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Freddy Dodge's Gold Prospecting Show


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That's Freddy Dodge's Mine Rescue where he and Juan Ibarra travel around and spend a week with small scale miners, debugging their equipment and operations.  If anyone is familiar with another Discovery network show named Homestead Rescue where three people (Rainey family) travel around the USA helping fledgeling homesteaders; that's the show's template.

The 'friend' is Gypsy Jewels (we've mentioned/disucussed her before) who is a Garrett 'rep' on YouTube, etc.  Garrett has a finger in Gold Rush and its spinoffs, I think.  We see a lot of Super Sluice gold pans, for example.  Dodge's and Todd Hoffman's photos can both be found on Garrett boxes, in their catalogs, etc.

If I recall accurately the episode you mention, she says the Apex will find 1.5 g size and up.  Most of us know that is a pretty darned nice size nugget and many detectors (not necessarily gold specialty) will sound off on that if it's not too deep.

Did she actually find the nugget purported to be found on the show?  Who knows; it's possible.  Was it planted?  We don't know that either.  There's a quote that fits the situation:  Opinions are like a_______, everybody has one.

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I still got the Brooklyn Bridge for sale and I will throw in all the pigeons on it but no takers. The same with that gold show but sounds good.

 Old Dave show the money is not in the gold mining but in mining the viewers of the show. Poor Dave gets his pantyhose in a knot and he gets mad are starts crying. Think about where is the money coming from to buy all this new equipment. You know it’s not coming from the gold found .

 Oh well I guess anything is better than nothing but the smoke they blow burns my eyes.

 Chuck 

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That Dodge family does (or did) do some real mining at one point. In a strange set of coincidences when I was looking for someone to mill a keyway into a shaft for me someone thumbed over towards a building and said the guy inside had a mill so I knocked on the door and it ended up being his brother's shop, oddly located in my town in WY despite no gold around. I noticed all the placer equipment in the shop yard and asked him about it since there isn't much gold here, and he explained who he was. Said his family has been mining in Canada for a long time and they own a bunch of claims up there which he works while his brother does the TV stuff here, but they don't show the real mining in Canada apparantly.

I have a strange way of running into these guys. Someone had shown me some pilot that Dozer Dave guy did, and literally a day or two later while I was investigating an excavator I saw in the distance I realized I was exactly where they were filming. I sat around for an hour seeing if someone would come back to talk to, but no one did. I'm sure a lot of NNV people here know where that was but I guess it's never good to draw attention so I won't.

 

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40 minutes ago, Ridge Runner said:

I still got the Brooklyn Bridge for sale

Now just a minute, how can you sell it when I own it?

 

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Valens Legacy  

 I’ve sold that bridge several times but the funny thing I never owned it .

 I always wondered who did own it and now I know.

 Chuck 

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8 hours ago, jasong said:

That Dodge family does (or did) do some real mining at one point.

Freddy's brother (one of them -- he may have more than one and I think at least one sister) was on the original Gold Rush show a few years back.  I think his name is Derrick and he's several years older than Freddy.  Their nephew (last name not Dodge, which is why I think he has a sister) was on one of the Gold Rush crews this last season (just ended a couple weeks ago).  Freddy grew up near Conifer, Colorado which is near where my sister lives.

It's easy to dismiss these shows (including the many treasure searching shows, etc.) as all fiction.  However, if you pay attention you can figure out what is real and what is staged, most of the time.  Remember, the characters on the show aren't real actors (hope everyone noticed that...).  You can tell when they're trying to act (doing a bad job of it) and when not.  Freddy is legit as is Juan (a mechanic/fabricator; he's not a miner and doesn't pretend to be).

My business partner and I got invited -- expenses paid but otherwise no emuneration -- to a taping of a reality show about 10 years ago as advisers and participants.  (He was in one of the scenes; I was happy to stay on the sidelines.)  I got a real life look at how these work and it helps with my critical eye today.

In another thread I started recently I was hoping some dredgers here had watched enough of Gold Rush Whitewater spinoff to critique it objectively, but apparently not.

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Yeah, Derrick is who lives here, I met him a long time back but at that time he said he wasn't going to do any TV, guess it changed. I haven't seen the Whitewater one as I more or less stopped watching or owning a TV 10 years ago. But I ran into an old closed claim in NNV that was staked by that Fred Hurt guy. Location of which made me think he must have been a gold detectorist at some point in the past, and the location also probably means someone on this forum probably knows/knew him at one point.

 

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  • The title was changed to Freddy Dodge's Gold Prospecting Show

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