Gold Rush: Alaska - Jimmy Dorsey's Biggest Problem Before The Action Started
Way before Discovery filled a gold mine-sized chunk of its air time with various "Gold Rush" spinoffs, the original was known as "Gold Rush: Alaska." The first and only season before the show dropped the "Alaska" part from its name featured multiple names that have since left the series behind. Jimmy Dorsey, for instance, spent only a single season with the show. Dorsey left "Gold Rush: Alaska" before the season was even over, choosing to depart his dig site after growing displeased with the lack of gold findings.
Though his "Gold Rush" tenure is hardly the longest, Dorsey has been willing to discuss the show and has stated that the makers of the series at least partially influenced the way he ended up walking out. In an interview with Oregon Gold, Dorsey also shared his views on the crew's rickety equipment. He was especially concerned about the shaker machine's age, condition, and suitability for their particular dig site. "The shaker was bought from an auction for fifteen thousand dollars," he said. "There was some incompetence there to modify that shaker. These guys were kind of playing around with it... It was a pretty old machine. I think it was built in 1967."
He also described being vocal about the equipment issue before his crew even departed. "I was actually at Sandy airport saying, 'Why are we taking this thing to Alaska?'" Dorsey said. "I did not understand why they would want to go on the Discovery Channel with such poor equipment... We also did not have enough water to be running the equipment properly. The equipment demanded eighty gallons a minute and we had about thirty."
Dorsey's dramatic exit from the show ended in literal flames
Jimmy Dorsey's time on "Gold Rush: Alaska" is full of controversy — so much, in fact, that when he ultimately departs the show, Todd Hoffman's "Gold Rush" crew sets fire to his cabin to celebrate the occasion. This dramatic event comes after the team's lack of success culminates in a fistfight between Dorsey and his colleague Greg Remsburg. The latter goes on to appear in a total of five seasons of the show, but Dorsey ends up leaving both the camp and the show.
The fight takes place in "Gold Rush: Alaska" Season 1, Episode 6, but even before this, Dorsey had been a central figure in dig site controversy. In Season 1, Episode 3, for instance, he confronts Hoffman and calls him out over the crew's lack of success. Since Dorsey has said he was already vocal about the crew's equipment before they even got to the site, it's probably safe to assume that things were pretty tense within the crew even before the fight broke out.
Of course, Dorsey is hardly the only one in the Hoffman crew who's created drama in the show. In fact, some "Gold Rush" fans feel the Hoffmans are simply bad at gold mining, as instrumental as their colorful operation is for the show.