With prospects, they’re panning like it’s 1849
A new gold rush is on, thanks to a record snowmelt
The state’s historic drought has ended. Riverbeds, once dry, are torrents, and California’s Gold Country is living up to its reputation.
Standing on a narrow bridge over Eagle Creek, weeks before the Detwiler fire ravaged the foothills to the south, Robert Guardiola watches nearly 40 miners spread out. Wearing kneepads and waders, they have begun to organize their equipment — buckets and classifiers, hog pans and cradles — along the edge of the stream.
Some cut into sandbars with their shovels; others adjust their sluices half in and out of the f lowing water. A few have begun swirling mud in their gold pans.
“Everything begins and ends with a pan,” says Guardiola, pleased with the activity. He helped organize this outing, a monthly foray for a local prospecting association known as the Delta Gold Diggers.
Settled in a nearby folding lawn chair, Russ Tait is doing his part. A latte-colored slurry circles the perimeter of his emerald-colored pan.
With a floppy hat, ponytail and a white beard that hasn’t been trimmed in 18 years, the 72year-old looks like a refugee from Knott’s Berry Farm. Even his blue eyes behind silver frames have a bit of a twinkle.
Tait has bone cancer, so getting down to the creek isn’t easy. But even if his days are numbered, he isn’t above dreaming. He peers into the murky solution, hoping to glimpse something shiny.
“I guess you call it gold fever,” he says. “You get out there, and there’s times where you get tired and you don’t want to quit.”
For years, especially during the drought, Tait and his friends stood on the riverbanks of California’s Mother Lode alone with their obsession. Now, as record snowmelt scours these watersheds, washing gold into streams, that’s seldom the case.
More and more strangers are out on these rivers and streams, looking for that sparkling metal.
Since it was first smelted almost 6,000 years ago, Au 79 — one of the 118 elements on the periodic table — has inspired an enduring madness.
Ovid tells the tale of Midas, John Huston of a similar malady in the mountains of Mexico, and television cameras bring home
the frenzy on the Bering Sea.
But gold is admired not just for its beauty and worth. In a chaotic world, it speaks with evangelical zeal to values less ephemeral. Populists and politicians champion it as a stabilizer for the dollar. Survivalists see salvation in its worth when civilization collapses.
But on the banks of Eagle Creek, the talk is more about the poison oak, twining its way through the brush, as unwanted as the mining regulations that have come out of Sacramento.
In 2009, the miners complain, a state judge issued an injunction that placed a temporary moratorium on the use of motorized equipment near the state’s rivers and streams, putting an end to dredges that suction rocks, sand and pebbles from the bottom of a creek and pumps that circulate water into sluices located high on river banks.
A coalition of tribal, conservation and fisheries representatives said such practices compromise riparian habitat, and the judge ordered the matter to be studied. A final ruling has yet to be made.
But what regulations have prohibited, nature has allowed, and with all the water blasting through these mountains, prospectors have a new kick in their step.
Geological gumshoes, they search for ancient rivers, for rounded boulders tumbled together, for orange soil tainted by rusted iron and veins of quartz hiding gold.
They read streambeds, imagining how the current flowed during floods, hunting for any irregularity — a riffle, a ledge, a waterfall — that could create a backward eddy for the gold to escape the water’s momentum and drop to the floor.
Heavier than most metals, gold, they say, has arms and legs for its propensity to climb deep into bedrock where it lies trapped.
Late afternoon, after nearly an hour in the water, Guardiola totes two five-gallon buckets up from the creek. One contains trash collected from the shallows: a spark plug, a shotgun shell, a square-headed nail, a spatula and part of a car door.
The other contains his concentrates, less than a cup of dark sand sloshing about in water.
Panning it, he separates the lighter material from the heavier to reveal a few gold specks, each no bigger than a fat flea.
What could possess a man to stand for an hour in snowmelt with a shovel and gold pan for the sake of a few microns?
Every miner has an answer, and Guardiola’s reply comes two days later on his personal claim, some 20 miles south of Eagle Creek near the town of Moccasin.
California’s Mother Lode is a lonely place — twisting roads, tall grass, ancient oaks — haunted from the days of 1848, when the Argonauts panned out from Sutter’s Mill. Gold littered the ground like potatoes, then like marbles, and finally a dust they called flour, all totaled: $2 billion extracted by 1852.
Their legacy lies not only in the rusted debris and flattened mountains they left behind, but in the blackberries, the fig and apple trees they planted, still growing in these forests, vestiges of their dream.
Guardiola, 52, purchased the right to mine these 20 acres in 2001. When he first walked out on this property, he knew he could be happy here. Ten deer, two bucks and fawns browsed beneath the oaks. A stream — Grizzly Creek — cut through the property, which already had two mines on it, always a good sign.
Seven years later, after losing his equipment rental store in Modesto to a broken plumbing pipe and a slow insurance settlement, he began to work the claim more seriously.
Prepped for the cold — insulated waders, booties, wool socks and sneakers — Guardiola wades into a pool of 55-degree water as deep as his thighs.
“We’ll see if Mother Nature was kind and restocked my bank,” he says.
Above him, the stream cascades over a rocky shelf, creating a small waterfall. The sun plays peek-a-boo behind the clouds.
Two years ago, the stream was dry. Last year it was a trickle. But this winter brought a torrent of water, and with it, nearly 2 feet of new rock and gravel deposits, called overburden, into the pond, and the water has not stopped flowing.
With his face right up against the surface, he muscles a submerged boulder aside — 200 pounds, by his estimate — to get at the deeper material. With a choked grip on a short-handled shovel, he fills his gold pan and examines each scoop.
His T-shirt is drenched, his hair plastered to his scalp. Mosquitoes land on his neck, and suddenly he flinches as if a pulse of electricity had passed through him.
“That’s what it’s all about,” he said, surprised by a decent-size nugget, a little smaller than a pea, shining up at him.
An hour later, shaking from the cold, he wipes his eyes and gathers up his gear in the waning light.
Historian H. W. Brands, in his account of the Gold Rush, “The Age of Gold,”