From the Sacramento Bee:
California drought brings a golden lining
Until the search for glittering gold renewed his life, long-haul trucker and Gulf War veteran Gary Shaver was overweight and lacking energy. He had survived four heart attacks, with surgeons ultimately implanting a battery-powered defibrillator in his chest to prevent sudden death from cardiac arrest.
Then, three years ago, the Sacramento resident began combing trickling mountain waters of the Sierra Nevada as a prospector. He rediscovered his vitality in the picturesque wilderness and – to his surprise – started finding a lot of gold.
“I liked it from the start,” said Shaver, 50. “I was getting gold the very first day.”
As California’s prolonged drought dries up irrigation supplies for agriculture and forces cutbacks in urban water deliveries, it also creates opportunities for prospectors and miners panning, sluicing, chiseling and diving for gold.
Across the Mother Lode, gold seekers are wading into formerly deep waterways to harvest flecks from the pea gravel and sediment in long inaccessible crevices. Diminishing flows also have been leaving gold residues, like gilded bathtub rings, amid the cobbled banks of many rivers and streams.
In recent years, drought-inspired gold seeking has spiked sales of sluice boxes, gold pans and metal detectors at Gold County mining stores from Columbia in Tuolumne County to Auburn in Placer County. While the drought, now in its fourth year, has rendered many creeks too dry for panning, new adventures are opening elsewhere as receding waters reveal more treasures.
Very cool - there has got to be a lot more gold out there and with the "normal year" streamflow, it has all been concentrated into cracks in the streambed that were inaccessible until now. It will be interesting to see up here with our low snowpack - lots of gold up here in them thar hills.