PebHmong Discussion Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: theking on April 24, 2023, 06:10:29 PM
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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-hoo-hoooo!”
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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 blasted 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.”
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California Gold Rush 2.0
California readies for treasure hunt as floods wash up ‘Gold Rush 2.0’
In the aftermath of an unusually wet winter, Californians are bracing not only for flooded fields and raging rapids, but also for a potential treasure hunt that experts are dubbing “Gold Rush 2.0.”
“It’s one of those 100-years events,” Mark Dayton, a Sacramento Valley metal detector expert, told The Hill.
With one atmospheric river after another this past winter, snowpack on the Golden State’s mountain peaks piled up to unprecedented heights. But as that snow gushes down the hillsides, the fast and furious flow is shuttling other materials along with it.
“When it melts, it comes rushing down at crazy speeds through narrow gorges and canyons, and it’s a torrent of raging water,” Dayton said. “This is even crazier than whitewater.”
The flow cascades like a waterfall from about 5,000 feet to 3,500 feet, at which point it begins “meandering into some of the foothills” and into creeks and streams, Dayton explained.