Lots of yellow here!

The Yuba Gold Fields are a fascinating place for me because they give a very good idea of what the area around Mississippi Bar on Lake Natoma would have looked like after the dredgers finished their work in 1962. At Lake Natoma, the Teichart Aggregate Company reclaimed much of the resultant dredger tailings and crushed them into gravel; when the company left the area, they did a fair bit of habitat restoration.

Mississippi Bar in February 2019

Almost 15 years after this episode of California’s Golden Parks first aired, a similar vision for the Yuba Gold Fields has made very little progress, due to disputes over mining rights and property access.

Huell travels to the Yuba Gold fields near Marysville and learns about the mining operation along the Yuba River that was at one time the most profitable operation in the world.

(Click on the linked image below to see the video.)