On tonight’s Gold Rush: Dave Turin’s Lost Mine, we see the incredible patience it takes to be a successful miner as Dave Turin is testing some pay dirt and sluicing by hand in order to see if his area is worth mining and focusing on.
And the good news is that his pan winds up with many gold flakes, enough to make the normally stone-faced Turin smile and change his plans to mine.
In our exclusive clip, you see him lasering on his task.
He says: “Gold will not penetrate this [points to rocky ledge] so right
here at this seam is where there should be a lot of gold. The question is, did the last miners come up this tributary and beat me to it?”
Turin gets his sluice pan and says: “Let’s grab a pan and see.”
Meanwhile, Jason radios in from a dozer and tells Dave its time to call it quits and rethink the plan as he has no place to work in that stretch of pay.
He says: “You got a copy boss? Hows it going down there Dave?”
Not finding anything yet, Dave is still locked into his task and cautiously answers and says: “Well, I’ll let you know soon.”
Jason fires back: “T1 is done, I mean I got a little bit of scrap clean up but it’s done. So you got to get a move on brother. I got no place to go, sir, it’s done.”
Sounds like someone needs a coffee break. Replying, Dave says: “Done out of pay. Now they’re putting pressure on me now, aren’t they?
Still busy with the sluice, Dave says: “I got to find something I got to find it in a hurry, so if this has got good gold in it, we’ll move to the
dredge graveyard. I need to see at least 10 good-sized flakes of gold in a pan.”
Then Dave is quiet He says: “Bingo.”
“This is what I’m looking for… finally.”
The relief is all over his face. “Maybe things are looking up. Holy smokes that’s a good pan.”
But there’s a price to pay. He says: “It’s further away, it’s gonna cost me more money to truck it, but it’s gold. Right now it’s a risk I’ve got to take.”
He adds: “KC’s is gonna have to drive a little bit faster because with this kind of gold we can make some money.”
Gold Rush history
When Dave Turin split from Todd Hoffman’s crew at the end of Gold Rush Season 7, a series of major events followed for the top-rated series.
Around that time, Rick Ness packed up his gear and struck out on his own away from Parker, while Hoffman flat out quit the series.
Gold Rush viewers parting memory of Turin was him and Trey Poulson getting into a massive fight.
No one saw it coming as Turin’s stoic demeanor doesn’t have the sparky fireworks of someone like the bombastic Tony Beets, who we learned in an exclusive interview has become a good friend of Dave’s.
In that same interview, Turin revealed his wife was more integral in his daily operations and that he relied on her very much.
“The other thing for me [that] was a pure joy was to be able to work with my wife. My wife has always traveled with me but she’s kind of been in the background. She’s a very competent lady. She doesn’t like the camera. However, she was an RN. She ran clinics, she was a manager, but she stepped back and allowed me to go do some of these crazy things.
This year she stepped up. I asked her to be more on the camera. She ran the gold room for me. She processed the gold, cleaned the gold, weighed it, and gave us results. It was really fun to be completely in partnership with my wife.
The official logline from Discovery:
Dave faces a nightmare scenario when the ground he’s mining goes cold and no one knows why. With his season hanging in the balance, the pressure mounts for Dave to get them back on the gold.
Tune in tonight to see if this sluicing was a “flash in the pan” or if Turin has a vein of gold waiting on him for discovery.
Gold Rush: Dave Turin’s Lost Mine airs Fridays at 10 PM ET/PT on Discovery Channel.