can't. The cash has to land this week, not next month, not after a couple more cleanups come in this week.

[00:04:56][music] And verify. and Brian knows it.

[00:04:59]The deal closes in under two minutes on camera. The handshake happens. The paperwork moves. The tractor stays in the yard for the new owner to collect and Parker walks back to his truck having converted a working asset into operating cash because the operation could not generate it from the ground.

[00:05:16]He started the season expecting his wash plants to fund his wash plants. He is funding them out of the equipment yard.

[00:05:23]Now, the tractor he just sold is the kind of machine a mining operation uses every day of the season, pulling trailers, moving small equipment around camp, hauling fuel. The next time Parker needs that capability, and he will. He is either renting it, borrowing it, or working around the absence. None of those options are cheaper in the long run than owning the piece outright. He knows that. He sold it anyway.

[00:05:51]The tailings gamble.

[00:05:54]Mitch Blashki stands on the side of a hill, gesturing across acres of disturbed gravel. Tailings, piles of them, stretching across ground worked decades ago. [music] Camp is just over the next rise, Mitch says, pointing. The whole basin in front of them was slooed once already. In the early 1980s, miners worked this perimeter using primitive equipment. They ran a pushbox wash plant. They used a dozer to feed pay directly into the slle box. [music] The method was crude and the recovery was poor. They walked away leaving their leftovers behind. Parker's bet is that the men who came before him missed [music] gold. That the same inefficiency that left those tailings sitting here for 40 years also left fine gold trapped in the gravel. [music] Gold, a modern plant with modern recovery, could pull out and turn into ounces.

[00:06:44]>> [music] >> It is one of the oldest plays in placer mining, reworking ground that earlier miners gave up on. It is also a gamble and Parker is gambling at exactly the wrong moment in his cash flow.

[00:06:54]>> These tailings are one of the best options if there's gold in them and we, you know, pretty desperately need to keep the plant running and hopefully on something that has a decent gold in it.

[00:07:05]>> Mitch lays it out. They cannot commit [music] to mining the whole pile.

[00:07:08]Somebody else has already been in here.

[00:07:10]These are their leftovers. They need to know where Roxanne is [music] going next, which means knowing where the next big plant is going to spend its weeks of operating time. [music] Two weeks on the wrong ground coster fuel, payroll, and the only commodity he has less of than money, [music] time. The plan is to bring in a mini hoe and a small test trauml. A smaller plant that can run a sample of the tailings and tell them in dollar per yard terms whether the leftover ground is worth a full commitment. Tyson's going to come down with our little test trauml and we're going to do some testing. See if there's any gold in them.

[00:07:45]>> The whole question, Mitch [music] says, is how much of the gold the original miners got, how much they pulled out and how much they left behind. Nobody knows.

[00:07:54]Nobody can know without testing. [music] The test is not just about the gold. The test is about whether Parker can keep Roxan running at all in the back half of the season. If the tailings come back hot, [music] Roxanne moves and starts producing again. If they come back light, Roxan [music] sits. And the only plant making money on Parker's claims is Big Red.

[00:08:15]The three test. The test starts small.

[00:08:19]Three yards of material, one shovel full at a time, fed into a little plant that looks almost laughable next to the giant equipment Parker has parked at the bigger cuts. Different materials from different parts of the tailings pile run separately so the cleanup tells them which sections of the ground are worth chasing and which are not. The crew runs the yards through. Then they shut the plant down for the cleanup. Mats out, concentrates panned, [music] numbers measured. To make the bigger commitment work, the math has to come back at 1 g of gold per yard minimum. Anything less and the tailings are not worth chasing with a full-sized wash plant. The fuel alone eats the margin. The labor eats what is left. Parker has done the math in his head a hundred times by the time the final bucket goes in. This is the last one, he says. This is where they either find the confidence to commit or they [music] do not. He frames it the way he has learned to frame these moments. They will pan it. They will lay it out. They will see what is in it.

