ARC MAGAZINE

Emily Riedel has spent the last decade digging deep to find her destiny. And when she does find it, she’s fiercely committed to holding it in her own hands.

Riedel is one of the original cast members of Bering Sea Gold, the long-running reality TV series on the Discovery Channel. Created by the makers of Deadliest Catch, an equally popular show about crab fishing adventures in the same part of the world, Bering Sea Gold follows a fleet of miners who take their boats out to the shallow waters off the coast of Nome, Alaska, on Norton Sound to dredge the seabed for gold.

Now in its twelfth season, the show is divided according to the region’s two dredging seasons: the summer season, which airs in the spring, and the winter season – with the modified title of Bering Sea Gold: Under the Ice – which airs in the mid-summer.

Separate and apart from the acquisition of the gold itself, the journey chronicled in Bering Sea Gold has been a life-changing experience for Riedel – one with plenty of challenges and setbacks as well as triumphs. The life lessons she’s learned and the wisdom she’s picked up along the way are things that no amount of precious metal can buy.

“Life is what happens when you’re making other 15 plans,” says Riedel, borrowing a well-known quote from John Lennon. “I really expected to do just one summer in Nome.”


She’d earned a graduate degree in vocal performance from The North Carolina School of the Arts in 2010. A year later, during the summer of 2011, she was looking for a way to make enough money to attend graduate school in Europe. Given her family roots in Alaska, a place with plenty of unconventional but lucrative job opportunities – including gold mining – Nome seemed like a good place to start.


“A lot of people assume that I have some kind of gold mining history in my family,” says Riedel, who grew up in Homer, Alaska. Her father was actually a bush pilot who did surveying work in Prudhoe Bay before he became part of the Bering Sea Gold team in the show’s fi rst season, and her mother is a music teacher. “I hear those things and I say, ‘Nope. I was just a broke post-grad with no experience on boats, no experience with gold.’ I just had this far-off fantastical notion. I just went up there to make some money for school.”


One summer job has stretched into eleven seasons of television with a steep learning curve. She started out as diver, but her first day of diving off fellow miner Zeke Tenhoff’s dredge ended in less than spectacular fashion. The exhaust fumes from the engines made her sick enough to vomit, and she ended her day before it even started by swimming back to shore.


But the setback was only temporary, and the allure of gold was – and continues to be – the same for Riedel as it has been for countless miners and explorers that have come before her over the centuries.


“The first time I ever dove and saw gold on the ocean floor, there was nothing like it,” she says. “It really is as bright and as glittery as you always hear about. There’s a mineral called pyrite. People call it fool’s gold, but once you’ve seen both, you realize that pyrite doesn’t look anything like gold. The only thing that looks like gold is gold.”

Despite the immediate gratification of those first dives – or perhaps because of it – she was hesitant about the idea of TV camera crews becoming part of the daily routine later that same summer.

“Alaskans generally don’t like the idea of people watching what goes on here,” she says, “because we really value our freedom, our independence and our privacy. ”

By the end of the first season, however, the TV crew had become part of the routine. But the routine changed during the second season after Riedel experienced a series of diving mishaps that warranted emergency ascents back to the surface. She describes the result as “a sort of PTSD” that has kept her topside ever since.

“I used to love being down there,” she says, “but after a couple close calls, I didn’t feel right in the water anymore, and I didn’t feel like I could perform. That was a hard year for me, because I didn’t know how I fit in the industry after that. I’m a hard worker. I like having a purpose, like everyone does. So I was really thrown off by that setback, because I really wanted to contribute, but I didn’t really know how I could contribute anymore.”

The solution was to buy her own boat and promote herself from diver to captain. She bought Tenhoff’s dredge, then known as The Edge, and rechristened it The Eroica – a reference to the Italian operatic term, sinfonia eroica (heroic symphony), and a nod to her musical background.

In her new role as captain of her own ship and head of her own dredging operation, the good news was that she was now the master of her own destiny. The bad news was that she now had to manage every aspect of her own destiny.

