On tonight’s premiere of Gold Rush: White Water, we see a whole new way to extract gold out of mother Earth — as mining legends “Dakota” Fred Hurt and his son Dustin take massive risks in a bid to land a potential fortune.
The series sees the Gold Rush veterans put their lives on the line as they dive deep beneath the raging waters of McKinley Creek, Alaska, where they believe plunge-pools amongst the fierce rapids are laden with gold.
Once they locate the right pools — with the help of a team of intrepid divers, mountaineers and bush mechanics — they will use a six-inch suction dredge to try and get hold of the gold.
On tonight’s premiere, Dustin locates one such potential pool — but getting to it isn’t going to be easy. In our exclusive clip, an area they are trying to reach is cut off by a 30-foot wall of shale rock.
To get there, Dustin has devised a plan to bolt steel brackets into the wall and attach wooden boards to make a walkway, much like scaffolding hugging an uneven wall.
He is attached to a rope in case he plunges in, but around half way through hits a major difficulty when the rocks start to become loose and he risks having huge boulders fall on top of him, or the entire cliff collapsing under his feet.
The challenge sees Dustin assume a leadership role as Dakota Fred looks on. But when Fred starts meddling with what Dustin is doing, things start to get tense between the two.
Dakota Fred is well aware that they need to make a serious return on fellow gold miner Todd Hoffman’s investment for their project — and quickly. But in such perilous conditions, one wrong move and it could all go disastrously wrong…
Gold Rush: White Water airs Friday at 10pm on Discovery. Don’t miss our exclusive interview with Dakota Fred about Gold Rush: White Water here.