INTERVIEW: Dakota Fred Hurt is up a creek on ‘Gold Rush: White Water’
The successful Gold Rush reality series branches off tonight, Jan. 19 with the spinoff, Gold Rush: White Water. The new show, which premieres at 10 p.m. on Discovery, follows gold miners Dakota Fred Hurt and his son, Dustin, as they head back to McKinley Creek, Alaska, to look for big paydays. Along the way, they will face numerous dangers, including everything from terrifying heights to brutal rapids to freezing-cold temperatures.
All’s in a day work for the Hurt family.
“First of all, Ghost Rush: White Water is going to be very different than the Gold Rush show that people have been accustomed to — mega equipment, moving and digging and shoving dirt and jamming dirt down a wash plant and doing gigantic cleanups and all that,” Dakota Fred said in a recent phone interview. “I mean, people are going to tune in just to watch the scenery. This is in the middle of some of the best scenery in Alaska, and mostly that’s what people go to Alaska for, other than fishing and hunting, is the scenery. But we are mining in an incredibly tall, raging, little creek. That’s what we’re doing. It’s in the middle of a canyon — very, very remote. We can’t get to it with any kind of a vehicle or piece of equipment. About the only way you can get to where we were was with a helicopter or hike. There’s no other way, so it’s really remote. … It’s quite difficult to mine where we were mining, very difficult, but we think that that’s kind of where the gold came from. So that’s why we’re there.”
Much of Fred’s obstacles on the new series involved underwater work. They used a small dredge to dig up material at the bottom of the creek, but this isn’t Bering Sea Gold. These waters are moving constantly.
“This is a raging creek, very narrow canyon,” Fred said. “The walls are straight up like 200-250 feet straight up. We had to have a tremendous amount of safety features. We had people downstream if anybody got loose into the creek or anything. We had people that would try to rescue us. There were a number of incidents that did happen. They were, I’d call them, near misses. That’s about the best I can describe that, and they involved diving. You kind of have to stay tuned to see exactly what happens with this.”
If any audience members believe the events of Gold Rush: White Water are faked, Fred has a clear message: No, they are not.
“It’s a very real show,” he contended. “Reality shows sometimes are a little iffy. People don’t know whether to believe them or not sometimes. This one, they will. They’re going to see the real thing.”
The first obstacle that Fred and the crew faced involved getting to the remote area of the creek. They had to use a cable and attach themselves with little straps.
“This is an individual hanging by an individual little strap and then going across a 400-foot canyon hanging over about 200-250 feet down to the creek,” he said. “Then you have to … hike up about a 45-degree mountain for about 1/3 of a mile. Then we had to rappel on a rope down a slope down toward the creek, which was about 300 feet down from where we had hiked to. Then we had to walk and hike another 1/4 of a mile or so … and then we had to do our work. And then after work, you had to the same thing back after about 10 hours of work. It was, let’s just say, it was a physically, physically demanding job. I was a little bit out of shape when I first started, which I refer to probably half a dozen times. I was about 10 pounds overweight and out of shape, and I’ll tell you what, being in my 70s, it was a struggle to keep up with all the young bucks. But I did.”
Working in these conditions was hellish. The water was constantly 38 degrees, so they had to build walkways to stay above the ice-cold waves. The reason for the cold temps was because Fred and the crew were only a couple miles away from a glacier melt.
“So it stayed right at 38 degrees and really running fast,” he said. “I mean, it was raging at times. I mean, sometimes it was horrendously rough. We did lots of safety measures to make sure we didn’t kill ourselves. It’s going to portray the real deal, probably the most real reality show that’s on TV anywhere.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Gold Rush: White Water will premiere Friday, Jan. 19 at 10 p.m. on Discovery. Click here for more information.
