Gold Fever Still Lures Miners To California

FORESTHILL, Calif. - Steve Hall feels the gold bug like a cold clutch in his stomach every time he scratches the dirt and spots a glitter.

Wayne Sowle and his partners smell it in the dusty damp of the mine they pick-axed 100 feet into the side of a mountain.

Ron Manuel has spent more money trying to cool his fever than he cares to recount.

"You find one little piece, and your heart starts pounding," said Manuel, who dredges the American River for the six months of the year it is legal. "You just know you're going to find another one."

Thousands of mom-and-pop prospectors still comb the hills of Northern California hoping for the big strike. Gold fever is as intense for them as it was for the '49ers who streamed into California from around the world hoping to find the claim that would make them rich.

No one denies that gold still lies tucked into stream beds, lodged under boulders or buried beneath the surface in a vein that stretches from Central to Northern California.

Plenty of gold left

"Geologists say that since the 1840s until now, they only took about 10 percent of the gold. They're pretty united on that figure," said Ron Stockman, research director of the Mother Lode Research Center in Auburn, Calif.

Stockman, whose nonprofit center gathers information on legislation that affects prospecting and metal detecting, estimates there are 15,000 to 20,000 mom-and-pop prospectors.

The Gold Prospectors Association of America has 60,000 to 70,000 members, said a spokeswoman for the group that attracts both serious prospectors and hobbyists. Prospecting is so popular that gold hunters have their own cable-television program and a Web page on the Internet.

But mining is risky business, the prospectors say. Few get rich, some die in accidents, and most lose more money looking for gold than they will ever recoup.

The prospectors are a mixed group. Some are retirees who finance their vacations with what they find at the bottom of their gold pans. Some are escapees from the city looking for a way to make a living in the lovely towns of Northern California.

Others, such as Martin Nemeth, 63, say they will be content with nothing less than the big strike.

Nemeth came to California from Hungary 16 years ago for one reason: "The Mother Lode, of course."

Nemeth teamed up several years ago with Sowle and Roger Woodhead in several mines.

Recently, they said, they found a wealthy investor to help foot the bill for exploration in one of their tunnels, the Wayne S. Drift Mine. The three believe their tunnel is 200 feet from the "gut" of an ancient underground riverbed full of gold.

Sowle found the spot with some core drilling and a letter from an old prospector.

But nobody is rich yet.

"I mend fences and mow lawns to put food on the table," Nemeth said.

Few get rich quick

Down-at-the-heels prospectors are far easier to find than rich ones.

Hall, 54, and a companion live in a one-bedroom miner's shack without a bathtub or a proper kitchen.

People recall 1992, when a guy went into the languishing Sixteen to One mine and aimed his metal detector in the right direction. In the next nine months, miners took out $1.3 million in gold.

"I always get gold," Sowle said. "It's a matter of how hard I work."

Most people find what the prospectors call "colors," or dust. But a good panner in the right place can turn up flakes. The really lucky find growlers, rocks big enough to rattle on the bottom of a gold pan.

Last year, California mined 950,000 troy ounces of gold valued at $361 million, making it second to Nevada in gold production. Most of that was pulled out by large mining companies, Stockman said.

Serious prospectors are notoriously secretive, he said, and no one knows the value of what they find. Most sell their gold to jewelers.

Small miners are reticent partly because they don't have federal and state permits, Sowle said. "Ninety percent of them are mining illegally," he said.

Annie and Don Robinson researched old diaries, letters and newspaper clippings before they left white-collar careers in the San Francisco Bay Area to come north 16 years ago.

In their first years on Sucker Flats, they shoveled, hauled and panned tons of earth.

"I fired her and she quit 20 times that first year," said Robinson, 47.

Then one day, Robinson's drill went through the wall of the shaft into an abandoned mine no one knew existed. That ended the vein they'd been mining for 12 years. Neither will say how much gold they found.

Four years ago, Robinson was forced to find work with a mining company.

But they haven't given up. "I've found a way to go in again," said Robinson, who hopes to be working their claim by the spring.