LURE OF GOLD FIELDS DRAWS MODERN-DAY PROSPECTORS.

Byline: Christine Wicker The Dallas Morning News

Steve Hall feels the gold bug like a cold clutch in his stomach every time he scratches the dirt and spots a glitter.

Wayne Sowle and his partners smell it in the dusty damp of the mine they pick-axed 100 feet into the side of a mountain.

Ron Manuel has spent more money trying to cool his fever than he cares to recount.

``You find one little piece, and your heart starts pounding,'' said Manuel, who dredges the American River for the six months of the year it is legal. ``You just know you're going to find another one.''

Thousands of mom-and-pop prospectors still comb the hills of Northern California hoping for the big strike. Gold fever is as intense for them as it was for the '49ers who streamed into California from around the world hoping to find the claim that would make them rich.

No one denies that gold still lies tucked into stream beds, lodged under boulders or buried beneath the earth's surface in a vein that stretches from Central to Northern California.

``Geologists say that since the 1840s until now, they only took about 10 percent of the gold. They're pretty united on that figure,'' said Ron Stockman, research director of the Mother Lode Research Center in Auburn, Calif.

Stockman, whose nonprofit center gathers information on legislation that affects prospecting and metal detecting, estimates there are 15,000 to 20,000 mom-and-pop prospectors.

The Gold Prospectors Association of America has 60,000 to 70,000 members, according to a spokeswoman for the group that attracts both serious prospectors and hobbyists. Prospecting is so popular that gold hunters have their own cable television program and a Web page on the Internet.

But mining is risky business, the prospectors say. Few get rich, some die in accidents, and most lose more money looking for gold than they will ever recoup.

The prospectors are a mixed group. Some are retirees who finance their vacations with what they find at the bottom of their gold pans. Some are escapees from the city looking for a way to make a living in the lovely towns of Northern California.

Others, such as Martin Nemeth, 63, say they will be content with nothing less than the big strike.

Nemeth came to California from Hungary 16 years ago for one reason: ``The Mother Lode, of course.''

His back yard contains a machine that he says takes gold molecules out of water. All he needs is the right stream. ``I'm looking for an ancient river that's been licking that gold for thousands of years,'' he said.

Nemeth teamed up several years ago with Sowle and Roger Woodhead in several mines. Their motto: ``No guts. No glory.''

Recently, they said, they found a wealthy investor to help foot the bill for exploration in one of their tunnels, the Wayne S. Drift Mine. The three believe their tunnel is 200 feet from the ``gut'' of an ancient underground riverbed full of gold.

Sowle found the spot with some core drilling and a letter from an old prospector.

But nobody is rich yet.

``I mend fences and mow lawns to put food on the table,'' Nemeth said.

Down-at-the-heels prospectors are far easier to find than rich ones.

Hall, 54, and a companion live in a one-bedroom miner's shack without a bathtub or a proper kitchen. ``It's like a wooden tent,'' he said.

Most people find what the prospectors call ``colors,'' or dust. But a good panner in the right place can turn up flakes. The really lucky find growlers, rocks big enough to rattle on the bottom of a gold pan.

Prospectors in the gold rush of 1849 claimed most of the placer (loose) gold. Chinese workers picked over the leavings. Prospectors began using huge hoses for hydraulic mining that literally washed away mountains. Next came the use of huge dredges that scooped up the river beds. Then, hard-rock mining deep within the earth began.

What gold remains is in microscopic particles, Stockman said.

Last year, California mined 950,000 troy ounces of gold valued at $361 million, making it second to Nevada in gold production. Most of that was pulled out by large mining companies, Stockman said.

Serious prospectors are notoriously secretive, he said, and no one knows the value of what they find. Most sell their gold to jewelers.

Small miners are reticent partly because they don't have federal and state permits, said Sowle. ``Ninety percent of them are mining illegally,'' he said.

The violence of the Old West is rare, local prospectors said. Six years ago, a shootout in Julian, Calif. left two men dead. In 17 years of working claims, Sowle has known of two people killed in fights over gold. ``Both times it was partners fighting,'' he said.

Partners who steal, or ``high-grade,'' are a bigger danger than thieves from outside, he said.

``There's ways of testing people,'' Sowle said. ``You get a piece of gold that's shaped funny, and you leave it so your partner can find it. Then you see if it turns up at the end of the day. If it doesn't, you know he's stealing.''

Claims don't take much to file - $135 or $235. Keeping a claim requires $100 in fees plus taxes or evidence it is being worked each year, according to the California Bureau of Land Management. Unpaid fees leave a claim null and void.

People looking for new claims often check with the Bureau of Land Management, which has 33,952 on file, Stockman said.

Annie and Don Robinson researched old diaries, letters and newspaper clippings before they left white-collar careers in the San Francisco Bay Area to come north 16 years ago.

She was an office manager; he owned a computer company that kept him on call 24 hours a day. They wanted out of the city. In their first years on Sucker Flats, they shoveled, hauled and panned tons of earth.

``I fired her and she quit 20 times that first year,'' said Robinson, 47.

Then one day, Robinson's drill went through the wall of the shaft into an abandoned mine no one knew existed. That ended the vein they'd been mining for 12 years. Neither will say how much gold they found.

Four years ago, Robinson was forced to find work with a mining company.

But they haven't given up. ``I've found a way to go in again,'' said Robinson.