Gold Rush has been on the air for over a decade, and cast members of come and gone.
Would you believe teenagers have outclassed miners 3 times their age?
Here are the most successful Gold Rush characters, ranked.
Former Army medic Fred Lewis first appeared on Parker Schnabel's spinoff series Gold Rush:
Parker's Trail. He was hired to replace Schnabel's former operator Rick Ness
on a dangerous expedition into Papua New Guinea. He joined the main show in Season 11,
as he and his rookie team sought to take advantage of the record high
prices of gold and record low prices of oil brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We're not just looking to have a good season. I wanna make the Lewis
family name and the Madden family name well known."
Despite being an impressively bearded and patriotic group of would-be miners,
Lewis and his crew lack the aptitude and ability to learn skills that would save their season.
Even a visit from series fixer Freddy Dodge wasn't able to get Team Lewis back on track.
In the end, the Lewis crew's total yield was just 6.4 ounces. With a worth of about $11,400,
the team earned less than half of what the Hoffman crew mined in their first season.
Despite his failures, Lewis has returned for Season 12 as well as the 2021 limited series
Gold Rush: Winter's Fortune. Will his luck improve with experience? Only time will tell.
Veteran miner and quarry expert Dave Turin was brought in during Season 1
to assist his friend Todd Hoffman's fledgling attempts at finding gold.
For three years he assisted the Hoffman crew and was integral to their continued success.
After Hoffman's ill-fated expedition into Guyana in Season 4, Turin ended their partnership and
teamed up with Freddy Dodge on a new mining operation in the Klondike. In Season 5, Hoffman
convinced Turin to rejoin his crew, in exchange for a 50% ownership stake in Hoffman's new claim.
In 2019, he starred in the Gold Rush spinoff, Dave Turin's Lost Mines, traveling across the
country and rehabilitating abandoned gold mines. Since he was never a crew leader on Gold Rush, his
gold yields were not tallied. However, the hard work he completed with the Hoffman crew, and the
fact that he extended the Gold Rush franchise with his own spinoff, earns him a place on this list.
When miners are in trouble, they call Freddy Dodge. Much like his colleague Dave Turin,
Dodge was on hand to assist the Hoffman crew in its first two seasons before joining them full
time in Season 3. After leaving Hoffman behind in Guyana to work a Klondike claim with his brother,
Dodge returned to the Hoffman crew in Season 5 and has appeared off and on ever since.
He's often called to assist in particularly dire moments, such as Rick Ness' collapsing
wash plant in Season 9, or Fred Lewis' failing crew in Season 11.
In 2021, Dodge hosted the six-episode special Freddy Dodge's Mine Rescue,
visiting underperforming gold mines across the country and getting them back on track.
"There's a lot of gold in this country. THe old timers hit it pretty hard.
Ya know, they found lots of large nuggets."
Like Dave Turin, Dodge's gold yields on the show have not been tallied. However,
his trusted place within every crew he works with, along with his success as an ambassador
of the Gold Rush brand, earn him a place among the show's most successful cast members.
Miners Fred Hurt and his son Dustin, better known as the Dakota Boys, were introduced in Season 1.
They became regular cast members in Season 2, when they leased the Porcupine Creek mine out
from under Todd Hoffman after he missed a lease payment. Free to mine the claim as they pleased,
the Dakota Boys attempted to reach the Glory Hole, a gold-rich deposit at the
bottom of a water-filled ravine which Jack Hoffman had previously gone after.
Their work on the Glory Hole was beset with problems, from a decaying cabin on their dig
site to the threat of major flooding due to melting snowcaps on a nearby mountain.
The Dakota Boys spent three seasons on Gold Rush before setting out on multiple spin-off series:
All That Glitters, then Gold Rush: White Water. In their time on the original
series they yielded 523 ounces of gold in total, worth over $930,000. In Season 4,
they achieved a personal best yield of 280 ounces. In recent years Fred has taken some time
away from White Water, leaving Dustin to carry on the family business and the "Dakota" name.
Rick Ness spent a long time as Parker Schnabel's operator and foreman,
before striking out on his own in Season 9. After Todd Hoffman left the show,
Ness took his position as the third leg of Gold Rush's three-team structure.
