Gold Rush: White Water is starting its second season off with a bang during Friday’s premiere of the hit Discovery reality show spinoff.
In a sneak peek of the Season 2 premiere, airing Friday at 10 p.m. ET, Dakota Fred, his son Dustin and their crew embark on a new adventure mining for gold nuggets in the ice-cold currents of the glacier-fed McKinley Creek in Alaska, where they rely on heated wet suits and complicated equipment to keep themselves safe in the freezing water.
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The father-son duo is utilizing a new floating wash plant this season, which the narrator explains has a suction hose to “draw gold-bearing dirt up to the onboard sluice, which catches the heavy gold in its riffles.”
The plant has an even more important purpose, however — keeping Dustin alive as he dives into the strong current of the freezing waterway.
“It is also his life support system, providing an air supply and hot water to his dive suit, and a safety line to haul him out in case of emergency,” the narrator continues.
For Dakota Fred, the risk seems to outweigh the reward when it comes to using this new kind of technology.
“In my opinion, it’s just unnecessary to be getting out in that type of water,” he tells the cameras before Dustin’s big dive. “Little bit of that that father instinct — keep your head safe.”
That instinct proves to be right on, as Dustin appears to get caught up in the current while taking an excursion underwater.
“The current caught me a little bit,” he tells the crew calmly, before shouting, “Get me out of here!”
The last thing fans can see in the sneak peek is Dustin’s dive boot breaching the surface of the water before it goes under, leaving viewers to wonder how the Gold Rush crew will get the young miner out of this alive and unscathed.
Prior to the season premiere, Fred opened up about his misgivings prior to that particular dive exclusively to PopCulture.com, saying that while he typically takes a backseat to his son Dustin when it comes to acting in an advisory role, this moment was one in which he felt he had to speak up.
“When it looks like it’s gonna be serious, I’m not gonna keep my mouth shut,” he told PopCulture. “People may think I’m a hard a— because of it … but I didn’t feel like we made enough preparations and enough testing to get in the water that quickly.”
Gold Rush: White Water Season 2 premieres Friday, Jan. 4 at 10 p.m. ET on Discovery.
Photo credit: Discovery
