(Exclusive) Gold Rush’s Parker Schnabel Was ‘Embarrassed’ He Failed to Meet Last Year’s Goal, Spent $250K a Day Filming Season 16

Failure isn’t an option for Parker Schnabel.

Following “the most disappointing season” of his 15-year career, the 31-year-old miner is launching one of his most risky operations with hopes that he comes out on top. PEOPLE has an exclusive look at season 16 of Gold Rush and spoke with Schnabel as he prepares to “reclaim his throne.”

“I was definitely a little bit embarrassed by not hitting our goal last year,” he admits. “That’s not something that I don’t think it’s ever happened. I think that was the first time in 14 years that we’ve been on the show. It was definitely fairly off-putting that that happened last year and I was not about to have a repeat of that, so I definitely came in with a lot of force and fire, and we just came out swinging.”

Schnabel says his team started stripping the land early, investing in new equipment, increasing staff and lighting “a fire under everybody’s ass.” He also didn’t shy away from his spending with the hopes of seeing a big payoff from the soaring gold prices.

“It’s also very important to take advantage of that,” he notes, adding that he burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars daily. “I think that from our standpoint, we want to spend as much money as possible.”

While he spent $100,000 each day on base costs, he reveals that the total including acquisition costs was actually much higher. “With all that stuff baked in, you’re actually up in the probably $200,000 to $250,000 a day range,” Schnabel says.

While those numbers seem high, he says they don’t scare him at all. In fact, he sees it as motivation for the entire team to do better knowing there’s a lot to lose. “I think that the whole company really thrives under that pressure, and we’ve attracted people and kept people on who deal with that kind of pressure very well and take that responsibility on as a personal challenge,” he explains.

“So nobody really thinks about it. Even I don’t really think about it too much apart from it’s my job to make sure there’s money in the bank accounts to pay bills. But I don’t know. I really enjoy it,” he continues.

When viewers tune into the season 16 premiere — which also features “King of the Klondike” Tony Beets and Rick Ness, who are coming off massively successful past seasons — Schnabel says he’s excited for fans to see how he makes his comeback.

“It was really the first year that we had the property that we bought up on staff,” he shares. “Coming into the season, we had a bunch of ground opened up. We had pushed a bunch of production from 2024 into 2025, and that was a big part of the reason why we had a bad year in 2024 and didn’t hit our goal. We were behind the gun and we decided to not really try to fight it out. Instead we were like, ‘Okay, let’s just take a beat and basically move the dirt that wants to be moved and not fight too hard and make things way more expensive than they need to be.’ Efficiency is a big driver for us.”

“2024 was about being efficient and prepping in 2025 was really about production,” Schnabel adds. “We focused pretty hard on that.”