Wall Street crisis puts a gleam in California miner's eye

COLUMBIA, CALIF. —

High up a steep Sierra hillside that rises behind this Mother Lode town, past where the paved road runs out, tucked into a shadowy gulch covered with pines and cedars -- and far, far away from the financial calamities rocking Wall Street -- this was where Perry Cottingham could be found last week, engaged in that most seminal of California enterprises, mining for gold.

Here was a man happy in his work.

A few days earlier, Cottingham had been following the dire financial bulletins on early morning television, tracking the price of gold on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. As the stock market tumbled, gold was bounding upward toward a magical price of nearly $1,000 an ounce.

Cottingham has worked his one-man gold mine full-time for three decades now, surviving all sorts of economic gyrations. As the price peaked, Cottingham, a 65-year-old former stock car racer, gathered up his stockpile and headed down the hill to meet with the storefront gold buyers who still operate in towns scattered through Gold Country.

"I sold all my gold," Cottingham said. "I sold most of it when the price was up above $910 and some of it close to $1,000."

How much did he sell?

The miner only grinned.

Certain questions, apparently, should not be asked in these parts.

"Let's just say 'enough,' " Cottingham said at last.

"Let's just say 'a substantial amount.' "

The latest climb in gold prices began about a year ago, just as the economy started to wobble. As a result, weekend hobbyists and novices have been pouring into the fabled California Mother Lode, which extends roughly from the Sierra foothills outside Sacramento south to Coarsegold, above Fresno.

"Sheer lunacy," is how Brent Shock of Gold Prospecting Adventures, a mining outfitter on the main street of Jamestown, describes the current scene -- fortune seekers who arrive by the carload with newly purchased pans and dreams of walnut-sized nuggets.

It's not that there isn't gold to be found. The state estimates $13 million worth was commercially mined in California last calendar year. It's just that easy finds were picked clean more than a century ago.

With Cottingham, gold is less the product of eureka moments than it is of sweat equity. He periodically burrows into the mine and blasts down tons of quartz. He runs the rocks through a series of homemade crushers and grinders, sifters and separators, patiently working through hundreds of tons of rock to extract flakes of gold and, on better days, maybe some raisin-sized nuggets.