From The Christian Science Monitor:The California gold rush is still on, maybe not as heady as it was 150 years ago, but still on – especially since the discovery last spring of a giant among gold nuggets, which will soon go up for auction.
The tale of the so-called Washington nugget – so named because it was discovered near the famous northern California Mother Lode Gold Rush mining camp of Washington – is a story made for retelling around the campfire. The nugget was found by an amateur miner who was out sleuthing on his own property, using a metal detector. When the man brought the nugget to the offices of geologist Fred Holabrid in Reno, Nev., for verification, Mr. Holabrid knew it was "one in a trillion."
The Washington nugget weighed in at 100 ounces and is about the size of a small loaf of bread. By way of comparison, the largest California nugget still in existence, which is on display at the Smithsonian Museum, weighs 80 ounces.
Upon seeing the whopper, “I just screamed and everyone thought something was wrong,” says Holabrid in a phone interview. Of all the gold panned or mined since the Forty-niner rush, no more than 100 nuggets of that size have ever been plucked from California gold fields. “They were melted down purely for their monetary value,” he adds.......read on
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