DREAMIN’

There’s gold in that there peninsula. At least that’s what Donald Sheckler hopes. The professional prospector has found an abandoned gold mine “somewhere down in Baja.” It’s 50 miles off Highway 1, but, naturally, he’s not saying exactly where--he’s about to open it up again for the first time since the 1920s.

“It’s not easy,” he says. “You’re back to tents and campfires and shovels and dynamite, but that’s the way I was raised. I’ve already been down there panning, and it looked good.”

But at 76 years old? His wife, Caroline, shrugs her shoulders. “It’s in his blood. I can’t stop him.”

“I was raised with prospectors and miners camping on our land,” he says. He still lives east of San Diego near the Barrett Junction ranch where, until recently, he owned the Eagle’s Nest mine. It had made the previous owners $1 million, but soon after he and his partners acquired it in 1982, government officials started getting interested.

“They paper-worked us out of the business!” Sheckler says. “They demanded ‘operational reports’--stating our scale of operation, how much gold we expected to find. That goes against a miner’s instincts. Those people are trying to freeze all of us small miners out. They ask for bonds--against environmental damage we may do--from $20,000 to $100,000!” Sheckler pulled out of the partnership about five years ago. Now he’s taking his shovel and goin’ south, where the Mexican government lets you stake your claim without too much hassle. “The only harassment you get is a bond of about $2,500 and an obligation to take your gold to a Mexican bank,” he says. “They recognize that people have to live, to eat. Up here the government doesn’t give a damn.”

According to Sheckler, the last President who understood prospecting was Herbert Hoover. “He was the greatest mining engineer that ever lived. I never forget his advice to the boys with gold in their eyes. He said out of every thousand mines, one is a real good one. The rest aren’t worth a damn.

“Still, when you’ve got a prospect like I have down there, it’s hard to resist.”