[00:09:20]Maybe they get the confidence. Maybe they do not. He does not know. Parker did the three-yard tailings test.

[00:09:27][music] Deliver above or below 1 g per yard. The chapter is built around this question and the source footage may or may not show the answer on camera. If the result was shown, the closing beat of this chapter is the gram per yard figure and Parker's call on whether Roxanne moves to the tailings. If the result was not shown, this chapter ends here with the question still open. 20 acres mined out. Parker stands at the edge of a hole in the ground his crew has carved out over months, 20 acres, the long cut, mined out top to bottom, every yard run through the plant. That is a damn good feeling, [music] he says.

[00:10:06]He looks at the cut, the walls, the floor, the size of what they have made disappear. It is crazy to sit there and look at the size of it, the amount of hours that have gone into making it happen. Mitch Blasky gives him the credit he is due. [music] Parker said he did not care what it took. get it done.

[00:10:23]He let his crew have at it out here without micromanaging the work. That is rare coming from a foreman who has watched a lot of bosses lose their nerve when the dirt got hard. The long cut is finished. The crew is intact. The equipment is still running.

[00:10:36]>> Pretty crazy when you sit here and look at this hole in the ground that we've made. The amount of hours that have gone into making this all happen. Parker said, "I don't care what it takes, get it done." and he's really just kind of, you know, let me have at it out here.

[00:10:52]The season isn't over yet, but the long cut is completed.

[00:10:56]>> The long cut is finished. That is the problem. The season is not over, and finishing the long cut means another wash plan is now sitting idle with nowhere obvious.

[00:11:06]The big question, Parker says out loud, is where they take Roxanne from here. He is staring at the answer he does not want to admit. They may end up with serious downtime. Equipment that does not move does not pay. A wash plant is built to run. Every day Roxan sits [music] without ground to chew through is a day Parker is paying for an asset that is generating zero. Lease costs a crew. Maintenance windows get scheduled.

[00:11:33]The crew assigned to her either finds work on another plant or stands around.

[00:11:38]None of that produces ounces. None of that puts anything on the cleanup table.

[00:11:42]Parker is now down to one plant making money. The two plants standing still are costing him just as much per day as the one still running. Big Red can't keep up. Three wash plants started this season. The long cut is finished. Sulfur is finished. That leaves one plant still running in the last piece of open ground. The bridge cut. Big Red. The only money maker Parker has left. And Big Red is not getting it done. The cleanups have been telling the same story for weeks. Under a 100 ounces.

[00:12:15]>> Should we throw some gold on the scale and see what we got?

[00:12:19]>> Yeah. Start with old Big Red, old trusty.

[00:12:21]>> Yeah.

[00:12:22]>> Is she going to keep up her triple digits?

[00:12:25]>> Tyson counts the gold out loud as it lands on the scale. The numbers climbing in slow [music] increments that sound almost rehearsed by now. 5 15 30 45 60.

[00:12:37]The pause before they break a 100 is becoming a ritual. There is 100. There is 105. There is 111. Pretty consistent.

[00:12:46]Pretty consistently poor. 100 ounces a week is roughly $350,000 at current Yukon prices against a fixed cost operation that needs more. Diesel for Big Red, wages for the crew running her, fuel for the loaders feeding her, parts when [music] she breaks. The math on a single plant covering a three plant cost structure has only one outcome and the cleanup table is showing it every Friday. 400 ounces a month from Big Red against a remaining gap of 3,000. The arithmetic does not close. There is no version of October where the bridge cut alone delivers what the season needs.

[00:13:22]The other plants could come back online if Parker found the right ground to put them on. That is the unspoken hope behind the test trauml behind the survey of what Roxan could be doing instead of sitting still. But every option costs money upfront. And money up front is exactly what this season has stopped producing. The tailings test has [music] to come back hot. The bridge cut has to overd deliver or both. Or the season closes where the numbers say it will.

[00:13:48]Big red is running every day she can.

