The Fairplay mine has the most gold-rich paydirt of any of Todd Hoffman’s claims on Gold Rush, but there’s a hitch — he’s hardly allowed to dig any of it!
In our exclusive clip from this week’s episode, Freddy Dodge explains how he’s only been left a postage stamp-sized parcel of land to mine relative to what the claim used to be.
Most of the 40-acre area has been rezoned by the county as residential land for housing, while much of the rest is either too steep or has already been mined. That leaves only a 75ft by 75ft square.
Freddy says they’re appealing the ruling by county officials, but until then they’ve got to abide by the rules.
The clip sees Hoffman try to get his head around just how small the patch of land actually is, as he and Freddy walk to the area and place plastic cones to measure it out. Freddy cautions Todd: “We need to mark it because we don’t want to dig one rock over these lines.”
Todd agrees, but says they’ve got to get “every ounce” of paydirt. A bemused Andy Spinks in the excavator says: “Usually the issue we always have to deal with is the pay is not very good but we’ve got a lot of it. Here the pay is excellent, it’s the best we’ve ever mined…we just don’t have very much of it.”
Gold Rush airs Fridays at 9/8c on Discovery.