Entrepreneurs' Adventures

A New Gold Rush

With gold's price hovering well above $1,000 an ounce, prospectors are returning to the site of one of the world's great rushes, California.

Image: Portfolio.com

The latest breed of prospectors may not look quite like the old-time miner '49ers, but with gold prices well above $1,000 an ounce, the hills of California are beckoning a new generation of entrepreneurs struck with gold fever.
And it seems there’s still plenty of gold to be found around the sites of the rush that led thousands to seek their fortune in the Golden State more than a century ago. Witness the sale Wednesday of one of the biggest chunks of gold yet to be found in the region.
The gold nugget, weighing in at 8.2 pounds, sold at auction in Sacramento for $460,000, and was discovered last year by a prospector using a metal detector, reportedly in his own backyard. Both the name of the prospector and that of the buyer are secret, and the price of the intact nugget was higher than the roughly $137,000 the gold would have fetched had it been melted down.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the nugget was found on land in Washington, California, in Nevada County, in the heart of the old gold-mining country.
The prospector was out in the yard with his metal detector when he pinged on the monster nugget back in March 2010. After digging it up with a pick, he proceeded to find two smaller nuggets, weighing four ounces and eight ounces respectively. Those nuggets sold for $7,000 and $17,000, respectively, Wednesday to a separate bidder.
Such a find, which fetched nearly half a million dollars, really is enough to set a glitter in the eye. But the anonymous Washington, California, miner is far from the only one heading to the hills and streams of California in search of gold. As the price of the precious metal has held above $1,000 an ounce (it was trading at $1,386.65 an ounce this morning), a new rush has begun.
That’s because the price of gold makes it worth it to go after the gold left in the hills, even if it’s often more expensive to find than it was back in the old days of mining camps and six-guns.
The rush includes individual entrepreneurs going about the gold hunt the old-fashioned way by panning the ice-cold streams of the Sierra foothills. And it includes companies looking to reopen old mines.

For instance, the New York Times reports, the Briggs mine on the border of Death Valley National Park reopened in 2009 and produced some $30 million worth of gold ore for its owner, Atna Resources.
Another mining company, Sutter Gold Mining Inc., estimates there’s $800 million worth of gold under the 3.6 miles it owns in the Mother Lode.
“People say the Mother Lode’s mined out,” David Cochrane, a vice president with Colorado-based Sutter, told the Times. “But that’s not the case.”
So, for those California entrepreneurs whose hot tech idea doesn’t exactly pan out, there’s always the option of seeing whether they can get their gold by literally panning for it.