Rains Open Floodgates to a New State Gold Rush : Prospecting: Raging currents in Sierra unearth a new bounty, but many are skeptical that it will pan out.

Patrick Szymanski was struck by the fever about two weeks back. It was slow in coming, but when it hit, the boyish-looking prison guard did not have a prayer.

So there he was one morning last week, scrutinizing the wares of a gold prospecting shop in this mining town about 50 miles east of Stockton, his dungarees smeared with caked earth and his fingertips split open and sore.

“My girlfriend hates me for it,” he confessed, a momentary glimmer flashing across the faraway look in his eye. “I’m always taking off. But it is like water-skiing. The first time you get up, you are so excited you never want to stop.”

Szymanski is one of the California ‘93ers, a new breed of feverish gold-seekers washed into these Sierra foothills with the rush of the spring runoff. For six long years of drought, gold prospecting was about as dry as a parched creek bed in many parts of California’s famed Mother Lode, but as one old-timer here said: “Mother Nature giveth as well as taketh.”

Never mind for the moment that Szymanski’s 20 hours of back-breaking labor--including a nasty run-in with a rattlesnake and a treacherous raid on an abandoned mine shaft--have yielded the wiry 29-year-old little more than $10 worth of gold.

For four glorious months this winter, the heavens answered the prayers of gold-seekers from Nevada City to Mariposa, dumping enough rain and snow to raise the collective spirits of half a dozen counties.

The deluge filled creeks and rivers so high that earthen banks wasted away, trees toppled and rocks tumbled. The raging currents so thoroughly disrupted the landscape--and, speculation goes, loosened stubborn yellow flakes--that even inveterate pessimists say 1993 will likely be the best year for gold in a decade.

“These high-intensity storms uncovered a lot of material that wouldn’t have been uncovered otherwise,” said John T. Alfors, a supervising geologist for the state Department of Conservation who has not gone near a gold pan in 10 years. “It is a season like this that draws people out. A lot of them won’t bother unless there is a good prospect of finding something.”

Serious gold prospectors typically sit tight until May, when the gush of mountain streams wanes to a chilly trickle and exposed bedrock and tree roots scream out for an adventurer with a pick and shovel. Even so, tales of big finds are circulating through the foothills, although many old-timers advise unsuspecting newcomers to keep a watchful eye out for rascals among the righteous.

“You will always have someone who legitimately stumbles upon a five-ounce nugget,” said Jamestown jeweler Bob Sumpter. “This is a good year, no doubt about it. But I don’t want the guy in the station wagon to drop everything because he got the impression he can come up here and strike it rich.”

Two weeks ago, shop owner Ralph Shock said, a man walked into his Main Street store with a nine-ounce nugget that he said came from the Tuolumne River just out of town. Shock swears by the story and asks $5,400 for the rock, which he slips from a cloth sack for an admiring customer to inspect.

Days earlier, Shock said, another miner arrived with eight pounds of gold, mostly in tiny flakes and miniature pellet-sized nuggets. The man, a regular customer who typically hocks two or three ounces a month, refused to disclose where he found the treasure. Shock said neither man wanted his identity revealed.

“I have seen creeks change entire courses because of the rains this year,” boasted the bearded former car salesman, who talks as if he is still working the lot. He wears gold glasses, three gold rings, a gold bracelet, a gold watch and a gold necklace with a dangling gold nugget.

“It is exposing gold that hasn’t been exposed, for who knows how long, thousands of years,” he said. “That’s what is happening, I tell you.”

Gold dealers and jewelers here and in a chain of Mother Lode towns made famous by the other Gold Rush 150 years ago report a steady stream of small flakes and nuggets. Nothing so spectacular as Shock’s nine-ouncer--which has raised more than a few distrusting eyebrows--but big enough to mount on a ring or pendant.

There have also been reports of unearthed artifacts, including Gold Rush-era coins, pistols, snuffboxes and mining tools that had been buried beneath years of river sediment and, some storytellers suspect, more than a century of heartache and disappointment.

Most commonly, however, merchants relate stories of a relentless flow of hopeful gold panners--most reduced to “weekend miner” status because of the constraints of 9-to-5 jobs--looking for an inside tip on a lucrative bend in a creek or a muddy riverside gorge.

At a museum in Angels Camp, a mining town where Mark Twain first heard the now-famous tale of the Calaveras frog-jumping contest, would-be prospectors stop along California 49 for directions to “the gold.” Curator Nancy Larson, a 30-year resident who would just as soon see the fortune hunters turn back home, dutifully points them toward the nearest creek.

“Most of the ones who stop here are green, and I just tell them to look for somewhere wet,” Larson said. “It is probably better if they wait until the creeks aren’t so high, but then of course everyone wants to be the first one there.”

Betty and Bob Edwards are avid panners who gave up their accounting jobs in Livermore three years ago to build a hillside log house on Sutter Creek, near the mining town of Volcano. The Edwards, who own a gift shop in Jackson, have for the most part graduated from panning and now own a three-horsepower dredger that sucks soil from the creek bed below their home.

The machine, mounted on an inner tube, works much like a vacuum cleaner and allows the high-tech prospector to sweep the width of an entire creek while the more authentic panner chips away at a single tree root.

But because of fish spawning, the state bars dredgers in most areas, including the Edwards’ quarter-mile stretch of Sutter Creek, until later in the spring. The machines are unwieldy, require a $28 permit to operate, and have been known to retire the burliest of prospectors for an extended weekend because of exhaustion.

“It is work, but it is fun work,” said Bob Edwards, who has kept the neatly trimmed mustache of an accountant but recently swapped his Mercedes-Benz for a Chevrolet Blazer. “You can suck some spots clean.”

The serious buyers of placer gold, the name given gold found in and near streams, say dredgers are their most reliable suppliers. If you are inclined to listen to Chuck Sturz, a self-described “arrogant little bastard” who buys gold in Jackson, anything short of dredging is a waste of time for prospectors interested in getting rich.

“Gold panning is a six-pack and a ham sandwich; that’s all you’ll see,” scoffed Sturz, whose one-bedroom apartment overlooking Main Street doubles as a jewelry workshop. The 71-year-old former television technician, happy to sell you the locket around his neck, also advises against asking prospectors for tips about where to strike it big.

“They lie,” he said. “If a guy comes in here and tells me he found it in the Mokelumne River, you can be sure he didn’t find it anywhere near there.”

That can make it pretty tough for a beginner such as Patrick Szymanski, who has relied on a handful of published guides and word-of-mouth advice to direct his nascent prospecting career. But even Szymanski is one up on many wanna-be millionaires who have turned up on Woods Creek in Jamestown since the Sonora Mining Corp., a professional open-pit gold operation, disclosed in January that it had uncovered a gold specimen weighing more than 60 pounds.

The company at first was very secretive about the find, inviting all kinds of speculation and tall tales, including a widely distributed story in a national tabloid newspaper. Company officials are now more talkative, having decided to put the specimen, embedded in octagonal crystals, on the market for $3.5 million.

Company Vice President Carolyn Clark said the mine has tried to discourage people from panning in the creek, which runs by the mine, explaining that there is no relationship between lode gold buried in a hillside and placer gold found in waterways.

“We have explained it, but people continue to pan anyway,” she said. “A 60-pound gold nugget is not going to come washing down that stream.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, it has been a hard sell.

“Heh, heh, heh,” one panner reacted mockingly. “What did you expect them to say?”