On tonight’s Gold Rush on Discovery, the Beets clan is featured in our exclusive clip.
“If it ain’t Dutch it ain’t much,” stated Monica Beets in a previous interview. It looks like Tony and Minnie’s daughter has excellent instincts on how to find gold like her dad — a man who former Gold Rush star Todd Hoffman said could find gold on Mars.
In our clip, Monica and her friend, Ruby, are doing a mini dredge and sluice testing holes on a piece of land they own called Hunker Creek. The girls are methodically coring out the ground and doing a miniaturized version of a big plant’s job.
The ground is put in a pail, shaken in to the trommel, and then sluiced with water to separate the soil, rock, and hopefully heaviest element, gold. The final test will be panning the finished product to see if any gold is in the soil.
Monica sets up Ruby to assist and says: “Pretty cute eh?” She hoists the first pail and dumps it into the sluice and says: “All right, first pail…”
And she and Ruby watch to see it all shake out in the wash, literally.
Monica cautions Ruby: “Just like with any plant, you got to make sure you don’t overfeed it, this is our season right here.”
The narrator explains what’s happening and says that the trommel separates out the rocks while the gold and fine material settle in the mini sluice, hopefully.
Watching and waiting, Monica explains what’s next: “Can you hit the switch… we just ran this stuff from our first drill hole we’re gonna wash the mat out, clean all that up… we’re on our next hole. Round two let’s do this… okay on to the next.” In total, three holes are cored out and she has three pails of soil samples to wash and pan.
This is when the big Beets is called in to help. Papa Tony Beets is called by Monica and he is shown speeding into the lot in his pickup truck, ready to sort the soil samples.
On the radio, Monica says: “Hey Tony… do you copy? We finished all of our pails, you want to come and pan awhile?
Probably his favorite thing to do, its so old school. Tony’s been panning for 35 years he’ll reveal if Monica’s ground has been mined out or is still full of Hunker Creek gold.
It’s nail biter time.
Tony says: “Okay so you want me to pan it out for you?”
He teases Monica and Ruby saying he hoped that they didn’t throw out all the gold in their bid to wash the soil.
The first two holes yield nothing.
He says of the first: “So far I don’t see absolutely zip. It really doesn’t look that good. So we’re not gonna mind this one.”
Then the next one is panned. Nothing. He tells the girls that if all the test holes are like that they won’t be mining there at all. “There’s not a speck of gold in it,” he says.
So we think.
Read our exclusive interview with Tony Beets and Minnie Beets and get the scoop.
Gold Rush airs on Fridays at 9 p.m. on Discovery