Dan Bova's 'Gold Rush' on Discovery Channel

A few weeks ago, I went to really, really, really Northern Westchester — to the Yukon territory of Canada to be exact — not in search of Big Foot, but something even better: gold. (Hey, those Larchmont-Mamaroneck travel baseball dues aren’t going to pay for themselves!)

Back tracking a bit, I’m a bit of a Discovery Channel junkie.

I am bored to tears by reality shows that feature beautiful people sitting around tables eating salad and backstabbing each other, but you give me a show where big sweaty dudes are catching crabs or digging holes for hours on end and I. AM. IN.

BOVA: Scary Clowns. Enough said.

FILMS: The Yonkers scientist who discovered plastic

So when my job at Entrepreneur.com presented me with a unique opportunity to dig alongside the furry, f-bomb-loving gold miners featured on Discovery Channel’s no. 1 series, "Gold Rush," I grabbed my passport and kissed my kids — and hopefully my mortgage — goodbye.

My business plan had three parts:

1. Pick up success secrets from these mud-covered millionaires;  2. bring back pockets full of gold; 3. at my wife’s special request, “Don’t do anything stupid that will get you killed.” (No promises, but I’d try.)

Gold Rush cocktail

That third part of my plan was a little tougher than I expected because an opportunity to do something stupid almost immediately presented itself in the Yukon. After many thousands of miles of travel on progressively smaller and smaller airplanes, I wound up at, of course, a bar.

The opportunity: Enjoy a glass of the bar’s signature drink, The Sourtoe Cocktail, which is a shot of alcohol with a frostbitten, dehydrated human toe plopped into it.

The risk: A $2,500 fine if you swallow the toe.

The bigger risk: My germ-phobe wife never, ever touching me again if she found out I put that in my mouth.

Goodbye, sanity! Hello, gold fever! The toe-centric drinkery is located in Downtown Hotel of Dawson City, the last outpost of civilization in gold country. Dawson City has a population of 1,300 people and 13 bars. That’s enough capacity for every single resident to get drunk at the same time. And these people need it. The Yukon is a small, mountainous, and extraordinarily unwelcoming Canadian territory just east of Alaska.

Gold mining here is tough. Things break, holes you thought would have gold in them don’t and — bonus! — if you are one of the miners featured on "Gold Rush," there’s a camera in your face capturing your every screw-up.

Hanging with Parker Schnabel

My first stop was at a claim called Scribner Creek, run by Parker Schnabel. At the age of 16, Parker took over the operation from his beloved grandfather.

Now 21, he remains one of, if not, the youngest mine bosses in the territory. When I met him, Parker was more than a little bit bummed. Long story short: a huge earth moving truck dropped a massive boulder somewhere it shouldn’t have, smashing his gold catching thingy to holy hell.

This wasn’t good because  you can’t exactly run to Home Depot to buy a new gold catching thingy and when it is working, the thingy is capable of snagging 2 ½ ounces of gold an hour, worth about $3,000. So every minute of gold catching counts. And at the moment, all the broken thing was catching was jack and squat. Sad trombone (I have the effect on people).

Happily, it got fixed by the Yukon’s version of the Maytag man, and a perked-up Parker asked me what I wanted to do at the mine. “Dig up some damn gold in one of those huge-ass machines!” was my obvious answer. “Absolutely not!” was the immediate reply from the onsite safety expert. (Did my wife call in advance?) So I settled for some old school panning.

I grew up on Long Island where the most notable concentration of gold is found in the grill in Flava Flav’s mouth, so I was pretty excited to be hunched in the muck, dishing for treasure.

I panned under Parker’s watchful eye and after a few minutes of my hands in the finger-numbing water, a gold fleck appeared. Then another, then another. By the time all of the sediment was washed out, my pan was more bedazzled than the back of a tween’s jean jacket.

I thought Parker was going to jump up and hug me. He did not. Turns out when you do this for a living, finding gold is what you’re supposed to do. And also? I don’t think miners hug a lot.

And to add onto that also? Parker spent a ton of money in fuel and equipment to find those flakes. A million bucks, to be precise. “I like having stuff on the line,” Parker told me. “I’d be bored doing normal 21-year-old things.”

Going broke in the Yukon is a very real danger, I learn, as is an unexpected golden shower. That is, dropping one of the glass jars these guys like to keep their collected gold in. “I dropped a jar with 100 ounces in it,” Parker tells me. “I got most of it collected, but definitely lost a couple of thousand bucks. I just didn’t go to the strip club that night.” Okay, maybe he’s not totally different from a normal 21-year-old.

On Paradise Hill with Tony Beets

After an hour on what they call a road up here, we arrive at another claim: Paradise Hill. I take a seat on the front porch steps and within minutes, there is a truck driving straight at me. Fast. Like ramming speed.

It skids to a stop, spraying dirt and gravel on me. A hairy hulk climbs out from behind the drive’s seat. Big Foot? No, this is Tony Beets, owner of this claim.

“Most people get out of the f---in’ way when a truck a driving straight at them!” he says, laughing. “I guess I trusted you’d stop?” I explain. “Don’t trust no person with your life but yourself.” I’ll remember that next time I try riding my bike on the Boston Post Road.

Beets, 56, grew up in Holland where he made ends meet milking cows.He and his wife, Mini, moved to Dawson City in 1984 to look for gold and he hasn’t stopped looking since. “After I have my breakfast, I don’t walk outside with coffee in my hand. I have both hands ready to f---ing work,” he tells me in his signature voice that sounds like the Swedish Chef and a lion had a baby.

Beets gives me a tour, where we see lots of mud and a couple of woolly mammoth tusks he’s unearthed. Oh and also a tray with 270 ounces of gold, worth about $351,000. He keeps it in a wood shed that is “locked” by jamming a rusty screw driver in the door.

ADT has not made its way this far north, I guess.

Tony didn’t let me pluck any gold from his stash, but he didn’t run me over either, so I’d say that was a win. Eventually, the safety officer saw me eyeing the keys to a 10-ton bulldozer and decided to call it a day.

Tony’s parting advice? “Do yourself a favor and get out of bed every morning and be very serious about what you do. We all have good days and bad days. At the end of the day, it’s you that made it happen. Not your neighbor, not the banker. You!”

I think about that all the way back to Westchester with a vial full of gold flakes in my pocket and severed toe cocktail swishing in my belly. Whoops, I mean, no, of course I didn’t drink that — my wife would kill me. Just kidding, honey!

The gold I found at Parker’s claim amounted to about $35 worth, not enough to retire, but enough to take the family to Walter’s for some hot dogs. Close enough.

The seventh season of "Gold Rush" premieres this Friday. Not sure if I made the final cut, but look for the short guy in the background getting chased away from the big machines.

Lohud columnist Dan Bova is a married Larchmont father of two. He's been the editor-in-chief of Maxim, a producer at “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and currently is editorial director of Entrepreneur. Got an idea for a column? Hit him up on twitter: @DanBova1