“There be gold in them thar hills.”

Towards the end of the third, and final, episode of this incredible series Dan Snow says that to truly understand and appreciate what people have gone through in history, you have to experience it for yourself…and he’s right.

Unfortunately, the realities of life mean that few of us are able to travel to the Klondike gold fields and recreate the journey of 19^th Century stampeders…so we’ll have settle for watching Dan and his team doing it instead.

In 1896 gold was discovered in the Klondike region of Canada, creating a rush over the next four years, as 100,000 prospectors made the perilous 600 mile journey through the wilderness in the hopes of finding their fortune…few did.

The programme’s three episodes broke the journey down into sections; the mountains, the lakes and rivers and finally, mining. Throughout their journey Dan and his fellow adventurers, medic and engineer Dr Kevin Fong, and polar explorer Felicity Ashton, used authentic processes including travelling through rapids and across lakes in an unwieldy flat bottomed boat, fully immersing themselves in the experience and bringing it to life for viewers.

For me, the stand out moment was the ascent of the almost vertical Golden Staircase, on the Chilkoot Trail, in episode one. This part of the journey was a struggle for the team, with the weather closing in, despite the expertise of the leaders highlighting the difficulty of the journey. However, for the stampeders it was worse, filing their way up the 1,500 steps, one after another, in their hundreds often repeating the ascent to bring their regulation years’ worth of supplies to the top. What’s more, once they’d reached the top they hadn’t even made it half way to the gold fields with many other obstacles still to be overcome.

A close second to this, was Felicity using a drone to show the impact gold mining, in particular dredging, on the Klondike landscape which was both impressive and incredibly moving in its own way, a reminder of both the power and desperation of man.

I have a new found respect for all the stampeders who were part of the Klondike gold rush, whether they were successful in their endeavours or not, and would urge everyone to watch Operation Gold Rush to find out why for themselves.

It’s not a stuffy, old-fashioned documentary, instead Dan and his team vividly bring history to life, blending their own experiences with diary accounts to follow a story I, for one, knew little about and I take my hat off to them for it.

Besides who hasn’t dreamed of finding gold?!

E