Known for his tattoos and sleeveless shirts, Ness' time on the show has been marked with struggle. He
learned on the job that being a skilled foreman is not the same thing as being a skilled crew leader.
"This year is different. I'm the boss. It's 100% my operation. I've never had this much
responsibility before. I've never put, ya know, my own money on the line like this."
Ness has had to deal with low yields and debt, as well as his team's low morale as
he works to improve his performance. Ness has shown he can be a responsible decision maker,
and he even brought Freddy Dodge in to help right his operation and fix some equipment. However,
he does make some more reckless calls as well, such as re-opening a plot of land as Winter set
in at the end of Season 10. In his three seasons as crew leader, Ness has yielded a total of 2,732
ounces, worth about $4.8 million. His first season yield of 1,100 ounces remains his personal best.
If you revisit the early seasons of Gold Rush, you'll notice a significant amount of screentime
is dedicated to Todd Hoffman's inexperience and failure. After his Oregon-based aviation
business went under, Hoffman gathered a team of other unemployed men, his father Jack,
and a camera crew before setting out for Alaska. He had a considerable amount of faith in himself
and a showman's instinct for good TV. However, he lacked even basic gold mining experience.
His first mining season ended with a yield of just under 15 ounces, but Hoffman was undeterred.
"We haven't accomplished our goal. We've proven
that you can still do stuff like this here in America."
Over the course of the next two seasons, he and his team improved greatly. Then came a disastrous
trip to Guyana in Season 4, where Hoffman and his crew were utterly defeated by the South
American jungle, mining just two ounces of gold before an unsuccessful pivot to diamond mining.
After returning to the Yukon in Season 5, Hoffman's skill and attitude recovered. In Season
6, he mined a personal-best 3,032 ounces. After failed attempts to open mines in Colorado and
his home state of Oregon, Hoffman left Gold Rush and the mining industry altogether after Season 8.
He would finish the series with a total yield of 8,039 ounces of gold, worth $14.3 million.
Colorful Dutch miner Tony Beets first appeared on the show in Season 2, when the Hoffman crew
relocated to Dawson City, Yukon. Before long, he became a fan favorite. With his wild beard
and foul-mouthed demeanor, he was seemingly made to become a breakout reality TV star.
It helped that he was by far the most experienced miner of the show's main cast.
"For Tony, this is a bad week. 220 ounces of gold, worth about $350,000 dollars."
His brusque way of doing business has also earned him long standing
beefs with co-stars Rick Ness and Parker Schnabel.
Starting out in Season 5 with an ambitious quest to get a 75-year old dredge mine up and running,
Beets has been running his crews with the assistance of his wife Minnie and his daughter
Monica. Like the Hoffman crew, his seasons have been up and down. However, thanks to his prior
experience in the industry, when Beets has a good season, he brings in a lot of gold.
To date, Beets has mined a total of 16,261 ounces of gold, worth $28.9 million.
In Season 7, he managed the largest single gold clean-up in the show's history to that point,
but his personal best came in Season 9 with 4,400 ounces. Beets would be
the most consistently successful miner on the show, if not for the last name on this list.
When it comes to gold yields, Parker Schnabel is head and shoulders above the rest. Schanbel
joined the Gold Rush cast as a teenager, working on one of his grandfather's old claims. Throughout
his career on the show, Schnabel has mined an incredible 39,910 ounces, worth $67.8 million.
Not only has Schnabel found success as a miner, he is also the longest-running, most consistent
star of Gold Rush. Starting as a 16-year-old overcharging the Hoffman crew for firewood,
Schnabel emerged as not just a camera-friendly presence, but a mining prodigy who saved the
Hoffman crew from their own incompetence on more than one occasion. Inspired by his grandfather
John, a lifelong Alaskan miner, Schnabel excavated the Big Nugget Creek mine on his own in Season 2.
While that claim yielded just 34 ounces, he very quickly moved on to bigger and better things.
Since Season 4, he has been the top earner of each season, yielding a record 7,509 ounces in Season
11. Through the years he has faced setbacks and hardships, including the death of his grandfather,
but has managed to persevere and thrive both in the mountains and on camera.
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