California has caught gold fever again.

Gold prices are at all-time highs. Signs of a new gold rush are popping up all along Highway 49 through the Mother Lode: grizzled prospectors panning in the creeks, new underground mines preparing to go into production, rampant mining-stock speculation, boosterish media coverage and even an old-fashioned salted-mine hoax.

The timing is perfect for a new gold rush, says Jack Mitchell, publisher of the weekly Ledger Dispatch in Amador County. The economy is "sucking wind" in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, he says, and "there is a strong belief that the real gold has not been found yet."

"Today's Gold Price" is posted daily behind the front desk at the historic Holbrooke Hotel in Grass Valley: "One Ounce - $1,593.00" the sign read when I checked in a couple of weeks ago.

People on the Mother Lode still talk about the gleaming 9-pound gold nugget recently dug up on a nearby property. Only later was it revealed to be a specimen found 25 years ago in Australia.

As we historians like to say: History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. And the colorful history of California's original Gold Rush provides plenty of rhymes for modern miners to riff on. This gold rush is only missing one thing - an actual rush. For all the talk of a new gold rush, there is precious little gold coming out of the Mother Lode these days.

The Lincoln Mine, the first significant new underground gold mine on the Mother Lode in more than 50 years, is due to begin production this fall, with 66 miners going back after gold left behind when historical mines shut down around the quaint mining towns of Plymouth, Amador City, Sutter Creek and Jackson. But even if the Lincoln Mine meets its target of producing more than 1,800 ounces of gold a month - worth nearly $3 million - it will be a small operation compared with the Brobdingnagian open-pit gold mines in the California desert and Nevada's Great Basin, which produce nearly 75 percent of the nation's gold.

Still, there is a new kind of gold mining afoot in the Mother Lode. Call it slow gold. It will never be a gold rush. But it may well be the only way gold mining can reconcile its past and future in the heart of California's Gold Country.

Holly Boitano, a 28-year-old rail with a ponytail, runs the environmental, health and safety program at the Lincoln Mine and proudly identifies herself as a fifth-generation Mother Lode miner. "There hasn't been much mining in 50 years," she acknowledges, but her father's side of the family first came to California during the Gold Rush. After the major mines shut down, her grandfather continued to mine a small claim outside of Amador City, and her dad worked there as a kid. "It's a family business," she jokes.

Boitano started working at the Lincoln Mine as a tour guide in high school. She led school kids and tourists into the historical tunnels, while the company waited for the price of gold to rise, raised money and applied for permits to reopen the mine. She went away to UC Santa Barbara to study religion and art history, traveled in Europe, came home broke and needed a job. So she came back to the mine.

Now Boitano is trying to keep 70 contractors in line as they install equipment in the mine tunnels, build a mill to crush the ore and extract the gold. Like Boitano herself, none has worked in mining before. Although the Mother Lode's image is still based on the Gold Rush, the actual culture of mining is long gone. "It's a big challenge creating that culture from square one," says Boitano.

Modern gold mining is also a very expensive proposition. Leanne Baker, president and chief executive of the Sutter Gold Mining Co., just got back from trying to raise additional capital in London and Toronto. The Lincoln Mine and its faux-historical, rusted, steel-sided mill - meant to harmonize with the mining towns nestled in the nearby hills - will cost more than $26 million even before the first ounce of gold is poured. The mine has had to get 40 permits from 20 federal, state and local agencies to begin production.

In the 1990s, when plans to reopen the Lincoln Mine were announced, local residents voiced concerns about the traffic, noise, dust and pollution that mining would bring to their picturesque small towns. Opponents filed a lawsuit in 1999 but it failed.

"Mining has a bad rap," says Boitano. Miners "didn't stick around. They didn't care what happened to the environment and communities.

"This project will not be like that."

Boitano still hears concerns from her neighbors, though. "The community is largely on board now," she says, "as long as we keep our promises."

Up Highway 49 in Grass Valley, another gold mining company is deep into the long, slow process of returning to the Mother Lode. Bumper stickers and temporary tattoos for kids proclaim "Golden Past, Golden Future" at the Idaho-Maryland Mining Corp.'s booth at a weekly street fair in Grass Valley. The company hopes to reopen a historic mine not far from downtown. The Idaho-Maryland Mine was a "very high-grade mine in its day," says chief executive David Watkinson. And tourism in Grass Valley, he notes, "is still based on a mining theme." But the company has years of hurdles ahead - environmental studies, permits, political persuasion and raising capital - before miners can head back underground for gold.

Down the street, opponents of the mine hand out "Green Not Gold" bumper stickers. Ralph Silberstein, president of Citizens Looking at Impacts of Mining in Grass Valley, is a software engineer who moved to the Mother Lode so he could live in a "small town and have a job you normally get in the city."

"They talk about how mining built this town. Yeah, mining built this town," Silberstein says. "And now we have a different kind of town."