The Happy Camper: Canada’s Deadman’s Curse, Season 3
Season 3 of the Canadian hit show Deadman’s Curse is now out. I binge-watched it during Thanksgiving weekend, between basting the turkey and peeling the potatoes. It’s still a captivating show, enough for me to skip making my traditional gravy and just use the lumpy package brand so I can keep watching.
The premise of Deadman’s Curse is based on four present-day treasure hunters searching for the legendary Slumach’s lost goldmine hidden somewhere in the rugged mountains of British Columbia.
Slumach, an elderly Katzie First Nations man, had discovered a colossal “place deposit” of gold in 1891 noted to be worth billions of dollars. But soon after, he was hung for shooting a man (Louis Bee) while protecting his bounty. On his death bed, he put a curse on the goldmine by uttering the words, “Nika memloose, mine memloose,” or “When I die, the mine dies.”
The show first aired back in 2022. I interviewed the crew and wrote a piece on the show for an Explore blog.
Now it’s 2025, and there were big questions that floated around my head before I watched the third season: Did they finally find the gold? Is it still a good show to watch?
Well, I’m only at Episode 6 at this point, so I can’t tell you if they actually find the gold. But I will say that I hope they don’t. There is way too much more going on in this latest season to simple end it with finding a few nuggets.
There’s something bigger coming; it reminds me so much of the classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer children’s movie when Yukon Cornelius licks his pickaxe and declares, “Nothin.” If you Google that scene, you’ll find out that the original film that aired in 1964 didn’t have the cartooned miner character searching for silver and gold, Yukon Cornelius was looking for something better, more meaningful, more tangible—Peppermint!
“Peppermint! What I’ve been searching for all my life! I’ve struck it rich. I’ve got me a peppermint mine… Wahoooo!’”
This Deadman’s Curse legend definitely doesn’t present itself in a linear format. The crew are actually looking for the “peppermint.”
I did another Whisky Fireside Chat on my KCHappyCamper YouTube channel for Season 3 of Deadman’s Curse.
It was with Adam Palmer. He’s one of the four-person crew on the show. Palmer is a mountain climber and outdoor educator. The other three are Kru Williams, a seasoned prospector, Taylor Starr, a young Indigenous historian and the great-great-niece of Slumach and Don Froese, Taylor’s father and proud member of Seabird Island First Nation.
Palmer has been looking for the gold for over two decades now, and I doubt he’ll quit until he finds it. Listening to him during the interview, I think he’s more obsessed about solving the mystery of Slumach’s lost goldmine than becoming rich from it.
An interesting addition to the new season is that it features a number of rival prospectors with each one bringing something new to unravelling the legend.
Check out Deadman’s Curse as it returns for a third season on Thursdays at 10 p.m. on the History Channel and StackTV. The team explores old mine shafts, climbs over BC mountains, dives deep lakes and investigates shocking new leads, new terrain and new unconventional theories for a lost gold (peppermint) hidden in the wilderness of British Columbia.
