Gold Rush’s Rick Ness Opens Up About His ‘Tough’ Year: ‘The Weight of the World Can Crush Anybody’ (Exclusive)

The gold miner exclusively tells PEOPLE about his plan to rebuild in season 14 and how castmate Parker Schnabel performed an act of kindness “that meant a lot” to him

Everyone deals with loss differently, but when Rick Ness’s mother died from cancer at age 55 in 2018, the Gold Rush star struggled mightily to find his footing in the months and years that followed.

The veteran gold miner entered an emotional tailspin, one that drove him into a depression he addressed early in the reality show’s 13th season. “I don’t know what’s causing it,” he said in one episode. “I don’t know if you ever know.”

Ness, 42, discussed his mental health journey with PEOPLE days before the debut of Gold Rush’s new season.

“I was having some mental health issues. There was a lot of things going on,” he admits. “I’m a gold miner with the stigma there. I don’t really ask for help, you know what I mean? I’ve always been that way. And it’s just some things were going on in my head, and I didn’t know what it was, because I didn’t know anything about depression and things of that nature. And so I just thought I’d deal with it myself and try and figure it out, which is tough when you don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

Ness decided to take a year off from work, largely disappearing from Gold Rush’s 13th season to spend a “lot of time” on his own and come to terms with the loss of his mother. Taking time off in a fiercely competitive line of work like gold mining, however, can mean falling behind and potentially yielding millions of hard-won dollars to competitors.

“This business is easy come, easy go. It’s a very fickle business,” he says.

But the reality show fan favorite felt he had no choice but to slow down.

“If I hadn’t, the direction this train was running [in] was not a good one,” he explains, adding that a number of things, including “the stress of this business” overwhelmed him. “I had to take a step back. It was not good for business, but it was good for me. And at the end of it all, I’m just fortunate I have another shot at this.”

Season 14 sees Ness dive back into gold mining, selling his mother’s house to rebuild his business in a bold effort to recapture some of his former glory.

“I’m starting off with not much in the bank, so I have to start from scratch with a lot of secondhand equipment and just anything I can afford to get going,” he says, adding that he recruited one of his closest friends Brian “Zee” Zaremba as his partner. Ness says of the truck driver: “I tapped into him because he’s one of the few people that I stayed in touch with that I know I can trust.”

In returning to the Yukon, Ness hopes he proves skeptics wrong. “A lot of people didn’t think I was coming back,” he adds. “A lot of people didn’t think they’d ever see me up here again.”

Parker Schnabel, who employed Ness for six years before Ness eventually decided to strike out on his own after season 8, defended his longtime friend from cynics, telling them “Rick’s a survivor” and not to be “surprised to see him back up here,” Ness says.

“It was touching,” he continues. “That goes to show we do have a long history. … He knows me pretty good. It really meant a lot. It was tough coming back.”

Schnabel, 29, faces his own challenges in Gold Rush’s upcoming season as he decides whether to scale back his operations or take a huge risk by spending $15 million on more land to mine. Schnabel also went back and forth over whether to support his longtime friend or indulge his competitive instincts.

“I’m just super competitive and see you as a competitor,” Schnabel tells Ness during their conversation with PEOPLE, “but you’re a great fit for the show. You’re a great fit for mining.”