Environmentalists and residents fight a new California gold rush

There is still a lot of gold in these hills and a lot of money at stake. But across California, a strong environmental ethos and, in many historic places, an economic shift toward tourism are now sharply at odds with the resumption of gold mining, despite its promise of new jobs more than a century and a half after tens of thousands of migrants arrived to strike it rich in this state on the country’s edge.

A frontier chic now characterizes many towns that have moved far from the hard-hat lifestyle of hard-rock mining. Drawing on their gold-rich history to draw tourists, these antique towns have adopted a different view of the actual mining, still a potentially dirty business even if improved from the past.

Love, whose family traveled generations ago from Ohio to join the gold rush, put her home on the market this year and quickly accepted an offer. But the buyers backed out once they discovered what might emerge next door. Now she fears that, at 69, she is stuck in a home without value.

“It all comes down to our local politicians and I think a lot of it will come down to money,” said Love, a retired preschool teacher. “There are no miners here so where would they all come from, where would they live?”

The timeless treasure making a comeback in the era of cryptocurrency here in the Sierra foothills, the cradle of California’s 19th-century gold rush, reshaped the state’s population and economy, often at the expense of native residents and a fragile environment.

But interest has spread beyond here, as the price of gold skyrockets. Shuttered hard-rock mines and, further south, remote fault lines rich with gold dust have become coveted targets for companies willing to take on community opposition and California’s environmental regulations.

The economics are obvious. When the Rise Gold Corp. bought the Idaho-Maryland Mine in 2017, the average price of gold was $1,260 per…