Posted on 05/18/2008 7:53:25 PM PDT by blam
Gold rush fever returns to the California hills
By Tom Leonard in Happy Camp, California
Last Updated: 1:39AM BST 19/05/2008
Almost 150 years after the first ’49ers swarmed into the mountains of California, a new gold rush is sweeping across the United States.
"Some will get very lucky and even make a few thousand dollars a day, but not for long" says 'Klondite' Mike LaBox [right]
Soaring gold prices, a recession and ingrained American optimism have combined to prompt thousands to head into the hills.
With the discovery of gold there in 1848, the California Gold Rush brought 300,000 people into the state, transforming what was then a backwater into the embodiment of the American Dream.
Fewer in number, "new 49ers" may have swapped picks and covered wagons for suction dredges and mobile homes but many are just as confident they will strike it rich. "Too many people think there's gold just lying along the rivers waiting to be picked up," said "Klondike" Mike LaBox, a prospector for 50 years. "There's still vast amounts of gold out there but it's not as easy to get at as it was for the '49ers. Most of it's subterranean."
Mr LaBox, 57, and his wife, Kathy, are caretakers of the Scott River mining camp in the Klamath hills in north California. About 20 prospectors and their families were installed in their mobile homes on the site this week, swapping gold stories and preparing for the onset of the sluicing season, which is timed to avoid disruption to fish spawning. Mr LaBox said there would be 50 prospectors there before the summer was out. "What upsets me are the ones who are quitting their jobs to come out here with their families, spending thousands of dollars on equipment," said Mr LaBox.
"Almost every day we have people stopping in looking for equipment and they have not a clue what they are buying. I just try to answer their questions. I don't try to discourage them – it's their lesson to be learned."
He added: "Some will get very lucky and even make a few thousand dollars a day, but not for long. But the majority will have trouble even earning enough to pay for fuel for their equipment."
Land claims in the western states have soared and the Gold Prospectors Association of America says its membership has grown by nearly 40 per cent in a few years to 45,000.
"There's a lot of excitement right now," said Walt Eason of the association. "It used to be that you might find $2,000 or $3,000 of gold after a week's work. Now it's possible that that figure could be $15,000 to $20,000."
Gold has been found in all but two US states – Kentucky and Hawaii. But given that the first rule of prospecting is to look where large amounts have already been found, most of the interest has focused on California, Nevada and Arizona and Alaska. Improved equipment has enabled prospectors to find gold – currently trading at $900 (£450) an ounce, that was missed before. Sometimes it is as simple as running over the debris left by earlier miners with a metal detector. Two years ago, one of the Scott River prospectors found a crack in the river bedrock which yielded , more than 23 ounces, worth as much as $40,000 at today's prices.
Mike Morgan, 54, a former aircraft mechanic, has been prospecting for two years and has never used anything more elaborate than a shovel, pan and sluice box.
For him it is just a hobby, but another camp member had, aged 28, given up his roofing job and moved on to the site with his wife and two small children. He had been there for six months and had little gold to show for it, said Mr Morgan.
"It's hard for him. I wouldn't have put my family through that," he said. "But he's trying to realise his dream and it's difficult to tell him he's wasting his time. The next hole he sinks could be a vein of gold."
Inevitably, prospecting has its dark side. "Gold fever" is a real obsession, said Mr LaBox. "I've seen it. I've had two pounds of my Alaskan gold – worth $80,000 today – stolen by a man I thought was a friend."
The pan and sluice brigade are not the only ones eyeing up the old gold claims. Commercial mining companies are starting up in Nevada. In Idaho and Colorado. Another, more professional, gold rush is heading towards Mexico as mainly American and Canadian geologists and engineers are leaving their jobs in the big mining companies to get venture capital backing for gold mining in the Sierra Madre mountains.
As for the '49ers' notoriously rowdy off-duty behaviour, tradition is not completely dead, said Mr LaBox. "The drunken fights in the local saloon – that still happens. But there's less gunplay."
Colorado is your ticket...
good luck!
DM
Ah, Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Bogart, classic film.
The yahoos in the photo won’t make enough to keep themselves in beer - a considerable quantity if their sveldt profiles aren’t camera distortion. Part of the reason the tailings and played out mines were left is because of the hard work involved wasn’t worth the payoff. Today, the payoff might be higher but for small scale pan and sluice miners the work hasn’t changed much from the days of the ‘49er.
