Gold Rush Arrives as California’s Rains Wash Nuggets into Rivers

A winter of heavy rain and a spring of heavy erosion has attracted a small gold rush of fortune-seekers eager to find nuggets in California’s burgeoning rivers.

The New York Times reported Saturday:

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.
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The big chunks of the easy-to-find gold that had been lolling around in rivers for millenniums were gone after the first years of the Gold Rush, and [James] Marshall himself [who discovered gold in 1848] died penniless. But miners resorted to spraying powerful jets of water onto hillsides and sorting through what flowed down, leaving giant piles of mining residue still visible today.

That kind of extraction is now heavily restricted in California, yet gold seekers say the recent battering of successive winter storms has produced a similar effect. It is as if Mother Nature had aimed a pressure washer onto the hills and delivered some of the precious minerals still embedded in the rock and dirt.

With gold prices near $2,000 an ounce; and with fears of long-term inflation, recession, and geopolitical instability hounding the dollar, the idea of spending a few hours in the river to find a few flakes is suddenly promising.

Meanwhile, weather forecasters are still uncertain about what the forhcoming snowmelt will look like. There are predictions for cool temperatures in May, which would slow the melt, reduce flooding, and restrain erosion.

But heavy rains have already washed down the mountains and into the Central Valley, where Tulare Lake — an inland freshwater lake drained in the last century — has returned, and more flooding is expected.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Photo: file