The shed is in Parma, Idaho-nominally his home, though he has been camping along the American River for several months now-and those days occurred in the grips of a long, cold winter, during which Mike caught gold fever before he even “saw color,” prospecting slang for pulling up gold. “Guys spend thousands on their gear and I just spent days in my shed.” “Being an engineer has helped me a lot,” he says. An electrical engineer by trade, Mike came into prospecting with a running start. But his relative inexperience-about an ounce of gold in two years-is belied by his wealth of knowledge. “Anywhere there’s a crack, crease or crevice, there might be gold.” Photo by Michael RohmĬompared to James’ 20 ounces in 20 years and Keith’s 5 ounces in eight years, Mike is a beginner. “Gold has accumulated in these areas down to the bedrock over thousands of years,” he says. Mike Terronez is deep in concentration as he pans a shallow eddy along the North Fork American River. Mike stands for a long moment in silence, as if to let the river make a formal statement. “I was the third top service advisor in 2014, but I put the corporate world down for this,” he says, water surging past his waders. The former service advisor for BMW hasn’t engaged in those other definitions of work-duty, responsibility, salary-in several years. Stooped over his sluice box in an eddy a quarter mile upriver from James and Keith, he’s still hard at work, a term meant only to denote physical exertion. “But I never feel like I’m working when I do this,” he is quick to add. “I’m not making enough from disability and social security, so I’m having to grind it out and make some extra money. “This is the hardest work I’ve ever done,” says Keith, whose career in construction earned him a bad back and a disability check. Though he enjoys an end-of-the-day six-pack, you don’t find 20 ounces of gold-28 grams in an ounce, countless gold flakes in a gram-by just sitting and drinking. In his two decades of prospecting, James estimates he has found about 20 ounces of gold, roughly $25,000. Unstructured and unconventional, yes, but real prospecting is no Sunday stroll. It depends on the day and the hour, bad weather or difficult terrain, the surfeit or scarcity of food and water, and the overall feeling of good or bad luck. If it seems that very little gold hunting occurs while hunting for gold, that is not entirely false, nor entirely true. “This is why we come to the river,” he adds. For Keith, whose current narrative will end either asleep in his car tonight or in the bed of a motel he can barely afford, slipping into a story that is beautiful, if perhaps fictitious, has an irresistible appeal. The fact that good stories still exist to be told and heard is sufficient. It is not clear which story, exactly, the river is telling, and likely that is the point. Keith stirs and takes a hit from his pipe.
Gold hunting is not about one dream or vision, but the freedom to surrender one’s life to dreams and visions.
Rather, the dream is whatever quality first compelled a man or woman to abandon the life they had constructed and pick up a spade and a sluice and head to the river. The dream is not exclusive to finding gold, although any prospector worth his salt can feel the weight of the elusive nugget in his hand at all times. James and Keith are a little drunk and a little stoned, and they have at last given in totally to that element of gold hunting that has undergirded the activity since man first lusted after the gleaming mineral: The Dream. Its shallow clarity promises untold treasures, and in the glimmering half-light, that promise almost feels real. Here, the river unspools from its upstream ferocity, slowing and widening as if to prepare for the canyon downstream, through which it will tighten into a coil of thundering rapids.īoth men stare at the river, or, perhaps, through the river. Only the water moves, and even it is barely perceptible. James falls silent, takes a sip of Keystone, and considers the river. And anyway, Keith hasn’t been listening for the past several minutes. It’s late afternoon, and though James nudges Keith and declares they ought to pan the traps farther downstream before they lose the light, his suggestion lacks sincerity. James Dee and Keith Mullenix are sitting on the steep bank of the North Fork American River at Mineral Bar, just outside of Colfax. Placer miners continue to pan Sierra streams, gripped by the same gold fever that shaped California