“The first couple years of owning a dredge,” she says, “were pretty chaotic in terms of personnel and fi guring out the vbusiness, figuring out the equipment, getting the right advice, putting the right kind of setup together to optimize the gold dredging.”

But anything done on a daily basis – no matter how many steps, no matter how many details, no matter how complicated – eventually falls into a routine. And in the gold dredging business, says Riedel, routine is one of the primary drivers of success,

“If things are boring, then you’re making money,” she says. “If things are exciting, it’s because the weather has come up, you’re having some kind of dive emergency, or you’re having some kind of mechanical breakdown, and people are losing their minds because you’re not making money. You never know what you’re going to get out there.”

She’s confronted the adversity – and the not-so-subtle skepticism of some of her colleagues along the coast of Nome –with a steel-eyed resolve.

“I’ve been running my boat for seven seasons now, and not all of those seasons have been successful, but a lot of them have been. A lot of them have been more successful than many people who have come through in the last ten years. Because I work really hard and I run a good ship and I find good people to dive. So a lot of the people – locally at least – have kind of shut up about it, because they see that my boat is out there and it’s working.”

Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, Riedel’s gender has factored into some of the misperceptions about her ability to do the work.

“People make a lot of assumptions about you,” she says. “People turn away from you. People talk over you. People assume that you have nothing to say and you don’t know anything. People assume things because I’m a woman…But I don’t really care. I just do my job and I try to do it the best that I can. It doesn’t really get to me. And I live in such a small world, and people are so used to seeing me in that world, and they know that I work hard, so it’s gotten a lot easier.18 But at first, it wasn’t that way at all.”

She’s hesitant to call herself a role model for young women, or even think of herself as one. “But in general, when women are seen doing jobs like this, young girls can see those jobs as options,” she says. “That’s the most important thing. It’s not about equality of outcome. It’s about equality of opportunity. So if a girl sees someone like me doing something that is traditionally considered men’s work, then that gives them an option, right? Not everyone should be a welder or a fabricator. Not everyone should be a gold dredger. That’s not what’s demanded of you. It’s more about what you can see as options, and what options you want to pursue.”

After nearly a decade on the Bering Sea, is there an endgame to Riedel’s gold-dredging journey? Perhaps a pivot to dry land and something more in line with her musical training? She has found a way to do both, but the balancing act has its challenges.

My schedule is very unpredictable,” she says. “Sometimes we’re summertime mining. Sometimes we’re ice mining. But I’ve performed the Anchorage Symphony, which is great. I had a random, very moving opportunity last year to sing at Carnegie Hall. That was a fantastic opportunity. I’m getting better at managing the gold mining and the opera singing, but they’re just two very different things – two difficult things – to hold in tandem, as you might imagine. My voice is my instrument, and if I don’t take good care of my instrument, it doesn’t perform as well.”

For as unrelated as the two pursuits might seems, the sea and the quest for gold have taught her certain life lessons that translate to the performing arts.

“The discipline of being focused and dedicated to a craft – taking care of your equipment and making sure you’re doing things right – is not unlike being a competent musician,” she says. “You have to know your stuff. You have to study a score, learn the music, learn the notes, learn the rhythms, the tempi. You have to spend hours and hours working out the notes in your body, learning the languages. It’s all about discipline and attention to your craft.”

For all of its visual appeal, the gold is merely a means to an end for Riedel. That glittering thing she’s searching for on the floor of the Bering Sea every day has less to do with wealth and more to do with personal freedom.

“I think the most important thing in life is independence,” she says. “Independence from debt, independence from having anyone telling you how to live your life or what to do. That’s why gold mining is so appealing to me. It’s absolute freedom. I think gold mining is the embodiment of the American dream. I don’t work for anybody but myself. My achievement depends entirely upon me just getting up in the morning.”

For Riedel, gold is a universal currency. What’s more, the sense of personal fulfillment she derives from the process of search and discovery knows no price.

“There’s nothing between me and the true value,” she says. “The true value comes directly from my own hands. There’s nothing that really feels as good as that connection – and that sense of achievement – as when you’re holding treasure in your own hands, and it’s found by your own merits. That’s what the American dream is to me, and I feel like I’m living the American dream every day.”