The Gold Rush. It's one of the quintessential American historical events, a great big epic of history, fact, mythology and good-old-fashioned American gumption.
And now it's back by popular demand after well over 150 years!
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 back country searching for nuggets and other artifacts.
Popular perception notwithstanding, it turns out that there is still a fair bit of gold left in the Sierra Nevada, if you're willing to look for it.
The frenzied mining of decades past stripped much of the easy-to-find stuff out of the soil. But the recent crazy rainstorms that drenched California have blasted a lot of residual gold out of the dirt in the mountains there. Wildfires have also loosened the soil, making the gold more readily accessible.
How simple is it to make some money out there these days? Well, first you have to know where to look. But if you do, well:
[One miner] 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, Mr. Fausel had found about $100 worth of gold.
That's $300 an hour. Those are lawyer hourly rates. And you get to be outside in beautiful nature while doing it.
Not all miners are so lucky, of course. But some are. One fellow claims that he found "a nugget so big four years ago that he bought a brand-new Ford F-150 pickup truck with cash." If you have ever gone to a Ford dealership and perused their truck lineup, you'll know how big that nugget must have been.
So where do you go to find all this gold? One prospector has helpfully given us some directions:
Somewhere north of Los Angeles, south of Seattle and west of Denver.
