It’s easy to see why fans are so enamored with “Gold Rush.” The idea of becoming rich with a massive gold find, combined with the great personal and financial risks such discoveries require, means that there’s plenty to be excited about on the Discovery show. It doesn’t hurt that “Gold Rush” also features some extremely interesting personalities. The presence of people like prospector legend Tony Beets means that the series has no shortage of fascinating figures. However, even in its colorful ensemble cast, one person stands out in the reality series. 

Young, capable, and successful, Parker Schnabel followed his grandfather in the mining business and has gone on to offer some of the greatest entertainment and successes on the show. But which of them have been most valuable? Let’s take a look at some of the greatest discoveries “Gold Rush” star Parker Schnabel and his crew have made throughout the show’s many seasons. 

While nowhere near the most valuable discovery Parker Schnabel has ever made, large gold nuggets are an instrumental part of the prospector lore. As such, it would be a travesty not to include the find that, by the star’s own admission, is the biggest gold nugget Schnabel ever found. 

Don’t think this means that the nugget was particularly massive, though. After all, Schnabel tends to operate in areas where gold is very fine, and large nuggets are quite rare. In 2017 he explained that the biggest nugget he personally discovered weighed around a quarter-ounce, which would translate to no more than $500 in that year’s gold prices. While that’s nothing to be sneezed at,  comparing it with the single biggest gold nugget ever found — the 158-pound “Welcome Stranger” – suggests that the nuggets Schnabel has personally discovered aren’t getting in the Guinness Book of Records any time soon. 

It’s easy to expect that a gold prospector only focuses on finding gold. As Parker Schnabel has discovered, though, digging through a ton of soil in secluded natural areas can sometimes yield surprising results. In an interview with The Malestrom, the gold miner revealed that he’s made some very interesting and quite literally huge finds over the course of his years as a prospector. “We’ve found some mammoth tusks, which was really cool,” he said. “They’re preserved because they’re ivory and they were buried in the permafrost so the weather doesn’t really get to them. Some of those came out in beautiful shape.”

Though mammoth tusks might well be the strangest thing Schnabel ever unearthed on “Gold Rush,” Schnabel generally doesn’t bother to monetize them. “I usually keep them,” he explained. “You’re allowed to sell them, you just need a couple of permits to export them out of the territory, but I think they’re so cool I had to keep them.”

To get an idea of how much these particular discoveries are worth, well-preserved specimens of mammoth tusks can fetch tens of thousands of dollars on fossil auction sites, and even broken tusks can be worth thousands of dollars. As such, the fact that Schnabel chooses to just hang on to them instead of selling them is pretty telling of the kind of success he’s seen in the gold mining business, as well as the financial security a gold miner can enjoy when they’re doing well. 

Sometimes, it’s nice to have a crew that knows what it’s doing even when you’re away. Parker Schnabel finds this out personally in “Gold Rush” Season 11, Episode 10, when he returns to the dig site after a month’s absence to find out that Team Parker has been busy breaking records. In just four weeks, his crew unearths a record-breaking month’s haul of 2,293 gold ounces — which translates to $4.3 million worth of the shiny stuff. 

Yes, Schnabel is technically away from the site during this time, which might cause some people to wonder whether this technically counts as one of his discoveries. On the other hand, it’s good to keep in mind that while “Gold Rush” tends to focus on the leaders of the gold-digging teams quite heavily, it also makes it very clear that finding gold is always a team effort. As such, the simple fact that Schnabel has built his team and trusts them enough to keep on going on his land while he’s personally looking into other things is more than enough to put this record-breaking month in his bag — and the way his beaming crew members proudly announce their finds to him indicates that they probably wouldn’t disagree. 

Schnabel himself definitely sees the irony of his crew finding absurd amounts of gold when he’s not around, to the point that he even jokingly offers to take off more often if it leads to such stellar results. 

At the end of the day, the financial success of a “Gold Rush” star is measured by the haul they manage to take in over the course of a season. This is something Parker Schnabel has excelled at. 

“Gold Rush” Season 9 ran from fall 2018 to spring 2019, and one of these years was significantly more fruitful to Schnabel than the other. At the tender age of 27, his ninth “Gold Rush” season started out pretty badly. However, his team more than made up for its initial rough patch, to the point that the “Gold Rush” season ended up breaking the show’s money-making record when Schnabel’s team put together their findings.

After the dust settled, Schnabel’s team found out that they’d managed to find 7,427.25 ounces of gold, which was estimated to be worth nearly $8.5 million. This was enough to count as the biggest haul in the season — as well as the entire history of the show at that point. However, even this truly significant find isn’t enough to top this list.

For “Gold Rush” Season 14, Parker Schnabel made a massive investment on a new land area called Dominion Creek. This cost him around $15 million, which is a huge sum even for a successful gold miner like him. However, as he explained in an interview with People, he ultimately deemed it necessary to go big because of the sheer size of his team. “We’re not a lean and mean little nimble crew or anything like that,” Schnabel said. “We need a lot of ground, and we need a lot of ounces out of the ground to stay afloat, because we’re a big operation. And my number one concern was, we built this really good crew and I didn’t want to have to break that up. That was my biggest fear.”

Fans may have been sitting on the edge of their seat to find out whether Schnabel and his crew could dig enough gold to keep going, but in the end, there was no reason to worry. In just six months, Schnabel’s first major excavation in the area — the so-called Money Pit — yielded 7,381.1 ounces of gold. This may be physically less than Schnabel’s Season 9 haul, but this time, his team’s findings were valued at only slightly less than the $15 million he forked over for Dominion Creek. The team’s single biggest week earned them over $1.1 million. 

The wildest thing about this magnificent discovery is that Schnabel’s team may just be getting started. Dominion Creek might be hiding as much as $160 million in gold, so there’s a chance that the Money Pit is only the beginning of Schnabel’s greatest success story yet.