The Gold Rush season 14 trailer has officially confirmed that Rick Ness will be coming back to the show in 2023.
Gold Rush follows various crews in the Yukon and Alaska as they mine for gold in difficult conditions. As a result, the show’s cast tends to shift and change between seasons.
But longtime Gold Rush fans should be happy to hear that Rick Ness, who had been gone from the show for a while, will be returning for its 14th season.
The Gold Rush cast
Discovery’s hit reality series Gold Rush follows teams of miners as they try to survive the tough mining seasons in the Klondike region of Yukon, Canada, and some areas of Alaska.
The very first season of Gold Rush premiered back in 2010 and included many of the cast members who are still fan-favorites to this day.
This includes the up-and-coming Parker Schnabel, the big boss Tony Beets and even Chris Doumitt, who sort of stumbled into the job.
Of course, any show which has been on the air for more than a decade is bound to face some changes between the seasons, and in Gold Rush’s case, many popular cast members, including Tod and Jack Hoffman (from the Hoffman crew), Michael Halstead, Dave Turin, Jim Thurber, and many others, have left the show for varying reasons over the years.
Updates on Rick Ness’s return to Gold Rush in 2023
Gold Rush fans have been abuzz this week with news of the show’s 14th season. While the previous, 13th season concluded just a few months ago in March of 2023, Discovery has already confirmed that Gold Rush will return for its next season before 2023 is over.
The teaser trailer which was released to promote this new season featured Parker Schnabel and Tony Beets all dressed up and ready to get back to work.
And in a rather unexpected turn of events, the last few seconds of the trailer also revealed that Rick Ness would be returning to the show, after all.
Ness had been mysteriously absent from the first few episodes of the 13th season, which started airing in 2022, prompting Zee (one of his crew members) to go as far as performing a health check in the second episode.
This check-up revealed a number of insights into Ness’s personal struggles, outside of the mining world, but it did not convince him to return for the rest of the season.
Fortunately, Ness is seemingly slowly getting back on his feet, and is ready to get back to business in this new season, which is all set to premiere on Friday, September 29, 2023, at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
Why did Rick Ness leave Gold Rush?
When Zee first visited Ness at the beginning of the 13th season of Gold Rush, he was almost unrecognizable.
Ness later revealed that he had been struggling with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which made it difficult for him to scrape together the motivation to get back to the claim after the previous season.
It seems as though things in Ness’s personal life were also rather unstable at the time, as he admitted to Zee that he had still not moved past his previous disagreement with his mother.
Several sources have also reported that Ness and his girlfriend Leese, Arie, who has also been featured briefly on the show, have gotten engaged, then broke up, and then got back together again since he left the show.
Rick Ness’s big comeback
Rick Ness’s return to Gold Rush may be welcome news, but this comeback is not entirely unexpected.
The biggest hint that Ness was planning to return to Gold Rush was a Facebook post from May 25, 2023, in which Ness was looking for a new mechanic to join his crew.
But even if he did manage to find a new mechanic through this posting, there is no doubt that he will have a difficult season ahead of him, after taking two years off.
What lies ahead for the rest of the Gold Rush season 14 cast
Ness is not the only Gold Rush cast member who will be starting out season 14 with something to prove.
This season will also see Schnabel choosing between remaining where he is and playing it safe, or risking it all for the possibility of striking it big on brand-new ground.
Beets is also not planning to take it slow on Gold Rush season 14, and has set a 6,000 ounces goal for the season.
This new goal will see Beets’s entire team work longer and harder, which may just cause a few of the crew members to start questioning their convictions.
