Still going for the gold

GIRDWOOD, Alaska -- The snow is still knee-high along the banks of Crow Creek, where men are crouching up to their chests in near-freezing water, and the air is several degrees colder.

But for Mike Telgenhoff and his companions, this is a fine day to look for gold.

"We do real good in the wintertime because the crick's so low," said Telgenhoff, dressed in a sopping leather hat and drysuit. "I've made a lot of money at it, but I've spent a lot, too. You don't get rich doing this."

But with gold prices reaching an all-time high of $900 an ounce and the economy slumping, Alaska expects to see more and more people trekking to the edge of the continent in search of gold.

Membership in gold prospecting clubs is climbing nationwide, along with sales of pans, dredges, metal detectors and other small-scale mining equipment. A trade show recently hosted by the Gold Prospectors Association of America in Orange County, Calif., typified the trend.

"I saw more people walking out with more metal detectors and sluice boxes than I can remember in a long time," said Ken Rucker, general manager of the 45,000-member association.

The group has received hundreds of calls and e-mails from interested gold seekers. New memberships are increasing, and the number of membership renewals at the close of 2007 was twice as high as the year before, said Brandon Johnson, the director of operations.

The heightened interest in gold is nowhere near that of the famous 19th century gold rushes in California, Alaska and Canada's Yukon Territory. Those grizzled prospectors have long since been replaced by recreational gold hounds, mostly seasonal workers and retirees.

Roughly 150 families in Alaska live off gold they have collected, according to state officials. But longtime prospectors say small-scale mining is generally unpredictable, tough on the body and yields little to no profit.

"If you love ditch-digging, you'll just love gold mining," said Steve Herschbach, owner of Alaska Mining and Diving, a mining-supply shop in Anchorage. "It's just hard labor. I knew a guy up in Nome who did really, really well, but he was like a human backhoe. The guy could just shovel all day long."

Mining clubs are popular with hobbyists who want to avoid the paperwork and fees required to stake claims to gold. The groups have forged various agreements over the years that allow members to mine on government or private land.

"It's great to just go out and maybe find a little bit and just enjoy being out in nature," said Rick Segebrecht, a plumber in Oregon, Wis., who started prospecting there five years ago. "And there's always that chance every time we go out, you could find the big one."

The Gold Prospectors Association, the largest gold-prospecting group in the country, lets members operate dredges and sluice boxes, which are metal or plastic channels designed to catch gold. Or they can spend a day sifting through dirt with a pan, on hundreds of thousands of acres across the U.S. and Canada. Another club called the New 49ers in the former gold mining settlement of Happy Camp, Calif., has access to 70 miles of federal mining claims along the Klamath River.

The rare individual who does stake a claim must navigate an array of state or federal regulations to establish mineral rights and adhere to the Clean Water Act and other environmental protections. Alaska still enforces a 19th-century law requiring prospectors to mark the four corners of each parcel with a post.

Lately, the number of abandoned claims in Alaska has dropped significantly, while the number of permits issued to small miners rose steadily from 233 in 2002 to 315 in 2007.

Toni Logan Goodrich, who co-owns Oxford Assaying and Refining Corp. in Anchorage, said high gold prices are bringing a younger demographic to mining. In her workshop, her husband smelted 18 pounds of gold into a brick worth $250,000. Three fistfuls of gleaming nuggets and two quarts of gold flakes sat nearby, with a total value of another $500,000.