BeigeJournal

I’m oddly fascinated by Gold Fever on the Outdoor Channel. Host Tom Massie spends a lot of time exploring, with camera crew, places that, as he constantly reminds us, are not really safe to explore, such as abandoned mines. He spends a lot of time in Alaska, as well, showing off the GPAA Alaska Expedition. I find it a bit more interesting than Prospecting America, which is mostly about more ordinary people engaged in recreational gold mining in less exotic locales.

There is certainly a bit of infomercial in both shows (a bit less so in Gold Fever), but they are far more interesting than a normal infomercial. The viewer can learn a lot about recreational mining from the shows. The first thing I learned, for example, is that there is such a thing as recreational mining.

One could say that stylistically there is a bit of C-SPAN in them, with the less exciting (that is, boring) bits left in rather than edited out. It is nice to see some TV where they will take the time to show what is actually happening rather than editing everything down to an incoherent minute-and-a-half plus car chase and explosion. They keep enough conversation going that even people shoveling dirt seems interesting, and, in their hands, gold panning is positively interesting. Though informal in style and, one imagines, low in budget, the technical quality is fine, with shots in focus, the camera stable, and clear audio. It isn’t home video,

The whole concept of recreational gold mining fascinates me. Now that technological progress has transformed work (for some of us) into an indoorsy thing, with lots of sitting and mouse-clicking, what was once backbreaking labor has become an outdoor recreational activity. It may seem odd, but since I think a sixty kilometer bike ride, a swim in chilly Lake Michigan, and then another sixty kilometer ride back home is fun, shoveling dirt into a sluice box really isn’t any stranger. It actually does sound like fun, kind-of. Maybe.