The Dirtiest Business Men

Now in its seventh season, Discovery Channel’s Gold Rush follows the dreamers trying to get filthy rich by pulling gold out of the ground. We went north (and then north some more) to find entrepreneurship in its most extreme, raw form.

- Dan Bova

THEY ARE JUST WAITING FOR SOMETHING to go wrong,” 22-year-old miner Parker Schnabel tells me with an expression that is half smile, half sneer, and all exhaustion. We’re standing on the grounds of Scribner Creek, which isn’t a creek so much as a postapocalyptic-looking wasteland of turned-over earth. And “they” are the film crew of Discovery’s Gold Rush, who have followed Schnabel’s every shovelful of dirt since he became a mine boss at the ripe old age of 16.

“Last night I was digging a ditch,” he continues. “And I knew that the only way this was going to make the show was if I did something wrong or if I got hurt or something broke. And you can tell the film crew wants one of those things to happen! But that’s the nature of the show, they—”

As if on cue, a Gold Rush producer appears. “Sorry,” he says, “I have to interrupt you. Something has gone wrong.” So off we go to see what that “something” is, which is a big something: A boulder has smashed the holy crap out of a vital piece of Schnabel’s machinery. The producers are surely happy. Schnabel is not: He’s just an entrepreneur trying to make a living out here, surrounded by problems.

Welcome to working in the Yukon, a small, mountainous, and extraordinarily unwelcoming Canadian territory just east of Alaska. The town nearest the mines is called Dawson City, and its 13 bars have enough capacity for every resident to get drunk at the same time. The Downtown Hotel’s signature offering, the Sourtoe Cocktail, is a shot of alcohol with a frostbitten, dehydrated human toe plopped into it. There’s a $2,500 fine for actually swallowing the toe. That’s the thing about this place: Even the drinks aren’t easy.