“The whole way I’m driving out, I’m thinking I’m going to pull out this freaking $100,000 nugget.”

The remark was recently made by 50-year-old Mike Hewlett, a welder from California. With gold now over $4,300 per ounce, he’s traded his hobbies of snowboarding, skiing, and dirt biking, for prospecting. He’s hoping to make big bucks.

In fact, Hewlett recently extracted a chunk of gold about half the size of his pinkie fingernail out of the dirt in the forested Mount Shasta area. “I was jumping all around like you see in cartoons and stuff,” he said. When he later weighed his find, he discovered it was worth $175.

Sometimes in life there are endeavors where even the slimmest chance of a big score is reason enough to do it. The adventure – and the hope – are what make it worthwhile, regardless of if the ultimate payoff comes or not. Prospecting the well picked over mountains of California in the year 2025 is one of those endeavors.

Nonetheless, Hewlett is not alone. Others have recently been bitten by the gold fever bug too. Cody Blanchard, for example, a sanitation worker from Sacramento, recently found pieces of quartz veined with gold that he located with a metal detector. Continue reading →