SUTTER CREEK, Calif. — With his salesman's zeal and postgraduate degree, Mike Sweeney hardly fits the part of old-time prospector. But like the crusty sourdoughs who prowled the Mother Lode 150 years ago, Sweeney sees gold in the Sierra foothills.
It's not just ore he's after. Although his Sutter Gold Mining Co. hopes to eventually unearth as much as 60 tons of the precious metal from these historic hills, the firm also wants to mine another vintage California commodity--tourism.
In Sweeney's vision, paying visitors would mingle with working miners in underground tunnels, tour a bustling grinding mill, buy trinkets at a museum shop and, for the right price, even pour their own gold bars. All the buildings would be turn-of-the-century rustic. Sweeney hopes to reap $3 million a year just from visitors to this mix of mine and tourist trap, which won Amador County approval in September.
"I'd ultimately love to have people pay to work underground for a day," Sweeney said, tugging on a baseball cap as he headed into the firm's half-mile exploratory tunnel. "It would be just like people paying to go work on a dude ranch."
Is this the mine of the future? Industry leaders hope so. If Sutter Gold succeeds, it could put a fresh face on an industry hurting for a make-over. The venture also might breathe new life into the string of moribund mines littering the Sierra gold country.
"This mine is a trendsetter statewide, if not nationwide," said Denise M. Jones, California Mining Assn. executive director. "They melded the historic Gold Rush tourist attraction with a modern gold mine. It's unique."
Once a solitary endeavor practiced by Gold Rush prospectors, mining today is big business mostly pursued on a big, messy scale. From the Mother Lode to Montana, abandoned mines have scarred the landscape and left a trail of toxic byproducts, earning the ore gathering industry innumerable foes.
Aware of that legacy, Sutter Gold's principals have packaged their project as an environmentally friendly neighbor that will generate jobs and give the region a new tourist draw.
But hard digging remains to win public opinion.
The project has divided residents of Amador County, pitting economic growth against concerns about the health and tranquillity of a community dominated these days by bed and breakfast inns, gift shops and several award-winning wineries.
Some naysayers, who derisively dub the venture "Sweeney World theme park," have filed a lawsuit in a bid to block the company, which has sunk more than $20 million into the project so far.
Foes shudder at the prospect of miners eventually blasting a labyrinth of tunnels to the edge of quaint Amador City and literally underneath the main street of adjacent Sutter Creek, 40 miles southeast of Sacramento. Worried about rattled nerves and trampled hillsides, opponents don't buy Sweeney's sales pitch.
"These guys in the mining industry have gotten real smart," said Lee Goodin, a retired Air Force major who is Amador City's mayor. "They know how to put the proper spin on this stuff, put a happy face on it to make the mine seem benign. But the history of mining around here demonstrates it's not."
Environmental Disasters
To illustrate his point, Goodin need only point to nearby Jackson, where slag heaps of debris from abandoned gold mines sit behind cyclone fences with signs warning of toxic contamination. In Sutter Creek, a subdivision plopped atop a pile of arsenic-tainted tailings from the old Central Eureka Mine prompted both a federal cleanup and a lawsuit by homeowners, who won a $2-million settlement earlier this year.
But many other residents welcome Sutter Gold as an economic boost to an area still smarting from the shutdown of a lumber mill in Jackson. The company promises to fill 120 jobs.
"It almost seems to be a dead heat between those who have registered objections and others who think it will be an economic boon," said Jerry Budrick, a Sutter Creek cafe owner who lives in Amador City. "Personally, I'm divided. I'm in the restaurant business and think it could help tourism. But living in Amador City, I'm worried we'll be right in the path of the blasting."
The fight over Sutter Gold comes during what is perhaps the third gold rush in California history.
In the heyday of the 1850s Gold Rush, more than 1,300 tons of gold were unearthed before the easy pickings petered out. A second revival came with the Great Depression and ended with World War II.
Economic turmoil in the early 1980s fanned the latest boom. Gold prices skyrocketed above $800 an ounce, and California production soared from an anemic 250 pounds in 1980 to a peak of more than 35 tons, or 70,000 pounds, in 1993.
But the Mother Lode, which stretches in a 150-mile spine along the western Sierra, was hardly a factor in the latest rush. This time, the bulk of that bullion came from huge open-pit mines in the Southern California desert.
