New Gold Rush: Party Like It's 1849

With gold prices topping $900 an ounce and jobs still disappearing, a new gold rush is on. It's taking place in California again, where unemployed people are heading for the hills to prospect for gold. It's also happening on TV and online, where sometimes dubious ads promise rich rewards if you'll just hock your jewelry. And it's even creeping into a new kind of cocktail party that could only start in the Golden State.

And just like last time, the new gold rush can come with a mix of disappointment and, well, rush. The adrenaline kind, as one miner says.

"Some days you sit here and make two cents. Some days you make a couple of hundred dollars," said John Gurney, who like his crusty predecessors came from the East to find gold by digging around in California river beds.

"I had one good day and made about $10,000," Gurney told the KNBC-TV in Los Angeles.

What they're after

The mineral gold is dense but highly flexible. It is virtually indestructible and extremely rare. All of the gold ever mined can fit into a cube with 72-foot sides, says Stuart Simmons, a researcher from University of Auckland, New Zealand who has studied how gold forms.

Today, Fort Knox holds 8-foot-tall stacks of gold bars worth some $130 billion, enough to . . .

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