A new gold rush pits money and jobs against California's environment
GRASS VALLEY - Where the Sacramento Valley steepens into the Sierra Nevada, Susan Love found a home with big windows and pine-forest views. It was the house she shared happily with her husband before his death.
The surroundings, though, are changing.
A long-dormant gold mine within view of her front garden is showing signs of life. Once the second-highest-producing gold mine in the nation, the Idaho-Maryland Mine is again in the sights of prospectors, this time a Nevada-based company proposing to reopen it in this place born more than a century and a half ago in a rush of gold.
There is still a lot of gold in these hills and a lot of money at stake. But across California, a strong environmental ethos and, in many historic places, an economic shift toward tourism are now sharply at odds with the resumption of gold mining, despite its promise of new jobs more than a century and a half after tens of thousands of migrants arrived to strike it rich in this state on the country's edge.
A frontier chic now characterizes many towns that have moved far from the hard-hat lifestyle of hard-rock mining. Drawing on their gold-rich history to draw tourists, these antique towns have adopted a different view of the actual mining, still a potentially dirty business even if improved from the past.
Love, whose family traveled generations ago from Ohio to join the gold rush, put her home on the market this year and quickly accepted an offer. But the buyers backed out once they discovered what might emerge next door. Now she fears that, at 69, she is stuck in a home without value.
"It all comes down to our local politicians and I think a lot of it will come down to money," said Love, a retired preschool teacher. "There are no miners here so where would they all come from, where would they live?"
The timeless treasure making a comeback in the era of cryptocurrency here in the Sierra foothills, the cradle of California's 19th-century gold rush, reshaped the state's population and economy, often at the expense of native residents and a fragile environment.
But interest has spread beyond here, as the price of gold skyrockets. Shuttered hard-rock mines and, further south, remote fault lines rich with gold dust have become coveted targets for companies willing to take on community opposition and California's environmental regulations.
The economics are obvious. When the Rise Gold Corp. bought the Idaho-Maryland Mine in 2017, the average price of gold was $1,260 per ounce. So far this year's projections suggest the average price will increase to $1,830 an ounce, a 45% increase and a record high if those estimates hold.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported that $10 billion of gold was mined in the nation last year, much of it from Western states. California estimates that mining - excluding fossil fuels - generates more than a half-billion dollars annually in economic activity, and after bottoming out in the early 2000s, the amount of gold mined here each year has been climbing.
"Gold is used as a hedge against economic insecurity, and we've certainly seen a lot of that in recent years," said Elizabeth Holley, an associate professor in the Colorado School of Mines' department of mining engineering. "And if you consider the time when Idaho-Maryland operated, the methods have matured greatly and today you can mine much more efficiently and at lower grades of ore."
Given the high prices, Holley said, the interest in gold has expanded well beyond traditional mining states in the West. She serves on a National Academies of Science board examining the potential effects of gold mining in Virginia.
"The environmental and social impacts are always concerning for a community," Holley said. "But modern mining is highly regulated and I do think people conflate historic practices with what mining is now."
Nonetheless, the potential for new prospecting has inspired a visible public resistance, a jobs vs. community character debate, that at its heart asks whether the Golden State really needs gold anymore.
"There is no industrial need for gold - it is just a luxury," said Ralph Silberstein, a 24-year resident here who heads the Community Environmental Advocates Foundation and MineWatch, a group that opposes the Grass Valley project. "Sure there are a lot of old mines around here, but all have a toxic history behind them."
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They are the breadcrumbs of gold exploration, the small chunks of quartz that lay scattered across the desert east of Mount Whitney, about 300 miles south of Grass Valley.
Where there is quartz, there is often gold. There is a lot of both in this place, another target in another part of the state for corporate prospectors. The small, white minerals, slightly translucent, are as common as wild sage in this dry, quiet stretch of the Eastern Sierra.
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