Eureka! After California’s heavy rains, gold seekers are giddy
PLACERVILLE, Calif. — Albert Fausel spends his days at the family hardware store sorting through boxes of bolts and pacing the old, creaking floorboards to greet his loyal clientele. But on a recent sunny afternoon, he threw on his wet suit and diver’s mask and inserted himself face down in the shallow creek near his home.
An amateur gold seeker, Fausel used his gloved fingers to sweep aside the sand and gravel at the bottom of the creek and then, still underwater, let out a cry that was audible through the tube of his snorkel: “Woooo-hoohoooo!”
He emerged with what gold seekers call a picker — not quite a nugget, but big enough to pinch in your fingers — and he delicately handed the glinting object to his fellow prospector, a friend with a long white beard who goes by Uncle Fuzzy. In just 20 minutes of rooting around the creek bed, Fausel had found about $100 worth of gold.
There’s a fever in California’s gold country these days, the kind that comes with the realization that nature is unlocking another stash of precious metal. California’s prodigious winter rainfall shot torrents of water through mountain streams and rivers. And as the warmer weather melts the massive banks of snow — one research station in the Sierra recorded 60 feet for the season — the rushing waters are detaching and carrying gold deposits along the way. The immense wildfires of recent years also loosened the soil, helping to push downstream what some here are calling flood gold.
It has been nearly 175 years since the gold rush that drew countless wagons and ships filled with prospectors, but the foothills of the Sierra Nevada are still home to a quirky group of gold seekers, heavy on beards and flannel, who pore over old maps for the site of a now-vanished saloon or walk the backcountry searching for nuggets and other artifacts.
Placerville is a 15-minute drive from the valley where James Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, was building a sawmill in January 1848 along the American River when something shiny in the water caught his eye. “Some kind of mettle,” wrote one of his workers in his diary in the quirky spellings of the time, “that looks like goald.”
The big chunks of the easy-tofind gold that had been lolling around in rivers for millennia were gone after the first years of the gold rush, and Marshall died penniless. But miners resorted to spraying powerful jets of water onto hillsides and sorting through what flowed down, leaving giant piles of mining residue still visible today.
That kind of extraction is now heavily restricted in California, yet gold seekers say the recent battering of successive winter storms has produced a similar effect. It is as if Mother Nature had aimed a pressure washer onto the hills and delivered some of the precious minerals still embedded in the rock and dirt.
“Anytime you can stand next to a river, and you hear the boulders tumbling, you know the gold is moving, too,” said Jim Eakin, owner of a local firewood business who tells the story of finding a nugget so big four years ago that he bought a new Ford F-150 pickup truck with cash. Like many of his gold-seeking friends, Eakin, who often wears a nugget around his neck, is cagey when asked about where he unearthed the chunk of gold that got him the truck.
“Somewhere north of Los Angeles, south of Seattle, and west of Denver,” he said.
With the price of gold hovering near highs of $2,000 an ounce, Eakin counts himself among a group of gold seekers who can “read the ground” and profit from the fortuitous winter weather.
“It’s going to be a magnificent year,” said Tony Watley, president of the Gold Country Treasure Seekers club, which meets at the American Legion hall once a month. “Everywhere, we are seeing new erosion.”
Today’s gold seekers range from part-time hobbyists keen to spend an afternoon by the river to the die-hard, well-equipped treasure hunters who make a living from it. Gold shops in the area buy the gold and either melt it down or convert it into jewelry.
On a recent afternoon, Dayton was accompanied along the Cosumnes River by a friend, Barron Brandon, a former mining executive and an amateur gold seeker in retirement. The two men hacked away at rocks and sand in a crevice between boulders. One of Dayton’s metal detectors squawked and, after further digging, they unearthed what had excited the machine: a worthless piece of rebar.
Brandon showed no sign of disappointment. He stood near the rushing river, the rolling hills covered in white oaks, the pristine creeks flowing gently beside grassy knolls dotted with wildflowers. “The true gold is just being out here,” he said.
James Holifield, a high school student who lives in a Sacramento suburb, came to the banks of the American River on his last day of spring break, inspired by some videos on YouTube. “There’s something about gold,” he said, looking the part in a flannel shirt and rubber boots that covered his shins.
After two hours, he had found four flakes of gold. His mother, sitting in a portable chair a few yards back from the river, said she was grateful that her son had chosen a “low-investment” hobby.
And watching him pan for gold, she said, beats seeing him glued to his phone.