“The monthly meetings used to be dominated by retirees just looking to socialize, but there’s been an influx of younger members who are serious about getting out there,” Minzey says. He belongs to the Weekend Gold Miner’s Club, a Dahlonega-based organization with 783 members scattered all over the country-sometimes trekking from the West Coast, where personal dredging is banned.

With gold’s eye-popping ascent in the commodities exchange (it could exceed $2,000 per ounce later this summer if its current trajectory continues) flinty, flannel-friendly reality television shows such as Gold Fever, Gold Rush, and Prospecting America and the availability of more efficient, high-tech gear, Lumpkin County, the site of this country’s first gold rush-and according to legend, the point of origin for every treasure hunter’s rallying cry, “There’s gold in them thar hills!”-is once again in the crick-churning throes of what folks around here simply call “the fever.”ĭigger Don is known by most as Don Minzey, a Cumming electrical contractor, but the secretive social code of gold mining values the discretion of nicknames almost as much as “color in the water.” This is Minzey’s fourth season of prospecting. However, with this virile vacuum cleaner, he is intent on cleaning up-really cleaning up.

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