Mechanics Who Moil Under The Midnight Sun

Tune in to the most-watched show most Friday evenings in the U.S. and you’re likely to stumble upon some unlikely television stars: service truck mechanics.

Gold Rush, the Discovery Channel show featuring the real-life stories of mining crews working in the Klondike region of Yukon, Canada, is now filming its seventh season. Thanks to its rough-and-tumble cast members and high-stakes drama, it’s been a consistent hit — particularly among male viewers in the 18-54 age demographic.

Over the six seasons that have already hit the air, the crews have mined millions of dollars in gold. But, like any other difficult operation in a remote location, they’ve also run into plenty of challenges from nature, luck — and equipment problems.

That’s where the mechanics and their trucks come in.

Three service truck operators who have appeared on the show stumbled into unexpected TV fame through a bit of happenstance and good timing. Each said they’ve come away with a renewed appreciation for the work they do — and plenty of new skills.

Equipment connection led to Yukon

Mitch Blaschke, an auto body mechanic with Buzzards Equipment and All-Ways Towing in Estacada, Ore., found his connection through some equipment. His company was selling a Hitachi 400 excavator and the stars of Gold Rush — father-and-son duo Jack and Todd Hoffman — were buying.

Blaschke helped haul the equipment up to the mining site, and the trip coincided with a period when the Hoffmans’ operations — and the show — was getting bigger. They needed a full-time technician on site, and they wanted Blaschke’s help. At first, he was hesitant.

“I’ve got a good full-time gig, and to go up there, be in the middle of nowhere working on stuff — I know the struggles of that,” he said.

But after some thinking, Blaschke decided he was up for the challenge. He joined the show in its third season, and ended up working for the Hoffman and later the Scribner crews.

Blaschke had been fixing things for years, starting with dirt bikes and go-karts when he was a kid, and later moving into other types of equipment. But in the remote reaches where his crews were searching for gold, the mechanic had to learn to do more with less — and in some cases, with unexpected parts.

In one episode, Blaschke gives the camera crew one example: making a discarded piece of metal — he’s not even sure what it was or where it came from — into a temporary patch for a massing screen on a machine.

“She’s fixed!” Blaschke says after making the on-the-spot repair. “Good enough for the Yukon.”

He said in an interview that having to improvise is one of the biggest challenges of the show.

“I’ve been around heavy equipment for quite a long time, but when you’re down in the lower 48 and you need parts, everything is readily available,” Blaschke said. “That’s the hardest thing, when you’re out there and you have such a short time frame, you’ve got to do a lot of improvising.”

From Facebook to TV fame

Juan Ibarra, whose family owns Ibarra Drain Services in Sun Valley, Nev., had spent a few years working in central Alaska as a maintenance contractor when a shot at Gold Rush came calling. Ibarra’s brother-in-law, a big fan of the show, noticed a posting on Facebook that Todd Hoffman’s crew was looking for a mechanic for the 2015 season.

Like Blaschke, Ibarra took some convincing to even inquire about the job. He had a good job and wasn’t interested in moving. After his brother in law kept prodding, however, Ibarra told him he had a deal. If he felt that strongly, he could send in an application on his behalf. After all, he figured, he’d never end up on the show.

“Who knows how many thousands of people apply to this job,” Ibarra said. “I figured it was a long shot, and I was sure there were a lot of qualified guys who were applying.”

But a few weeks later, Ibarra got a call from the Discovery Channel. He was in.

Much of the work was very similar to other heavy equipment repair Ibarra had done in the past. But some of it — the work on conveyors and screens — was new. He didn’t have a lot of experience working on Volvo machinery. Plus, there was added pressure: this learning process would be captured on film.

“You want to make sure what you say is accurate, so that you’re not looking like a complete moron,” Ibarra joked.

Plus, since the people tuning in from their living rooms don’t necessarily know all the ins and outs of the business, Ibarra and the others on the show were instructed that they’d need to be careful to talk to the camera in plain language.

“Something that the producer had to tell me early on was, ‘Juan, explain this to me like I’m a kid,’” he said.

Keeping cool under pressure

There’s also the challenge of staying cool and collected when the cameras are rolling but things aren’t exactly running smoothly.

In one episode, Ibarra is called on to help at a particularly difficult moment: equipment has malfunctioned and the mine’s operations are shut down. Time is money and no one is happy about the unexpected delay.

“We were shut down yesterday, we’re shut down today, and we’re getting further and further behind,” Ibarra says, pulling equipment from his service truck. “We’ve got a mountain developing behind us, and we’re going to be completely buried in pay (dirt) here pretty quick.”

The boss, Todd Hoffman, admonishes another crew member for not paying close enough attention: “That belt over there looks like somebody didn’t dig out from under it.”

As tempers begin to flare, Ibarra steps in, reminding Hoffman that he’s “already got us running around over here doing everything. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

It’s clear from the scene that stress levels are running high, as is the workload; the other crew member yells out that they’ve been “running 22 hours a day, six days a week. When do you want us to do all this?”

Ibarra said the good — and bad — news is that viewers don’t get to see the entire picture. Because days and hours of work is boiled down into quick episodes, viewers “only get a quick glimpse of what it’s really like.”

“Some of the repairs we had to do this season didn’t make the episodes, and they were pretty cool repairs, really technical repairs,” Ibarra said. “There’s just so much going on through the whole mine site.”

Everybody knows everybody

Another mechanic, Mike Beaudry of Lloydminster, Sask., got involved with Gold Rush through another cast member, Parker Schnabel, who he’d met at another job. When that job ended and Beaudry went on the job hunt, Schnabel reached out.

“Everybody knows everybody in the Klondike, so when tradespeople are available, employers know,” Beaudry said.

Beaudry had been a mechanic for years, starting with his dad with the logging company Bell River Contracting. He found that learning how to fix things made him a more valuable employee — and eventually found that it was something he wanted to do full time. He started his own company, Beaudry Mechanical, in 2014, and got his own rig.

“I’ve tried a few different rig modifications like skid units, different deck units and different set-ups,” Beaudry said. “I’m still looking to build the perfect, custom set-up that’s mobile and agile for easy accessibility.”

Beaudry watched Gold Rush before he was on it, and says he’s still surprised to think that he’s now a fixture on the show. He said he’s glad to be part of something that gives people a close-up look at the work of his industry, and the type of mechanical problems that mining crews have to contend with daily.

“Equipment breaks every day, all around the world,” he said. “I think because we deal with equipment that catches gold, that’s what interests people.

Still, Beaudry said, the work remains the same.

“A broken machine is a broken machine and it doesn’t change the way I fix things, whether someone is watching or not,” he said.

Is that the truck from Gold Rush?

Interest in the show has even spilled over into the mechanics’ day-to-day work when they return home during breaks from filming the show. Ibarra said he sometimes gets recognized when he’s on the job.

“When I’m at the parts house or getting parts I do, especially (from) guys in the industry,” he said. “They see my service truck out front, and they say: ‘Is that the service truck from Gold Rush?’”

This spring, Ibarra was gearing up to begin another season of the show. This time, the action he’s involved in will be near Baker City, Ore. Despite the change in location, he expects there will be plenty of the same drama from the past seasons.

“I think it’s going to be similar in that there’s going to be a lot of breakdowns in general,” he said.

Blaschke said he’s hopeful the added spotlight on his work will help spark young people’s interest in the industry.

“I’m hoping some guys and gals will see that and go into that field,” he said, “because at the end of the day you’ve got to have people fixing broken stuff.”