Gold Rush: White Water

Hey, Fred, if you wanna take a break at any moment or...

You know, just let us know.

Well, we just go through it. We'll go through it.

- We got... We got plenty of time. - I'll let you know.

We're just gonna get some sound levels. Just have a little talk.

Hello there. Yeah. We can have a little talk.

Hello.

My name is "Dakota" Fred hurt.

And today is... Who knows what date?

April the something or another, 2023.

And we're doing this right now

while I'm still able.

Symptoms are creeping in on me a little bit at a time.

Several months ago,

I was diagnosed with brain tumors.

Not just one brain tumor.

How about four brain tumors?

It's an end-of-life diagnosis,

so it's terminal.

Hey, I'm about 80 years old now.

Yeah, I look back on my life...

And I've led

a little bit of an adventurous life at times.

Here we go.

Yahoo!

Some good stuff.

Nothing like good old southern boy ingenuity?

Yeah!

We're just kind of in that little zone

between crazy and insane.

Some not so good stuff.

- Don't argue with me. - Hey, stop it.

I asked you to not do this.

You did it anyway.

Things you didn't know about.

- You bought it out from under us. - -That is correct.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

- Fred. - No. Come on. Hey. Hey.

Ain't gonna do any good if you kill him.

It was a hell of a ride.

Eighty years.

Yeah! Yee-haw!

We're living.

Ain't we having fun yet?

I'm heading up to Alaska.

Gonna get back to work.

And I'm gonna make a detour.

I have to find out how Fred's doing.

Quite frankly, I think that this is probably

gonna be the last time I see him.

We'll see.

That's pretty sad to say that out loud.

I think that's the first time I've really,

really said that out loud.

Hey, Fred.

Hey, what's up, man?

- How is it going, man? - I'm doing fine.

- Good to see you. - Yeah.

- Have a seat. - Okay.

So how are you doing, man?

Hey, the best as I can do right now.

My balance is down a little bit.

A little bit of blurry vision.

It's progressing every day.

Sorry to hear that, Fred.

That's too bad.

So how long did they give you?

They don't know.

I mean, anywhere from a few months

to six months.

I know you're concerned and I know it bothers you.

Hell, I lived a good life.

Yeah.

Fredrick Richard hurt

was born on the 10th of July,

1943 in robstown, Texas.

My dad was an electrician.

He had his own business.

My mother was a registered nurse.

We had a regular middle-class life.

But money,

that was hard to come by.

I was fascinated by the ocean.

We lived on the coast of Texas

and I loved the water.

Got into college.

I went and bought myself some old scuba gear

and had a little pamphlet about that big

that said how to scuba dive.

And that's how I learned how to scuba dive myself.

Somewhere along the way,

I decided I wanted to be a commercial diver.

My career was successful.

Mostly oil field construction.

Offshore, the Gulf of Mexico.

After my career doing the diving,

I got into my own business

doing lots of pile-driving,

dock-building, concrete work.

Hell, I even put up bus stops.

But after 30 something years of doing this,

you finally just kind of get tired of it,

and I was ready for something else.

Back in, gee whiz, '04,

my son-in-law says, "let's go gold mining."

I said, "hell, that sounds interesting."

It sparked something in me.

We'd make contact with earle foster.

He said, "well, I got this place down in porcupine."

I packed up and I go to Alaska.

And Alaska is mountains, waters, trees.

You can't capture it on a camera.

It's impossible.

It's the feeling.

Unbelievable.

Didn't know a thing about gold mining

but I belonged there,

'cause I already knew all the skills.

I had bought the little shaker thing

for pasta shells

and I said, "hey, that might make

a pretty good gold mining equipment."

And I literally was taking a pipe

and washing material from this dump truck

right down into this little shaker plant

and it worked quite well.

When you first find gold,

it kind of sets your heart sailing.

I did it. I found some gold.

Real gold.

We occasionally started meeting

some of the locals there.

Some guy named John.

John schnabel.

Been mining there for 25 years

or something like that.

We started getting set up

to do a little mining over there.

Here comes this little kid on a little bitty motorbike.

He says, "hi, my name's Parker."

- He's about nine. - Eight or nine years old at the time.

So that's where it all started right there,

six years before the gold rush

people ever showed up there.

And we were successful in getting

some gold out of porcupine.

But in 2010,

earle foster called me and said, "Fred,"

he said, "I've got a proposal for you."

He had made some sort of a deal

with a bunch of guys out of Oregon

that they were gonna mine on his property.

We're going all the way, so we'll see how we do.

He said, "Fred, they've been there

for a couple of months, two or three months."

He said, "I hadn't heard a word

from what they're doing over there."

He said, "I'm just wondering

if maybe you guys could come pick me up

and we could drive down to the mine

and see what's going on."

Little did Fred know

he was walking straight into the first season

of gold rush.

Hey, Fred. I'm Todd.

- How you doing? - Yeah. Good.

Complete with Todd Hoffman and his rookie crew.

We get to porcupine creek mine and...

Whoops, some guys with cameras.

They stick microphones on us and all kinds of stuff.

It didn't take Fred long to settle into mining

or the world of TV.

Well, can you tell me? I mean, why are you here?

Why are you helping these guys?

I wanna see them succeed.

Very much so.

Um...

Do you realize that most working guys

out there across america

would just love to tell their bosses,

"this is it, I'm going gold mining"?

Well, these people are living that fantasy.

Fred, you like TV now? Pretty good?

- We'll see if... We'll see... - We'll see.

How much you like it when you're at home...

- Yeah. - And all your family's laughing at you.

Yeah. That's fine with me.

At earle's request,

Fred set about making improvements

to the Hoffmans' operation.

There were so many things wrong

that I couldn't even...

Where the hell is everybody?

I was just trying to get them to get up and go to work.

We can get some gold out of this place.

They didn't wanna work.

They seem to be missing in action.

He's in the extended stay

bed and breakfast or something.

The Hoffmans considered w-o-r-k a four letter word.