Color Market Reports

Reality series on gemstone mining to debut in ‘13

The logo for “Prospectors,” the working title for a new series from The Weather Channel that chronicles the lives of gemstones miners in the Colorado Rockies.
Dec 14, 2012

New York--Beginning in March, a group of Colorado gemstone miners will be the latest group to have their lives, and jobs, profiled on reality TV.

The Weather Channel is set to begin airing a show with the working title of “Prospectors.” The program follows the lives of a group of colored gemstone miners who hunt for topaz, aquamarine and rhodochrosite 14,000 feet up, in the Rocky Mountains.

“The prospectors use picks, sledgehammers and dynamite to send Volkswagen-sized boulders spinning out of control down the 60-percent grade mountainside. They open holes, looking for veins of brilliant red, blue and green crystals. And the right pocket, extracted correctly, can bring a million-dollar payday or more,” The Weather Channel said in a press release.

Miner

Steve Brancato, Joe Dorris and family, Amanda Adkins, Rich Fretterd, pictured here with his dog Shadrack, and the Busse family are among the “Prospectors” featured on the show. While they all know each other from the industry, they work separately.

High Noon Entertainment, which did “Cake Boss” and “Hurricane Hunters,” another Weather Channel series, is producing “Prospectors.” The first episode is set to air on March 5 at 9 p.m. EST, and the series will consist of nine 30-minute episodes to start.

While The Weather Channel has aired original series for a number of years, it was in 2012 that the network really began expanding its programming with series centering on people living and working in the elements. In 2013, the network will launch about a dozen new series, “Prospectors” being one of them.

When it airs, the show will not be the first to chronicle a more perilous side of the jewelry and gemstone industry.

In 2007, The History Channel debuted “Ice Road Truckers,” a series that documented the dangers faced by the men who drive trucks across the frozen lakes and rivers of the northern reaches of Canada and Alaska. Canadian diamond and gold mines were among the stops the drivers made.

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