You HAVE TO admit.....

...that given the fact that The Klondike has been mined constantly for 120 years it's really incredible to see Tony Beets smelting FIVE quarter-million dollar gold bars only a third of the way through the season. For DECADES now there are lots of miners who will tell you "The Klondike is mined out". Or they'll say "The dredges got everything that the old-timers left." And there is this old chestnut: "The dredges shut down when the Klondike stopped producing." The dredges eventually shut down not because the gold disappeared but because the PRICE of gold dropped too low. Between Parker and Tony and Todd over the last few seasons they have mined over 10,000 ounces of Klondike gold -- it's really quite incredible when you consider that 20+ dredges spent 50+ years tearing up most of the producing gold creeks of the Klondike. You can literally see the 2000+ square acres of dredge tailings in the Klondike from the Earth's atmosphere. You can forgive someone for thinking there must not be any gold left. It must be an incredible sense of satisfaction for Tony to resurrect a Klondike dredge and have it produce a million dollars worth of gold in four clean-outs. And the most incredible aspect in all of this to me is the fact that even after 120 years of constant mining and prospecting the hard-rock motherlode that is the source of ALL the gold in the creeks of the Klondike gold fields has yet to be found! Somewhere in the mountains around Dawson City is a MASSIVE vein of gold that fed placer deposits in creeks such as Bonanza and Eldorado -- two of the richest creeks in the history of gold mining. So the Klondike is NOT mined out -- in fact small placer operations such as Parker's and Todd's pull a combined average of 60,000 ounces of gold out of the ground there every year.