"Anytime you have an equipment breakdown, it's thirty or forty thousand bucks. It's like building a house—every day—cha-ching, cha-ching," she says. Lil goes on to articulate another reason you wouldn't want to put her and Simon on Gold Rush: When it comes to gold, they are calculated and pragmatic, not delightfully insane. "A lot of guys lose fortunes at this because with gold, people get stupid. They don't see it for what it is. They see Agamemnon's mask," she says. "The trick is, you can't chase it. Every day, you look at how much fuel you've used and how much gold you have, and if it's not good enough, you get out."

What compensates for the work's uncertainty, outlandish overhead, and tedium of spending all day, all summer long, washing dirt is that it's entirely free of the interpersonal maneuvering that running a multimillion-dollar business typically demands. "You don't have to go to meetings or pitch sales deals to people. The gold's there or it's not," says Simon. "When it is, it's quite neat to be making money out of nothing."

The process of mining placer gold is absurdly simple. With the heaviest-duty bulldozers and excavators you can afford, you scrape aside the permafrost and dig down to the bedrock, where the gold has settled over the years. Then you feed the pay dirt into the wash plant, basically a diesel-driven colander the size of a brontosaurus, which rinses and excretes boulders, rocks, and gravel above half an inch in diameter (known as tailings), reserving the gold-rich soils.

In the morning, I join Simon at the mine, where, in breach of his industry's customary secrecy, he lets me watch his daily cleanup—the process of rinsing the gold from the fine soils culled from the wash plant's trap. To collect the pure gold, Simon runs soils through a sluice, a sloping metal trough lined with a plastic woolly material overlaid with a mesh of what looks like cyclone fencing. Simon dumps shovelfuls of black dirt from a bathtub-sized hopper into the water coursing down the spillway. The current carries off the dirt while the gold, which is nineteen times heavier than water, settles out. Before long, a sparse yellow delta begins coalescing in the riffles. Okay. Gold. Nothing to freak out over. It looks like a scattering of nutritional yeast.

I keep fairly cool until Simon very casually puts a nugget into my fingers. It isn't much to look at, really, a bright little booger-sized chunklet no heftier than the crumpled foil wrapper from a Hershey's kiss. No big deal. Yet something is happening. My pulse hikes up a notch. Somewhere at the back of my mind a voice starts going OH GOD, OH GOD! RICHES! BULLION! ALADDIN'S CAVE! I'M HOLDING SOME ACTUAL GOLD! Not to get too Californian on you, but some energy is definitely vibing off this thing. Until now the idea of holding gold as an investment or otherwise hasn't offered the faintest allure, but now I am tuning something in, an unheard, insistent bleating that says, "Gather up a bunch of me and you will be safe from a bad and uncertain world."

I stare at it for a good while, trying to decipher this idiotic sensation. But it's no more decipherable than the experience of seeing the_ Mona Lisa _or spotting Tom Cruise in line at the Dairy Queen—the sensation, that is, of standing in the presence of something pregnant with fathomless value for reasons no one really understands. That's as articulate as I can be about what it's like to hold Simon's nugget. It's like holding a booger-sized Tom Cruise.

Simon, though, isn't freaking at all. "It's nice on a sunny day when you look down and see a hundred and fifty ounces gleaming in the sun," he says. "This isn't one of those days." Still, it's maybe thirty or thirty-five ounces lying there. And I sort of stammer that it's nothing to sneeze at, forty or fifty grand wrung from the humble dirt. "It seems like quite a bit, I guess, but then I just paid a fuel bill for $35,000," Simon remarks.

And looking behind him, at the vast heap of earth he had to move—165 tons per ounce of gold—it does suddenly seem like an utterly mad amount of work for a quantity of material that could fit into the front pocket of a pair of tight jeans. "It's retarded, isn't it?" says Simon. "The government should pay you not to do it."