That’s an insane amount of gold production. I watch gold rush and last season the two largest producer were just about 11k ounces, moving and washing a massive amount of dirt and rocks.
All their properties are played out. They're scraping the bitter dregs from properties that used to produce a massive amount more gold using extremely primitive tech to do so. In some cases, they're just re-running old mining tailings and scraping the ground at the edges of areas they knew were good.
If the price of gold didn't go up several thousand percent since the Klondike Gold Rush, there would be 0 reason to be up there at all. The Klondike produced -- on the low end of estimates -- 10 million ounces of gold worth in 10's of billions of dollars in today's money.
10 million (troy?) ounces is 311 metric tons. That's plenty of gold, but doesn't seem terribly impressive compared to 160 tons annually? Also, to get that 10 million onces figure, I think you must be including the mid-20th century dredging and hydraulic mining era? That stuff was a far cry from humble prospectors with pans like people might imagine.
No, I am comparing the amount of gold currently pulled from the Klondike. 11,000 ounces of gold from a (looks to me) single large operation pales in comparison to anything of yesteryear. 100 tons/year is quite the haul. Yukon currently is doing more like 3.5 tons/year in total. Nevada is just on a totally different scale.
Also Yukon (and that show) is majority placer, while Nevada looks to be hard rock? Hitting a rich vein means a massive payday, but even if not, the amount of rock they're moving is absolutely bonkers. Look at some of the massive craters they're digging out! 10, 20, 30 feet of topsoil to get to a few feet of pay gravel over a few dozen acres of ground is just not the same thing.
Dunno even what reclaimation looks like for a 1/2 mile deep crater. I'm guessing, "nothing lol deal with it"
> I watch gold rush and last season the two largest producer were just about 11k ounces
I remember watching the first couple seasons of that show. Every time it went to commercial break they'd try to hype up the melodrama with "we gotta do X or we're not gonna reach a thousand ounces!"
My wife and I still quote that to each other out of the blue.
Theres one mine outside a town, that has more gold than all of America.
Half the worlds lithum for example also comes from WA. Most of the worlds treasures that are dug out of the ground can also be found there. Most of it has never seen a person, theres far more there to be found one day in the future.
