COLOMA, Calif. — There’s still gold in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills and a new rush to find it. Not since the Great Depression have so many hard-luck people been lured by prospecting, hoping to find their fortune tumbling down a mountain stream.
“I guess there’s always hope. At home, I don’t have any right now,” said Steve Biorck, a concrete finisher who headed west because construction work dried up in Tennessee. Now he spends days standing knee-deep in an icy creek coaxing gold flakes from a swirling pan of gravel.
Miners who locate an unclaimed area can pay a $170 fee to the Bureau of Land Management for access to the land. Most claims are along the 120 miles of steep granite outcrops and rushing riverbeds that are part of California’s Mother Lode.
