Haul That Glitters

GOLDVEIN O n weekends -- and sometimes, Robin Adair confides, smack dab in middle of the workweek -- the cool, gurgling streams and dappled sunshine of the Virginia Piedmont forests call to him.

Forget the bass in the streams and the deer in the woods -- it's the gold that catches hold of Adair's imagination.

Adair is an honest-to-goodness gold prospector, "like the pirates of old," he jokes. Paradise, he says, is standing knee-deep in a chilly stream among the frogs and water snakes, peering into the bottom of a pie pan, searching for that distinctive sparkle.

More often than not, he finds it -- maybe a few pennies' worth on a slow day and maybe a lot more on a good one.

"When I started doing this, I thought I'd be out here chasing old ghosts," said Adair, who lives in this tiny southern Fauquier County town that, for decades, was the center of the state's booming gold mining industry. "But it's out there, and it turns out there is a thriving community of gold prospectors working the streams all over Virginia."

With the price of gold hovering above $600 an ounce for the first time in a quarter of a century -- and predicted to go higher -- gold fever is spreading, from the dusty old 49er towns of California to the backwoods of Virginia.

Editors of popular gold prospecting magazines say their circulation has spiked in recent months, similar to what they experienced in 1981, when gold prices peaked at about $800. Suppliers say this summer has been their busiest since the 1980s. And assayers -- who judge the purity of gold and other metals -- say business has doubled in the past few months.

"There are some guys right now [in the West] that have actually got a good spot that they're working and reworking, making 400 or 500 bucks a week," said Mike Jacobs, owner of Jacobs Assay Office in Tucson, a fourth-generation assayer whose company has been in business for 126 years.

Local prospectors aren't anywhere near that successful, although they say with the right tools and a little luck, it's possible to accumulate a quarter of an ounce on a very good day, enough to cover the surface of a quarter.

What little gold can be found is enough, also, to draw hundreds of prospectors to riverbanks and creek beds across the Washington region. They are history buffs and outdoorsmen, with a sprinkling of conspiracy theorists, all of whom seem drawn to the romance of modern-day treasure hunting.

"You don't really know the feeling until you turn the first hand yourself and see that bright yellow shining at you," said Ben Vaughan, president of the Central Virginia Gold Prospectors, 300 strong and growing. "Can you believe this is the first time anyone has ever set eyes on this piece of metal, and it's worth something to boot?"

Some prospectors use oblong metal sluice boxes dug into river beds to filter out the gold or suction dredgers to vacuum it out of the mud. But the most popular way of sorting gold from sediment is old-fashioned panning -- sloshing around a pan full of dirt and clay to force the heavy bits of gold to the bottom, then carefully pouring out the rest.