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California is a nation unto itself.  We don't really give a fuck about city rivalries like folks in the Northeast, and we don't have billboards with dead babies and a dead guy like you see everywhere else in the country.  We buy our marijuana in liquid form from stores that pay taxes, and we party like the world will end tomorrow everyday.  We lack accents, pretense, and culture, but it's worth it cause the girls are that much more fun.
 
All this is fine and good, but what originally drove wild people west was the gold rush and the dream of not having to work for the man. Most of the easy to find placer gold (meaning gold deposited in streams) has been collected by 150 years of miners working for subsistence wages, but modern techniques make it possible to recover smaller flakes and dust that old-timers were unable to process.  In the mountains near my home in Oroville (that’s "city of gold" in espanol) I have a 40 acre gold claim where I try to spend the majority of my free time digging, panning, and sluice-boxing for gold.  It pays roughly minimum wage, and it's hard work as you have to dig at least 2 feet down before you find anything, but you get a glimpse of what it was once like living in the woods as a free man.  I have a van equipped with solar panels and a mini fridge, but other than that I'm on my own.  We did kill off all the brown bears in California, but the black bears are kinda dicks since they're so used to raiding all the weed farms in the area without recourse.  It's a good idea to carry a gun.  Yelling at them is fun, but completely ineffective unless accompanied by gunshots.  I also hunt quail and grouse in the area and they're pretty delicious cooked over a fire.  Squirrel is no good at all.
 
Gold weighs 6-8 times more than most other particulates flowing in a stream, so it tends to settle only in slow bends and eddys in the creek.  Large rocks and tree stumps in the middle of the creek are often the best places to start digging and you will learn to recognize other spots as time goes on.  After locating a decent spot, you begin digging and sorting the dirt into 5 gallon buckets, classifying the rocks according to size.  After screening the dirt down to less than a half inch in diameter, you throw it into a sluice box.  You can buy sluice boxes, but I made my own out of aluminum sheet metal and a weaved plastic material called miner's moss which traps small flakes of gold.  A sluice box is about 5 feet long, and is essentially a trough that is open on both ends with a series of riffles used to trap gold as stream water rushes through it.  You dump dirt into the box, and all of the lighter material is washed away leaving only gold and heavy black sands which are generally iron, and magnetic.  After filling the box all day, you dump the remaining heavy sands into a bucket and pan through it til you get down to the gold.  This is the best part of the day.
 
After that you head back to camp, start a fire, get real stoned, and eat the shit out of canned food.  Wanna try it sometime?  Just lemme know.

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