COLUMBIA, Calif. _ California's historic drought has ended. Riverbeds, once dry, are torrents, and California's Gold Country is living up to its reputation.
Standing on a narrow bridge over Eagle Creek, weeks before the Detwiler fire ravaged the foothills to the south, Robert Guardiola watches nearly 40 miners spread out. Wearing kneepads and waders, they have begun to organize their equipment _ buckets and classifiers, hog pans and cradles _ along the edge of the stream.
Some cut into sandbars with their shovels; others adjust their sluices half in and out of the flowing water. A few have begun swirling mud in their gold pans.
"Everything begins and ends with a pan," says Guardiola, pleased with the activity. He helped organize this outing, a monthly foray for a local prospecting association known as the Delta Gold Diggers.
Settled in a nearby folding lawn chair, Russ Tait is doing his part. A latte-colored slurry circles the perimeter of his emerald-colored pan.
With a floppy hat, ponytail and a white beard that hasn't been trimmed in 18 years, the 72-year-old looks like a refugee from Knott's Berry Farm. Even his blue eyes behind silver frames have a bit of a twinkle.
Tait has bone cancer, so getting down to the creek isn't easy. But even if his days are numbered, he isn't above dreaming. He peers into the murky solution, hoping to glimpse something shiny.
"I guess you call it gold fever," he says. "You get out there, and there's times where you get tired and you don't want to quit."
For years, especially during the drought, Tait and his friends stood on the riverbanks of California's Mother Lode alone with their obsession. Now, as record snowmelt scours these watersheds, washing gold into streams, that's seldom the case.
More and more strangers are out on these rivers and streams, looking for that sparkling metal.
