My father and my sister have geology degrees, and some of my father's early science work was mining-adjacent (although he also helped survey for the CA Aqueduct project).<p>He remains fascinated with them, and we'd often travel to mining towns (one in particular) to check out the neighborhood and scenery. When I was in high school, our big "California Vacation" was to the Mother Lode Country, all up and down the center of California, from SD to Yreka (I considered it absurd that there was "Eureka"--also the state motto--and the comparatively obscure "Yreka" even further north).<p>We stopped in places like Virginia City, Lodi, Sacramento, and more. We saw Sutter's Fort. I saw punk rockers in a small town just hanging out. All my sister wanted was a pool at our motel. We fought and bickered constantly. It was a huge disaster, but very scenic and generated plenty of memorable family photos.
It surprised me when I moved west how recent some of these are, and that they are not all out in the middle of nowhere. There's a gold mine in Napa County that was developed in the 1980s, well after CEQA was enacted. The guy who owns it took out a billion dollars worth of gold and left a big hole where all the acid is impounded behind a dam, in the middle of the Cache Creek watershed. I visit that region frequently and I always wonder why we thought we had to do every last gold mine.
To add insult to injury, the vast majority of these mines have been closed off to the public in the last 20 years for liability reasons, even the ones that don’t generate significant amounts of latent pollution. Obviously most people don’t want to be around a defunct uranium mine but the same policies have closed off all other mines.<p>You used to be able to roll up on a mine tailing pile or even go into the mine to look for mineral specimens. Even though the mines are no longer economically viable, they were a gold mine for rock hounds and educators looking for interesting rocks.<p>Now all of that is gone and all we have left is bullshit commercial operators that make fake tailing mixed with commercially sourced gems.