Gold Rush: What Is The Black Pearl? The Gold Wash Plant Explained

Longtime fans of Discovery's "Gold Rush" will know that wash plants are some of the most important (and expensive) pieces of equipment in the entire gold mining industry. A wash plant is a collection of machinery that washes down gravel and rock to concentrate sluices into "black sand" that contains heavier minerals.

This process helps the miners sift out deposits of gold from the earth, and as such a wash plant is practically essential for every mining site we visit in "Gold Rush." One such plant is the so-called "Black Pearl," which belongs to Todd Hoffman's son, Hunter. Audiences got their first glimpse of the plant during "Hoffman Family Gold" Season 2. After a creek overflows into Todd's portion of the claim, the success of the entire operation becomes dependent on the Black Pearl's success — picking up the slack and running alongside another wash plant, "The Holy Roller."

The urgency that fuels the Black Pearl leads to disastrous consequences in the episode "Burst World Problems," in which Hunter decides to run his new plant for 12 hours to try and get the team's abysmal gold yield back on track. This causes one of the Black Pearl's waterlines to become punctured, shutting down the entire operation and costing him $30,000 a day while the plant is down.

Although the Black Pearl and other wash plants are the foundation of any good mining operation on "Gold Rush," fans of the series will know that they are notoriously tricky to operate and are plagued by constant setbacks and breakdowns.

Part of the reason for this is the fact that there is no automatic kill switch installed in the wash plant, making it so that any issue within the plant takes a long time to stop to prevent major damage. "Gold Rush" staple Parker Schnabel says that this is because an automatic kill switch has too high of a chance for malfunction, and it's important to always keep the plant running for maximum yield.

This need to keep the plant running constantly is part of why the Black Pearl suffered such a catastrophic puncture in its water pipe, since Hunter Hoffman himself admitted that he was hurrying so much he didn't even notice the pipe was broken. We actually saw a similar display of haste that led to the shutdown of Fred Lewis' plant in Season 13 of "Gold Rush," when his crew foolishly replaced a broken belt without taking the time to find the issue. Although speed is certainly important in the world of gold mining, it's clear that rushing through an operation can have horrific consequences for these machines.