The California Foothills

When most people picture the California Gold Rush, they imagine flannel-clad forty-niners swirling muddy gravel in tin pans along Sierra riverbeds. But placer panning was merely the opening act of California’s mineral extraction saga. Once the easy surface gold washed away, the real fortunes were won by blasting deep into solid granodiorite bedrock. Tucked beneath the whispering ponderosa pines of Grass Valley lies Empire Mine State Historic Park , the site of one of the longest-operating, deepest, and richest hard-rock gold mines in North American history. Between 1850 and its final closure in 1956, the Empire Mine operated for an astounding 106 years, producing roughly 5.8 million ounces of refined gold—worth billions in modern bullion value. To extract that wealth, human beings chiseled and dynamited a mind-boggling subterranean city: 367 miles of interconnected shafts and drifts plunging more than 11,000 feet on the incline and reaching a true vertical depth of nearly a mil...