[00:13:50]The bridge cut is being mined every yard the loaders can pull. The shortfall is not a problem of effort. It is a problem of ground. The bridge cut has gold in it. Big Red is proving that every Friday, but it does not have the grade Parker needs to close the gap. 100 ounces a week is what the ground gives.

[00:14:08]The crew cannot conjure more out of gravel that does not contain it. Every loader bucket, every shift, every pass through the slle produces exactly what the gravel allows and no more. That is the math of placer mining. At the wrong end of a long season, sulfur falls short.

[00:14:27]The conversation about sulfur is harder for Parker than the tractor deal. When he bought into the Sulfur Creek operation, the pitch was simple. Pull a quick thousand ounces, ride the cleanups, use the cash to fund the rest of the season. It was supposed to be the safe play in a year built on bigger gambles. The final cleanup runs out of Big Bob, the wash plant assigned to sulfur. The ounces tick up on the scale.

[00:14:51]5 10 20 30 60 70 80 100 120 150 160 180.

[00:15:00][music] The total settles at right around 750 O roughly $2.5 million at current prices. 750 against a,000. $250 of shortfall. Roughly $875,000 Parker counted on and did not get. Dean tries the soft pitch. Originally, you wanted a,000. That is pretty close. He is not too far off. The seller asks if Parker has to be happy with the purchase. Parker says no. The seller smiles, holds the smile a beat too long.

[00:15:33]Parker says no again. He says he really appreciates what was done over there, but it has been a battle. The seller looks at the table. Parker looks at the seller. The line about the battle is the closest thing Parker is going to give him to a thank you, and they both know it. Parker turns away from the table.

[00:15:50]The conversation does not continue. He spent the money. He sent a wash plant.

[00:15:55]He committed his crew. He took the risk.

[00:15:58]The gold was not there in the volume the pitch promised. And the camera caught the moment the math stopped pretending to be close. The buy was supposed to fund the rest of the season. Instead, it covered roughly half its own purchase price in additional ounces. [music] And Parker is back in the same hole that drove him to make the buy in the first place. a season costing more to run than it is producing. If you want to see how the next four weeks land, whether Big Red holds the line, whether the tailings test pays off, whether the final cleanup totals close any of the gap, subscribe to the channel and hit the bell so the next cleanup video drops in front of you the moment it lands. The long cut comes up short. Mitch Blashgate pulls Parker over to see how the long cut finished up. He has Roxanne and the long cut tally ready. The last little long cut, Mitch calls it. At the start of the season, Parker projected the long cut would deliver 3,000 ounces, roughly 10.5 million. That was the number anchoring the entire season's plan. That was the production figure that made the math on Dominion, on sulfur, on the new [music] equipment, all work on paper. The cleanup numbers come in. 10 20 30 45 50 90 100 130 140 15 155.9 Glad that cut is over. Parker says it was a pain in the ass. Mitch tells him, "Good job. You got her done."

[00:17:25]>> Roxanne is just about done in the long cut and we're still quite short on gold.

[00:17:30]And so [music] Mitch and I are trying to figure out where Roxanne should spend the rest of its year. I feel like I'm walking through minefield.

[00:17:39]>> The long cut supposed to anchor 3,000 o finishes roughly 700 ounces short of projection. 700 O is roughly $2.5 million below where this single cut was supposed to land. $2.5 million that was budgeted, projected, and counted on and is not coming. Across all three wash plants, the season's recent stretch totals 449 o [music] poured for the camera worth somewhere over $1.5 million. Combined with earlier cleanups, the operation breaks 5,000 ounces on the season. Chris confirms seasontoate total draft assumes 5,000 ounces. Parker calls it good. Good is not 8,000. Good is not the goal. Good is the number a minor settles for when the season has refused to give him the one he set. Parker looks at the cleanup tally and says, [music] "Too bad they could not keep three plants going. The line lands flat." Mitch does not respond. Both of them know the reason they could not keep three plants going [music] was that two of the cuts ran out of pay before the calendar ran out of weeks. Three plants need three productive cuts. Parker had three cuts.

