“There’s been a dramatic change . . . our sales have risen four-fold in the last three months,” said Harrigan McGregor, owner of GoldFeverProspecting.com, an equipment retailer in northern California.
“This is the second big California gold rush. We’ve had a lot of phone calls from people who are quitting their jobs and prospecting full-time.”
The growth of prospecting by individuals has been accompanied by a sharp increase in commercial mining activity. Commercial claims, most of which involve gold mining, rocketed to 2,274 in the first quarter of this year, up from 132 in the same period of 2005, the Bureau of Land Management says.
Roger Haskins, senior specialist for mining law at the BLM, said the high price of gold was “obviously driving [mining] activity up tremendously”.
“We have a market imbalance at the moment and there’s more demand than supply,” he added. “Gold sits in a little niche because it’s speculative . . . People buy it as a hedge for the future.”
Membership in the Gold Prospectors Association of America “has tripled in a very short space of time”, said Corey Rudolph, an official of the southern California-based group, which organizes events for recreational miners.
Read it here: High prices spark fresh Gold rush in California