Parker’s Team Strikes Gold Worth $1 MILLION | Gold Rush

Warning: This post contains spoilers from the first episode of Discovery Channel’s Gold Rush season 14.

In the 10 years Parker Schnabel has mined Canada’s Yukon territory, the Gold Rush veteran has never made a gamble as big as the one in last week’s episode.

In the final moments of the reality show’s season premiere, Schnabel, 29, handed over a check for $15 million to acquire Dominion Creek, a large stretch of untouched land that could potentially yield 80,000 ounces of gold worth $160 million. But the gold in Dominion Creek is buried 40 feet underground, which would require that he spend millions of dollars more to unearth it all.

For Schnabel, making the decision to spend $15 million upfront was a challenging process.

“We were at a real fork in the road in terms of taking on way bigger risks … spending a pile of money on new ground or downsizing,” he tells PEOPLE during a recent interview. “We had this really big choice to make early on in the season, and those big decisions matter quite a bit.”