Don’t grab your shovel and gold pan.
The gold that mining companies are after is deep underground in old mines.
Gold is made by colliding neutron stars (details here), and accessible gold (i.e., reachable by humans) likely was carried to earth by asteroids (see explanation here). There are various ways it ends up in minable deposits (examples here). It’s widely distributed, having been found on every continent except Antarctica (and may exist there under the ice).
But gold mining is a very polluting business, partly because gold-bearing ore leaves behind toxic residues (e.g., arsenic), and partly because mining methods themselves are toxic and polluting (e.g., use of cyanide in heap leaching to separate gold from ore). That makes proposed gold mines a target of environmentalists and local residents.
Gold miners’ dodgy business practices also often leave a sour taste. Often, a slick businessman (or group of men) behind a mining venture sets up a corporation to extract the gold and take the profits, then the corporation files for bankruptcy and taxpayers are stuck with the expensive cleanup (see, e.g., stories here and here). Many times, mining operations aren’t profitable unless major costs can be transferred to the public in this way, while the private exploiters keep all the profits.
The short and long is that many old California mines were abandoned not because all the gold was gone, but because they became uneconomic (fifty years ago, gold prices were too low to recoup mining costs), so that gold was left behind. Now, today’s gold prices and more efficient mining methods potentially make recovering that gold profitable.
But digging with pick and shovel, or panning streambeds for gold, isn’t an efficient mining method. If you know where to look, and you’re lucky, you might find enough with a week’s effort to pay for a can of beans. The land was picked clean of easy gold long ago. And you’re certainly not going to recover gold buried thousands of feet underground that way. It takes well-capitalized industrialized mining operations to get at it.
The question is whether rural Californians will welcome the state’s new gold rush. They might not be. See story here.