America's Backyard Gold

What are you digging here?

I was digging into the bank there

and turning my detector on.

And every once in a while,

you'll find nuggets in there long.

Okay.

See if there's anything in there.

Sounds pretty good.

Come on. Beep some gold.

Wow. Look at that one.

Almost an ounce and a half.

Dang.

You wanna sell the claim?

Well, I'll go partners.

Okay.

Gold is everywhere.

My god.

There's an estimated $3 trillion

still undiscovered in america.

- Woo. - And I wanna help you...

- Choose your weapon. - Find it.

- We got gold. - California gold, baby.

All you need is basic equipment...

You can get started with $15.

And the skill to decode the land.

That's a spot right there.

Yee-haw.

I'm Dave turin.

For the past 14 years,

I've mined millions of dollars of gold.

Yeah.

And now, I wanna show you where and how

I've seen it all now. Vacuum cleaner.

Everyday people are catching it.

That's insane.

So that you could be the next one to hit it big...

Boom, baby.

Right here in america's backyard.

You can tell why they call this big sky country

because you can see 360 degrees

of beautiful terrain.

I'm in what was once known as Idaho territory.

Made up of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

This massive territory

was claimed by Abraham Lincoln

during the civil war

because of its legendary gold.

People walked along streams

and were able to pick up nuggets,

but that was over 150 years ago.

There's still plenty of gold left out here.

If you know where and how to find it.

Starting in the 1860s and over the next century,

fortune hunters pulled out

over 26 million ounces of gold.

That's over $50 billion in today's money.

Incredibly, there's still another estimated

$50 billion worth of gold in this territory.

I've mined here before. It's a brutal place.

The environment's tough,

so you gotta really know what you're doing.

But I'm going to show you

how to give yourself an edge

by doing your homework and thinking outside the box.

My first stop is 12 miles east of elk city

in modern day Idaho...

Where I track down Rob mcguire.

Good morning.

Hi, Dave.

A former landscaper turned extreme prospector,

Rob's a great example of how simple online research

can identify a remote piece of ground

with potential to pay out big.

Why'd you choose this place right here?

Right up above, there is a load mine staked in 1910.

So anything coming out of that load mine's

going straight into this creek and down?

Washing straight into the claim, hopefully.

- At least that's the plan. - Makes sense.

- All right, deal. - Let's grab a couple pans,

a couple shovels, go find some gold.

Rob's strategy of identifying creeks and rivers

that run through areas of known hard rock mining

is on the money.

Most gold is found in rock deposits underground

in what we call hard rock or load mines.

Over millions of years, that gold deposit

erodes into waterways and creeks,

which then settles on rocky beds

and is known as placer gold.

It could be no one's been down here

since 1930s, 1940s.

I think it's just the remoteness of it

kind of turns people off, which...

- Yeah. - Is what gets me excited.

There's probably still a good gold left there

if no one else is willing to get there.

This is about as wild as you can get.

It's tough walking.

There are yellow jackets, cougars in the area.

There's bears.

So, just be aware of your surroundings

and take care of each other.

Watch out for the hole.

Yeah.

There's a hole right there.

There's the creek.

Prospecting is the term

for testing the ground for gold.

Based on his research, Rob's prospecting a creek

that should carry that placer gold.

I'm gonna just pull a sample.

- All right. Let's do it. - See what we got.

Choose your weapon.

Starting at just 10 bucks each,

a pan is the cheapest

and easiest way to test for gold.

Take dirt from the creek bed,

wash it using a swirling motion

and let the lighter material

wash back out into the stream.

Dang it, you son of a gun.

If there's gold there,

it will stay in the bottom of the pan.

Why do you come out here?

Basically there's not much gold in Ohio

and I know that there's gold out here in the west coast.

Rob's homework has already paid off.

He staked 40 acres of claims

and he's banked almost $10,000 of gold.

But it takes determination.

I'm not finding anything, Rob.

I ain't seeing hardly anything anyway.

Not expecting that one at all.

Here's a man out prospecting in the middle of nowhere.

Most people would be scared, not him.

Keep looking. Keep prospecting.

That's inspiring to me

because he's got a purpose in life.

My hat's off to him.

I do think the miners came down through here,

the old miners, and they worked it pretty good.

I just have to go through and find

the spots they missed.

You gotta think smart,

almost put yourself in their position.

Wow. They took out a big section

right there, didn't they?

They dug right under this bank.

Very interesting.

So if they were doing this kind of work,

there's gold here

'cause they wouldn't do that without finding gold.

My.

- A lot of it? - Check this out, Rob.

That's your rust layer, right?

That's your rust. That's your iron staining.

Like gold, iron minerals are heavy.

Where they go, gold should go, too.

Prospecting is taking all the evidence,

taking all the clues and trying to, you know,

figure everything out.

Where's the gold?

You know, is it on this side, this side?

You're not just looking for gold.

You're looking for the clues.

Where's the gold living?

'Cause that's where we gotta mine.

Getting the indicators we're looking for,

let's hope this pan's got more gold in it.

Hey, Rob, that's a better piece of gold right there.

Wow. Yeah, there's a nice looking pan there.

That's what we're talking about right there.

So, heck yeah, man.

Yeah. Heck yeah.

If you wanna get out of the rat race,

you can easily run a cheap operation out here

and live off the gold like Rob is finding.

But first, you'll have to claim it.

I think the best thing to do

would be put a stake in it

so I have the claim in my name.

Let's throw a stake in the ground.

- Let's do it. - All right.

To stake a claim, you must Mark

the four corners of a 20-acre area

and place your claim form in a prominent spot.

It's a process that hasn't changed in 160 years.

Okay. Just slide it up in here and Tucker down.

Once Rob pays the $260 fee,

he'll have sole permission to mine this creek

and keep all the gold he finds.

This is actually the first claim

that I've staked in the United States.

Well, I'm glad to be part of it.

- Cool. - Thanks for being a part of it

- and helping me. - You betcha, man.

- That was fun. - It was.

All right. Let's get outta here.

All right. Let's do the adventure back out.