‘Gold Rush Mine Rescue’ Stars Reflect on Dramatic Season 5 Premiere & Tease What’s Next

Freddy Dodge and Juan Ibarra faced some of their biggest challenges during the Season 5 premiere of Gold Rush Mine Rescue. During the two-hour premiere episode on February 13, the duo headed to the Yukon to tackle an extensive treasure hunt to the tune of 288 claims across more than 6,000 acres. 

They looked to help Morgan Fraughton and his family, which was easier said than done. Dodge and Ibarra enlisted the help of a local expert in Jeff Bond for their gold expedition. This delicate project pushed the team to think outside-the-box and take a different approach. Here Dodge and Ibarra break down tackling this particular project and what else is to come on the Discovery Channel series. 

We’re kicking things off in the Yukon. Take us through what we saw. 

Freddy Dodge: Morgan has a lot of ground and started out pretty much with just a shovel out there. He had a little bitty track and a little bitty plant. He struggled along the way, but has done everything himself. His struggles were still continuing when Juan and I were out there. He is the type of guy and part of a family that isn’t going to give up. 

Juan Ibarra:  One of the things about Morgan and his family is you think of the gold rush and the early days of the 1800s that were blazing the trail, going out there looking for gold and prospecting and doing it every step of the way themselves. Honestly, Morgan is one of the guys we’ve helped over the years that is about as close you can get to that idea of what prospector miner is because he genuinely went out there, blazed the trails, staked the claims, found the channels. He did that himself. From start to finish, he did that on his own. We were fortunate enough to give him a hand this year. Honestly I wish him the best of luck. I think he is going to do great. 

Morgan and Krissy Fraughton oversee Eva feeding mini sluice with shovel. (Discovery Channel)

How do you look back at the obstacles you overcame?  

Juan: A lot of the time we have issues with access. That was no different at Morgan’s. The access to get down there to that mine site. It was barely an ATV trail. We couldn’t take our trucks down there. If we went down with our trucks down below, we probably wouldn’t have gotten them back out. We had to do a lot of the repairs we did and the building offsite, then bring everything in. We ended up using one of our ATVs with one of our small welders on the back of it. That’s how we installed everything on this plant. It makes it a lot more difficult. Since he is a newer miner, he didn’t have a lot of staging areas or areas where we could get our trucks close enough to do the work. So, we were working 15 miles away or more. 

Freddy: Even after we built and repaired the stuff up top, that hill going down there was a challenge just to repair or get new pieces into the mine site itself. 

Juan: Not only was it a challenge, but it could have also turned into a multi-rescue because we didn’t have to just work on his wash plant, but we had to work on his equipment as well. I honestly didn’t think we were even going to get a test run done because there were so many things we had to get done. On top of that, the excavators were broken. It didn’t look good for a while, but we were able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and get it done. But it took a lot of work. 

Freddy: We took that track up the hill to do some prospecting and got to the bottom and it felt like it was tipping. We looked and he was lucky it didn’t break in half going back that hill. If he went up one more time up that hill to do more prospecting off that excavator, it may have been his life. 

What did you make of what you did? 

Freddy: We were proud of what we did there. It was a struggle the whole time. I know we improved his recoveries. That means a lot to me and Juan. We want to win. Sometimes we don’t, but we give it all we got. 

Morgan Fraughton and Simon removing expanded metal from wash plant sluice. (Discovery Channel)

This looks to be an emotional season, especially when considering you’re heading to British Columbia, an area where people have suffered due to a wild fire. 

Freddy: There was a fire there before that burned everything down. In that situation everything was burnt. It was very worrisome that we could start another fire or another fire could start around us. Another thing on that one was that the place had been hit hard by so many miners in the past that it was like a puzzle to even find some virgin ground around the plant. 

Juan: The hard part is these people come and get a lease and take it without having any foreknowledge of what has gone on and just taking somebody’s word. Unfortunately, one thing we’ve learned over the years is a lot of times people aren’t as truthful as they should be when it comes to the ground, especially mining ground. That was no exception. They had great hopes. I hope they are doing well, but to be honest, there wasn’t a ton of ground left. 

Freddy: I told them this old saying [from Mark Twain] where a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top.

Juan: Unfortunately, that is very true. 

Freddy: You have to do your own work. That’s what I always say. 

The February 20 episode centers on the Idaho hills where you connect with a rookie miner, who closes his 30-year-old auto business to chase gold in this remote area. What can you tease about what unfolds here? 

Freddy: Idaho was another one where we couldn’t get our equipment in. We did everything with an ATV. Juan set everything up on a flat place on a hill, but it was an hour each way in and out of the mine itself. You couldn’t get any of our service trucks or anything in, it was a struggle.

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Juan: One way was an hour, and that was just to get to the staging spot. We would genuinely lose four-and-a-half to five hours a day in travel. That just dramatically takes away what you can do for the people we’re trying to help. Nonetheless we still got a lot done considering how steep that terrain was. We must have crossed the same creek 30 times, maybe 25. It was a lot. There were a lot of challenges there, but fortunately, we had the equipment there to do it. It really took away from the end result of what we could have done. That’s the unfortunate part. We only have a certain amount of time to do the work we can do. Whatever we can get accomplished in that time is what we’re going to get done. Sometimes the circumstances and environment don’t allow us to get a whole lot done. We lost so much due to travel. 

Freddy: Another problem we face when we can’t get our equipment in there is when we do our second test run, anything we miss, we don’t have the equipment there to fix it. We’re a three hour round trip to our trucks and back on our ATV. That makes it difficult. If anything goes wrong during that second test run, we’re in trouble. 

Gold Rush Mine Rescue, Fridays, 9/8c, Discovery Channel