It’s a brisk day in Johannesburg, a tiny mining town in California tucked among the Rand Mountains in the Mojave Desert. The landscape is vast and rugged, a mish-mash of rock, dirt and creosote bushes ...

Record prices have amateur prospectors buying picks and ‘pay dirt’ buckets and dreaming of stumbling on the motherlode ...

The National Park Service and owners of the Colosseum Mine in San Bernardino County, shown in 2025, have been involved in a years-long dispute. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times) Deep in the Mojave ...

Deep in the Mojave National Preserve lies an old open pit mine where workers dug and drilled for gold and silver from the late 1800s to the 1990s. Miners are back at the Colosseum Mine today—but now ...