There’s still gold in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills and a new rush to find it. Not since the Great Depression have so many hard-luck people been lured by prospecting, hoping to find their fortune tumbling down a mountain stream.
The recession and high gold prices are helping to fuel the latest gold craze, especially among workers who have lost jobs.
“I guess there’s always hope. At home, I don’t have any right now,” said Steve Biorck, a concrete finisher who headed west because construction work dried up in Tennessee. Now he spends days standing knee-deep in an icy creek coaxing gold flakes from a swirling pan of gravel.
Miners who locate an unclaimed area can pay a US$170 fee to the Bureau of Land Management for access to the land. Most claims are along the 200km of steep granite outcrops and rushing riverbeds that are part of California’s Mother Lode, a narrow band of gold-rich terrain.
When Don Wetter was in the Army, he guarded Fort Knox in Kentucky, home of the US Treasury’s gold depository. Now that he’s been discharged, Wetter hopes to find some gold of his own using an anticipated loan for a “grubstake,” an old mining term for money to sustain the search.
Wetter, a 22-year-old tree trimmer from Troy, Michigan, said he wanted to turn to hunt for gold because most of his customers lost their jobs or moved away.
Many would-be gold panners are drawn to the South Fork of the American River, where the 1849 discovery of nuggets at Sutter’s Mill launched the largest human migration in the Western Hemisphere. The Depression brought another wave of miners in the 1930s.
“It’s hard to keep my equipment in stock,” said Albert Fausel, the third-generation owner of the nearby Old Placerville Hardware store, which was founded to sell sluices, picks and pans to the original ’49ers.
Back then, the price of gold was US$16 an ounce. Today it hovers at about US$1,000.
The store’s wood floors used to creak under the weight of recreational rafters and fisherman. Now prospectors are some of the biggest shoppers.
“A lot of people are out of jobs and know where the gold holes are,” Fausel said.
Between October 2007 and last September, the Bureau of Land Management in California issued gold miners 3,413 permits, or claims, to search for gold on public land. That compared with 1,986 claims in 2006. So far this fiscal year, the agency has issued 1,444.
Many miners believe that only 10 percent of the gold in the Sierra Nevada was discovered in the original gold rush. They are also excited by the prospect of stumbling onto buried treasure.
“A lady was walking over there, kicked a stone with her toe and picked up a nugget just like that,” said Russ Kurz, who at 77 with a bushy white beard looks like a grizzled miner. He points to a sandbar on the American River near Coloma.
“I was walking my dog once and went to pick up a rock and pulled a long nugget straight out of the sand,” he said. “It was worth about US$6,500 — and that was 13 years ago.”
Brent Shock of Jamestown now teaches the newbies he calls “the bonanza people.” He says sandbars, cracks in bedrock and low-pressure eddies behind boulders are prime places to set up sluices, which are metal or plastic channels designed to catch gold.
Spring is the best time to hunt for gold as snow melt churns streams and rivers, potentially uncovering new riches.
“There’s got to be a lot of it sitting around somewhere,” said Eric Tring of Roseville as he panned with his 13-year-old daughter.
The gold fields are becoming so popular that Todd Osborne has had to guard a claim that has been in his family since the 1960s near a remote mountain creek.
A handmade sign with the image of a rifle and the words “private claim” dissuades most intruders, but novices often are unaware that miners can make a stake on public land.
“A couple of years ago there’d be nobody out here,” said Osborne, 41, who began prospecting full-time last year when his work as an arborist slowed.
Osborne, who says both of his grandfathers turned to prospecting during the Depression, knows the people who sold supplies to miners are the ones who stayed rich. One of the most notable examples is denim maker Levi Strauss.
Osborne owns the patent on the Bazooka Gold Trap sluice that he builds with his prospecting partner, Adam Schiffner.
The two can process up to 1,325 liters of streambed gravel a day with it, yielding between US$100 and US$1,000 in gold flakes.
They are betting that the instability of the dollar will drive gold prices even higher and entice more people to his sluice.
“Whether they get rich or not,” Osborne said, “we’ve got part of their grubstake.”
SLOW-MOVING STORM: The typhoon has started moving north, but at a very slow pace, adding uncertainty to the extent of its impact on the nation Work and classes have been canceled across the nation today because of Typhoon Krathon, with residents in the south advised to brace for winds that could reach force 17 on the Beaufort scale as the Central Weather Administration (CWA) forecast that the storm would make landfall there. Force 17 wind with speeds of 56.1 to 61.2 meters per second, the highest number on the Beaufort scale, rarely occur and could cause serious damage. Krathon could be the second typhoon to land in southwestern Taiwan, following typhoon Elsie in 1996, CWA records showed. As of 8pm yesterday, the typhoon’s center was 180km
TYPHOON DAY: Taitung, Pingtung, Tainan, Chiayi, Hualien and Kaohsiung canceled work and classes today. The storm is to start moving north this afternoon The outer rim of Typhoon Krathon made landfall in Taitung County and the Hengchun Peninsula (恆春半島) at about noon yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, adding that the eye of the storm was expected to hit land tomorrow. The CWA at 2:30pm yesterday issued a land alert for Krathon after issuing a sea alert on Sunday. It also expanded the scope of the sea alert to include waters north of Taiwan Strait, in addition to its south, from the Bashi Channel to the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島). As of 6pm yesterday, the typhoon’s center was 160km south of
STILL DANGEROUS: The typhoon was expected to weaken, but it would still maintain its structure, with high winds and heavy rain, the weather agency said One person had died amid heavy winds and rain brought by Typhoon Krathon, while 70 were injured and two people were unaccounted for, the Central Emergency Operation Center said yesterday, while work and classes have been canceled nationwide today for the second day. The Hualien County Fire Department said that a man in his 70s had fallen to his death at about 11am on Tuesday while trimming a tree at his home in Shoufeng Township (壽豐). Meanwhile, the Yunlin County Fire Department received a report of a person falling into the sea at about 1pm on Tuesday, but had to suspend search-and-rescue
RULES BROKEN: The MAC warned Chinese not to say anything that would be harmful to the autonomous status of Taiwan or undermine its sovereignty A Chinese couple accused of disrupting a pro-democracy event in Taipei organized by Hong Kong residents has been deported, the National Immigration Agency said in a statement yesterday afternoon. A Chinese man, surnamed Yao (姚), and his wife were escorted by immigration officials to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, where they boarded a flight to China before noon yesterday, the agency said. The agency said that it had annulled the couple’s entry permits, citing alleged contraventions of the Regulations Governing the Approval of Entry of People of the Mainland Area into the Taiwan Area (大陸地區人民進入台灣地區許可辦法). The couple applied to visit a family member in
RSS