I wonder about the environmental rules for this in CA. Placer mining can be highly destructive, as in high-pressure water mining, wherein the overburden is simply blasted away with water (re: the movie “Pale Rider”). The Klondike era left terrible scars throughout the Northern Rockies.
Then there’s that method that uses cyanide to separate the pulverized ore.
*BUMP* !
Badges! Badges! We doan need
no steenkin badges!
It’s still possible to make a living out of mining, as long as you’re desired standard of living is pretty low. Although, you need to dredge if you’re serious about it. Panning, such as in the photo, is only for hobbyists.
I have dogs that are smarter than that guy.
That's a milling operation, usually in a controlled environment.
I once worked with a guy who years earlier ran his own mine and mill in Mexico about 40 years back. There was a significant leak in the mill and process water ran down a gully for a couple of days and left a 100 yard long trail of dead birds and rabbits.
Speaking of smarts, the author has some trouble with his math.
Museum quality crystalline gold is worth vastly more than the spot price.
that method was invented by one of my semi-distant relatives...:)
If that’s what those 23 ounces were, the author didn’t tell us.
This can’t be, everyone knows “That all the gold in California is in a bank in Beverly Hills in somebody elses name.”
I think he was used to adjusting dollars for pounds and vice versa. It works if 40,000/23oz = 1739.13 which then divided by 2 = 869.56
23 Oz of Gold, Silver and Copper sometimes with other minerals. Considering they moved the American river and cleaned the cracks, good luck.
My gold stories:
A buddy of mine moved to Arizona a couple years after I did. He got all excited about gold prospecting, read up on it, bought some gear. Then for Christmas, he bought my brother-in-law and me each a gold pan. It seemed interesting until I read a book on panning for gold. The book contained dirty words like “shovel” and “dig”. I decided that if I wanted to make a few dollars over the weekend, I’d work overtime at my job.
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Once Mrs. Chandler and I were visiting her folks up in Cottonwood at the same time her cousin was down from Alaska. Her cousin was married to a guy who owned a gold mine so far north that he could only operate the mine three months out of the year. The gold was extracted with heavy equipment.
The guy didn’t use a credit card. Instead, he carried a large quantity of gold nuggets in a briefcase. He also carried a 44 Magnum in there.
He let me hold the gold and it filled both of my hands cupped together like a bowl!
There's still enormous amounts of undiscovered gold and silver in the Sierra Nevada. Hell, there's still gold and silver in the Comstock Lode and that's been shut down since the late 1800s. Some of those smaller mines up in Virginia City behind my house start running again when metals are as high as they are now.
It's just that going after placer gold is slim pickings, but it always was. Not six months after the discovery of gold in the American River in 1849, the pan sifters were being bought out by outfits back East that moved serious mining equipment to California by steamship all the way around the tip of Argentina.
I can take you not fifteen minutes from my house and set you down in a stream to find appreciable amounts of gold, after all. I drive around and just see silver ore barfing out of the hills, but it would take a fortune to get it out of there in any significant amount. This is rough country.
Nevada is still one of the world's top gold and silver producers.
That’s a nice nugget.
Now those who make the rules get the gold.
Bingo!
Why would anybody in their right mind spend multiple millions getting elected to a job that pays like 86K a year or whatever?
Because after they get canned by the voters, they can still nail down a 200K job at some Wall Street joint or Law Firm.
They gave up truly worrying about American ideals and wisdom long ago.
I heard a story about an interesting silver strike in Nevada... some amateur had been out prospecting and calls it a day, pulls into a gas station with his Jeep.
Whines to the guy pumping that he didn’t find anything, the gas station guy asks him where he went.
Gas station dude goes up there next day and finds one of the biggest hits they ever made. He saw the blueish mud on the guts tires and knew it was ore.
A business partner of mine has been into some of the larger silver mines in Nevada, he says it’s stunning. You get on this elevator and start going down through these levels like floors, each one having thousands of yards of tunnelling going of, said he counted nine levels, but he’s older than me and might not remember.
For those here who wonder about the price of natural gold.
Most gold you see in the jewelry store or whatever is mined from rock that has gold so microscopic you’d be lucky to be able to see it.
There is a large open pit mine in Jamestown, California that coughed up a nugget before it was closed, and it was bought by a winery near there.
They paid 3.5 million dollars. For a 58 pound nugget.
Which works out to over $4,000 dollars an ounces.
I got pics somewhere. It;s way bigger than a wine bottle!
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