How California dreaming is bringing new life to gold rush towns in the Sierra Nevada

31.08.2023 - 16:59 / nationalgeographic.com

At an age when most schoolkids are still learning to tie their shoelaces, Nathaniel Prebalick — AKA Gold Plate Nate — was teaching budding treasure hunters how to pan for gold. As a third-generation prospector, he was raised amid the sparkling streams of California’s Gold Country, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, getting to know its watery veins as well as the life lines of his own hands. 

While this may sound like a sepia-tinged snapshot from another century, it’s anything but — as I discover when I meet Nate on a grassy riverbank one spring morning. He’s a thoroughly modern gold digger — a smiling twentysomething who uploads his gilded finds to Instagram — and he has a ready explanation for why Tuolumne County in eastern California is, once again, in the grip of a gold rush.

“We’ve had historic rains recently and all the gushing water has brought gold down from the hillside,” Nate says in a honeyed, Californian drawl, zipping his wetsuit up to his neck and wading into the cascading stream with a miner’s shovel in his hand. Nearby, his ponytailed father, who goes by the name of Nugget Nick, swirls a murky pan of sediment, locked into the eternal quest for a eureka moment. 

Scenes like this were first witnessed in California 175 years ago, after the heady discovery of shimmering flakes attracted a stampede of 300,000 fortune-seekers who ended up reshaping the landscape of the American West. Fast forward to the present day and, once again, it seems there’s gold in them there hills. The focus for today’s prospectors are the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, around two-and-a-half hours east of San Francisco. A combination of recent environmental factors, including Californian wildfires loosening the soil, coupled with pounding rains, has stirred up a bounty of precious metal in Tuolumne. 

Nate can be found most days sieving the brooks around the town of Jamestown, guiding groups of hobbyists and curious tourists as part of his family’s California Gold Panning business. In a state that’s long dangled the tantalising carrot of easy wealth — as dirt-poor miners who have struck it rich and the overnight tech billionaires of Silicon Valley will attest — Nate still holds onto a glimmer of hope each time he lays his shiny silver sluice box on the pebbled riverbed. 

“I once found a nugget the size of my palm,” he enthuses, pushing ringlets of hair back from his damp forehead. He explains that only a fraction of the region’s gold was unearthed during the California Gold Rush of the mid-19th century, so there’s plenty of treasure still to be found — if you don’t mind a bit of hard physical graft. “Sure, most people aren’t getting rich doing this kind of work. But out here in nature, I’m guaranteed a