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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Lifestyle
Amanda Ulrich in Barstow with photographs by Francesca Forquet

The modern-day gold diggers of California: ‘It doesn’t take much to catch the fever’

Gold California David Wolf Mining Flood United States
Three white people under a blue, cloudless sky stand on a sandy, barren landscape working with shovels and metal tools.
From left, members of the Hi Desert Gold Diggers club Donald Perez, James Mack and Yvonne Mack searching for gold. Photograph: Francesca Forquet/The Guardian

Way out in the wild center of southern California, in a scrubby patch of desert a few hours from Los Angeles, some things haven’t changed much in the last 200 years.

Not a single building dots the horizon, the only road in sight is rutted and made of packed sand – and a small group of prospectors hunch over dirt-caked tools to pull gold out of the ground.

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