Going For Gold

As a teen Parker Schnabel went to make his fortune near the Arctic Circle. He was looking for flecks of gold deep in the frozen dirt, where you can only work 150 days a year. Now at age 25 he’s made millions from his mining operation – and become a TV celebrity in the process

- William Leith

THE first time I see Parker Schnabel in real life, I’m standing at the edge of a cliff. Parker is running towards me. Beyond the cliff is an enormous open-cast gold mine.

I’m in the Klondike, the remote gold-mining region of the Yukon Territory in the far north of Canada. A few kilometres to the west is the Alaskan border. A few kilometres to the north is the curved line of the Arctic Circle.

When most people think of the Klondike, they imagine tough mountain men with beards and big boots, men who are obsessively looking for gold, and possibly a bit unhinged by the process. Looking at Parker, as he runs towards me, I can see he’s a little different from what you might expect.

True, he has a little beard. True, he’s spent years in this wilderness, obsessively seeking gold – and finding it. Last year, he says, he found gold worth $7 million (about R105m). But Parker is only 25. He’s tall and skinny. He’s one of the most successful gold-mining bosses in the Klondike but he looks like a student. Just a kid, really. He’s dug out about $25m (R375m) worth of gold in a business where most people fail. You have to wonder how he does it.

Parker runs up to where I’m standing. He reaches the edge of the quarry – in mining parlance, the “cut”. But he doesn’t stop to say hello. He runs right past me and jumps into the void.

HE GOT into gold mining early. At 15 he was helping run his then 90 - year- old grandfather’s small operation at Porcupine Creek, near Haines, Alaska – the Big Nugget mine. At 16 he was in charge.

Parker came to the Klondike when he was 19. Up here, in this vast wilderness, you can mine on a bigger scale. But everything is more risky.