The huge success of “Gold Rush” might have made it possible to get an exclusive insight into some of the most unexpected aspects of the gold mining industry, but even then it’s really rare to see women involved with it. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Tyler Mahoney, the Australian gold miner who not only became famous for her drive and honest dedication to what she does for a living, but also for her intelligence and natural skills at touching the audience with her personal story.
With the knowledge of an historically mining-inclined family, and the smartness that her own experience provides her, Tyler Mahoney is definitely one of the most interesting and worth watching miners in “Gold Rush” and its spin-off “Parker’s Trail”, but how has her TV appearances changed her life so far?
Stay with us to know what Tyler is doing these days, details about her personal life, gold-mining adventures and even more!
What Is Tyler Doing Now?
For the last couple of years, Tyler Mahoney has been quite busy dealing with her newly acquired international fame, her businesses and becoming a reality TV personality. Besides appearing in seasons four and five of “Parker’s Trail”, Tyler became a recurring star in the original “Gold Rush” series and its spin-off “The Dirt”. Other than that, in late 2022 Tyler hinted that she was filming some type of project in South America, but to date more details haven’t been revealed.
Regarding her other professional endeavors, Tyler honors her family’s tradition as a gold prospectors and is in charge of her business The Prospectors Club, her mining consulting business which in 2022 had its three year anniversary. Her time off-work is apparently spent hanging out with friends and family, leaving a record of her life nowadays on the subscription app Sunscreen, on which she also writes about topics of interest such as self-esteem and mental health.
According to her Instagram, Tyler’s home is currently located in Wongatha land in Western Australia, but as seen in some of her posts, her many international projects don’t allow her to spend more than two months at home nowadays. Nonetheless, this new chapter of her professional life is surely worth all the effort.
What Shows Has She Been In?
Although “Gold Rush” international audiences know Tyler Mahoney thanks to her appearances in the American TV franchise, she was already known in her native Australia for other small screen appearances.
In 2018, Tyler made her TV debut in “Aussie Gold Hunters”, an Australian show focused on gold prospectors and miners all around the country, as they use their experience and every type of tools and technology in order to satiate their thirst for gold. Although the series premiered in 2016, Tyler appeared in it for just the third and fourth seasons, but the show is currently still on air.
When asked what her reasons for leaving the show were during an Instagram Live in late 2020, she simply answered: ‘I just didn’t want to do it anymore, there’s not really too much more to it than that’, Tyler explained, also confirming that her parents weren’t planning on returning to the show either, and that her decision to leave was a good thing for allowing her to join “Parker’s Trail” not long afterwards.
Besides “Aussie Gold Hunters”, Tyler appeared in the Australian season of “Parker’s Trail” and its following season based in New Zealand, also appearing in the Yukon-based “Gold Rush” and “The Dirt”, but for sure she’ll be adding more titles to her already impressive career in the reality TV genre.
Who Is Tyler Mahoney?
While her appearances in the “Gold Rush” franchise are undoubtedly unforgettable, there’s more to Tyler Mahoney than TV lets us see. Coming from a family fully dedicated to the gold business, Tyler inevitably grew up learning the basics of the job, going from one place to other as the Mahoneys dug their way in gold claims all around Australia.
That being said, at some point Tyler wasn’t very convinced about becoming a prospector herself, due to the challenging schedules and lack of free time which the engagement in the profession entailed. As she admitted in an interview with the podcast “The Self Love Club” in 2021, she moved to Melbourne and briefly worked as an event manager, but eventually went back home to outback Australia to keep working in the gold business, and join “Aussie Gold Hunters” at her parent’s request.
Although not much is known about Tyler’s educational background, her LinkedIn profile shows that she studied at Curtin University, Perth, though her major is unknown. Nowadays. Tyler’s professional activity is situated between Kalgoorlie and Boulder, both areas where the Australian gold digging business has been active since the 19th Century.
Aside from everything work-related, Tyler is an advocate of mental health, often appearing in podcasts and interviews raising awareness about this topic, and educating people on bipolar disorder, which she was diagnosed with some years ago.
Book & Work
As expected, having spent the majority of her life in the gold business, either observing her parents do their job and as a prospector herself, Tyler Mahoney has quite a lot of anecdotes and stories about it. Many of those stories are told in her book “Gold Digger”, a memoir set for release in January 2023, and which contains some of the funniest but also dark-themed and sometimes scary situations experienced by Tyler during her still young but fascinating career in the field of gold prospecting.
However, while the mysteries and untold legends of the Australian gold mining industry which her book promises are surely entertaining, there are other more personal experiences that Tyler has already told in a different way.
As she said in an interview with “The Self Love Club”, even though having a family whose business is completely dedicated to gold prospecting definitely made her way easier in the industry, it’s a fact that she dealt with a different treatment for being a woman in a male-dominated field: ‘my father and brother are automatically given respect whereas me and my mother have to earn it’, Tyler described, saying that she’d been through those situations for as long as she could remember.
Nonetheless, even in spite of the sometimes unpleasant situations she had gone through, it’s evident that Tyler truly enjoys her job.
What Is Her Business About?
As seen in her appearances in “Aussie Gold Hunters” and “Gold Rush”, Tyler Mahoney’s knowledge about the mining industry allows her to be quite a trustful voice of reason at finding deposits with precious minerals.