[00:18:49]He had only one that was holding its projection. The long cut at 1 to 55.9 is the last cleanup that comes off Roxan for the year. The plant moves to maintenance mode after this. The next gold off Roxan will come next season on whatever ground Parker decides to put her on, if he decides to put her on any one month, one plant, one wash plant.

[00:19:12]Big red. Mitch still producing at the bridge cut. Two plants, sulfur and the long cut, finished and quiet. A little over a month of mining weather left before the ground starts to freeze and the trucks stop running. 8,000 O still on the books as the official goal. 5,000 O actually in the safe. 3,000 ounces of GAP, roughly 10.5 [music] million against one wash plant, producing under a 100 ounces a week on ground. That has not surprised anybody in either direction for a long time.

[00:19:43]Even on a perfect month, big red running flat out without a single breakdown lands Parker hundreds of ounces short of the promised 8,000. The shortfall is happening. It is happening in the cleanups that come in low week after week, in the conversations about what to do with the idle plants, in the strategy meetings on the side of a hill where the plan involves testing somebody else's leftovers from 40 years ago. Because there is no better ground to commit to right now. The next four weeks are going to determine whether this season is remembered as a setback Parker learned from or whether the losses pile into something that forces a real [music] rethink of how the operation is structured going into next year. The decisions he is making right now about Roxanne, about the tailings, about whether to commit to a new cut at all are going to be the difference between coming back next spring with options [music] and coming back next spring trying to rebuild from scratch. The calendar is the tightest constraint in the Yukon. The mining season ends when the ground freezes, and the ground freezes on its own schedule, regardless of how short the cleanup tables come in.

[00:20:49]Frost in the gravel turns wash plant operation into a fight against ice.

[00:20:54]Diesel costs climb. Production drops. By early November, most operations have shut down for the year. Parker has weeks, not months, to make whatever moves are still possible. Slooed and wasted, Parker stands at the edge of the bridge cut. Sleed gravel and waste material stretch out in front of him.

[00:21:14]The tailings of his own season laid out like a record of every yard that did not pay. It does not feel very good. He says they are short. They are learning.

[00:21:24]>> Yeah, a lot of ounces missing. Here we are at the end of the season slooing waste gravel. Doesn't feel very good, but we're learning. Dominion is teaching him a lesson he is paying for in real cash, in real equipment sales, in real cleanups that [music] have refused to deliver the numbers a season needs to be a victory. He stays at the edge of the cut. The radio is in his hand. Big Red is still running behind him. Mitch Blashkkey is [music] two cuts over, working the next problem. The 8,000 ounce target is gone. The season's promise of three plants running clean is gone. The narrative of Dominion as the next great cut is on hold. The Sulfur Creek pitch has been exposed as a half delivery. The tractor he sold for 162 is somebody else's machine now. And Parker Schneabel, the youngest mining boss in the Yukon, is closing out a year where the only thing the ground gave him in abundance was [music] the lesson that future gold does not pay this week's bills. The crew is still on payroll. The last cut is still running. The numbers are still being tallied. The season is not finished. It has just stopped pretending to be the one Parker planned.

[00:22:30]Big Red roars in the background of the shot. The conveyor moves. The water runs through the slle. Somewhere in the gravel pouring across [music] those mats, ounces of gold are being captured the way they have been captured for weeks. Slower than Parker needs, faster than zero on a plant that has now been asked to carry the entire weight of an 8,000 target by herself. The question the next chapter has to answer is whether Parker comes back to Dominion next year and fights this ground until it pays or whether the losses force him to walk away from a play he can no longer afford to make. Cleanup totals are about to be finalized. Dominion's verdict is days away. The only question left is whether Big Red can claw back even a,000 ounces in the final stretch or whether the season closes exactly [music] where the numbers say it will.

[00:23:18]Subscribe and hit the bell so the answer lands in front of you the moment it drops.