Tyler’s job as a gold prospector could keep her in the planning room revisiting geological maps, or in the claim leading the operation, resulting in her acquiring lots of knowledge and insights that only someone who has the right amount of experience in the gold business could provide. That’s exactly the reason which in 2019 led Tyler to start her business The Prospectors Club, a subscription service which regularly provides its members with insights and exclusive data about the gold prospecting business.
As stated on the business website, some of The Prospectors Club’s services include delivering handbooks with valuable information about locations and mining laws to its subscribers, along with tips and safety guidelines for those who want an ‘in’ to the mining business, but weren’t or haven’t been lucky enough to experience it themselves. Besides their gold related products, The Prospectors Club sells merchandise and has an active blog for fans.
On the other hand, in 2017 Tyler started her accessory and swimsuit brand Mae by Tyler, though in the last year the brand’s website became inactive. Nonetheless, as the brand’s social media are still up and running, it’s possible that Tyler might turn her secondary business back to life in the near future.
Personal Life
During Tyler Mahoney’s first season in “Parker’s Trail”, lots of rumors and assumptions were made regarding the nature of her relationship with Parker Schnabel. However, during an Instagram Live in 2020, Tyler stated that there was only a friendship between her and Parker, and that despite wishing to keep working with him in the show and in the mine, that wasn’t possible at the moment due to the contingency generated by the COVID-19 pandemic back in the day.
Although Tyler’s wish of again working with Parker actually became true, her friendship with Parker remains the same, and actually, since April 2021, Tyler has been in a relationship with a man named Jake Bennett. While not much is known about Jake except for the fact he and Tyler have matching tattoos, in late 2022 she dedicated a heartfelt Instagram post to him, thanking him for supporting her in her professional endeavors, ‘even though it means I’m only home for 2 months this year, you’re the best’, she wrote.
Besides sharing bits of her professional life and sometimes pics of her boyfriend, Tyler uses her social media to talk about mental health, social issues and self-esteem.
Dealing With Bipolar Disorder
Although Tyler Mahoney has always been open about her mental health struggles, her podcast called “Let’s Unpack That” was the first platform which allowed her to uninterruptedly talk about these topics.
In the podcast’s first episode entitled “Unpacking my journey with bipolar” posted in September 2020, she confessed that her earliest self-identified anxiety issues started from the time she was 17 years old, and dating her now ex-boyfriend, who at the time developed severe mental health problems. As a response to these problems, Tyler developed an ability to ‘detach completely from any negative feeling and convince myself that I could be fine’, she affirmed. In the following years, Tyler apparently ‘tricked’ her own mental struggles with alcohol and drugs, adding to the fact that she was highly stressed due to moving to Melbourne and starting her first event management business, eventually leading to experiencing her first depressive and manic episodes, along with hallucinations and paranoia.
After a couple of years in what she described as a period of denial, Tyler finally searched for professional help: ‘I realized I just wanted to be happy’, she recalled her thoughts at the time of accepting her issues and her diagnosis.
Despite having stopped updating her podcast since mid-2021, Tyler is still pretty much dedicated to raising awareness about these issues.
What Is “Parker’s Trail”?
While the “Gold Rush” audience were introduced to Tyler Mahoney and her story in the fourth season of “Parker’s Trail”, filmed in Australia, the show had certainly been on air for a while before that.
As it happens, “Parker’s Trail” premiered in 2017, and focused on Parker Schnabel’s efforts to explore the Klondike Trail in Canada, a route famous for once guiding over 100,000 people between gold prospectors and workers to the Klondike gold rush in the late 1800s. Once a legendary route, Parker along with his then-friend Rick Ness, guide Karla Ann Charlton and cameraman James Levelle embarked in a 600 miles long journey to be proven right about all the difficulties and challenges said about the trail.
For the next season, Parker crossed the US frontier to the mines in Guyana in search of El Dorado, with not much success. One year later, a third season led Parker to Oceania, where Papua New Guinea became his next exploration goal, as he tried to find more about the gold stories told by his late grandfather John Schnabel, who once served in the area as a Navy mechanic.
Premiered in 2020, the fourth season of “Parker’s Trail” showed Parker exploring the northern, southern and western areas of Australia, thanks to Tyler Mahoney’s guide, to verify for himself whether or not what is said about the country’s gold mining riches is real.
Five of the biggest gold nuggets in the world were discovered in Australia including the biggest ever found – called The Welcome Stranger weighing 72kg.
Parker Schnabel (@goldrushparker) hunts for Aussie gold on the season premiere of @Gold_Rush: #ParkersTrail tonight at 8P. pic.twitter.com/51yG0wQh4n
— Discovery (@Discovery) March 13, 2020
Will There Be More Of “Parker’s Trail”?
Despite starting as a short series, “Parker’s Trail” quickly became one of the most popular spin-offs from “Gold Rush”, meaning that it unsurprisingly continues to be renewed season after season. Although the show took an extended hiatus after wrapping up its Australian season in 2020 due to the COVID-19 contingency, in 2022 “Parker’s Trail” came back on air with the goal of exploring New Zealand’s South Island for gold, amid many risky adventures.
Besides Parker Schnabel, the fourth season brought back Tyler Mahoney, and seeing how she also became a regular in the original “Gold Rush” series, it wouldn’t be surprising if she keeps appearing in future seasons of “Parker’s Trail”. Nonetheless, nothing regarding the show’s renewal has been announced so far, leaving us no other option than to wish to keep seeing our favorite Aussie miner on TV.
