Home Care In Gold Run, CA

Rain will linger throughout the evening on Sunday in the Valley and snow will remain active in the Sierra after heavy snow snarled traffic, forcing roadway closures for those headed to the mountains and high winds caused power outages across Northern California.

Residents in South Lake Tahoe have seen power outages throughout the day, and many drivers looking to head to the Sierra were stuck in delays Sunday morning.

Rain and snow will be clearing out of Northern California by Monday morning.

See below for coverage of the latest road conditions and the forecast for what to expect with more rain and snow.

Here are live updates on conditions.

7:30 p.m.: Highway 50 traffic has been released at Sand Flat after vehicle spinouts temporarily stopped traffic, Caltrans said.

Officials say roads through the Sierra are slow-moving and to be cautious.

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#TrafficAlert update: US Highway 50 at Sand Flat in El Dorado County is now clear. Traffic has been released.

— Caltrans District 3 (@CaltransDist3) December 12, 2022

6:45 p.m.: Highway 50 traffic is being held in both directions in the Sand Flat area due to vehicle spinouts, Caltrans said. Tow trucks are working to clear the area.

There is no estimated time of reopening.

6:25 p.m.: Big rigs are still being turned around on Interstate 80 for westbound lanes at Stateline and for eastbound lanes at Applegate, Caltrans said.

5:09 p.m.: The California Highway Patrol gave an update on chain controls in the Sierra. See their update below.

4:59 p.m.: 23,398 Liberty Utility customers in South Lake Tahoe are still without power, according to the utility company's outage map.

There is no estimated time of when power will come back on.

3 p.m.: Highway 50 has reopened to traffic between Meyers and Placerville, Caltrans said.

Chains are still required and traffic is moving slow.

2:12 p.m.: Caltrans warns drivers of intermittent closures of Highway 50.

The closures will happen between Placerville and Meyers due to vehicle spinouts and for crews to work on avalanche control on Echo Summit, Caltrans said.

Drivers on Highway 50 near Ice House told KCRA 3 on Sunday afternoon they had been stopped for hours due to delays.

1:29 p.m.: Parts of Highway 50 are closed due to vehicle spinouts, according to Caltrans.

The road is closed about three miles east of Placerville to about 1.5 miles west of Kyburz.

There is no estimated time of reopening.

1:25 p.m.: Eastbound I-80 Gold Run rest area is closed, according to Caltrans.

1:15 p.m.: The National Weather Service released a report on rain totals. Find them below.

1:09 p.m.: Eastbound Highway 20 lanes are close at Nevada Street in Nevada City due to snow, according to Caltrans.

Trucks are also being turned back on eastbound lanes of I-80 at Applegate and westbound lanes at Stateline.

12:35 p.m.: California Highway Patrol gives update on chain controls. Find them below:

9:19 a.m.: Caltrans has reopened eastbound and westbound I-80 for passenger vehicle traffic only. Chains are required. Heading east, trucks are not allowed past Applegate. Heading west, trucks are held at the California state line.

9:04 a.m.: Caltrans has reopened Highway 50. Chains are required on all vehicles except 4-wheel drive vehicles with snow tires on all 4 wheels from 3 miles east of Placerville to Meyers in El Dorado County.

8:18 a.m.: Liberty Utility outage map is reporting 18,510 customers are impacted from a large power outage that started yesterday in South Lake Tahoe. The restoration time is unknown, and times could vary based on location. According to the City of South Lake Tahoe Government, there are many downed wires throughout several neighborhoods.

6:10 a.m.: Highway 50 reopens after avalanche control operations end. Sections of I-80 are still closed after whiteout conditions.

Traffic on Highway 50 resumed after an earlier closure between Meyers and Echo Summit for avalanche control, according to Caltrans. Chain controls are in effect over the summit.

Interstate 80 remains closed from Colfax to the Nevada state line.

Click here for a look at Caltrans' QuickMap for traffic conditions. Click here to search conditions by highway.

Here is what to know about the latest rain and snow timeline.

Valley Rain

A line of rain will continue to sweep through the Valley Sunday night. As we head into Monday morning, clouds and rain showers will disperse.

In the past 48 hours, downtown Sacramento saw 1.49 inches of rain, Stockton saw 1.74 inches of rain and Auburn saw 2.24 inches of rain.

Temperatures will warm into the mid to low-50s for daytime highs on Monday. By Tuesday morning, temperatures will be near freezing with patchy areas of fog.

Snow in the Sierra

The heaviest snowfall will happen along Interstate 80 Sunday night. However, it's not expected to fall as hard as Saturday.

Snow levels will drop as we head into the evening between 2,500 and 3,000 feet.

Sierra ski resorts reported anywhere from 32 to 48 inches of new snow.

"It's looking pretty good as far as the snowpack right now," KCRA 3's Dirk Verdoorn said.

Click here for a look at Caltrans' QuickMap for traffic conditions. Click here to search conditions by highway.

Track real-time traffic updates here

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Track Northern California Doppler radar here

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MARYSVILLE, Calif. (AP) — California officials on Tuesday said they will spend about $60 million to build a channel along the Yuba River so that salmon and other threatened fish species can get around a Gold Rush-era dam that for more than a century has cut off their migration along the chilly waters of Sierra Nevada streams.

What You Need To Know

The project is the latest example of state and federal officials trying to reverse the environmental harms caused by the century-old infrastructure along California's major rivers and streams. Those dams and canals allowed the state to grow into the economic powerhouse it is today. But they have devastated natural ecosystems that have pushed salmon — a species once so abundant it sustained Native American populations — to the edge of extinction.

Last year, federal regulators approved the largest river restoration project in U.S. history that will remove four dams along the Klamath River near the Oregon-California border. State and federal officials have plans to remove other dams that impede fish migration, including the Matilija Dam in Ventura County and the Rindge Dam in Los Angeles County.

Tuesday's announcement will affect the Daguerre Point Dam near the Northern California city of Marysville. The federal government first built the dam in 1906 as a way to stop the seemingly endless flow of debris left over from hydraulic mining during the height of the Gold Rush of the mid 1800s.

The dam is mostly underwater, allowing the water to spill over the top of it while holding back a mountain of sediment. But it also blocks three species of fish from migrating up the river to spawn — spring-run Chinook salmon, steelhead trout and green sturgeon.

The National Marine Fisheries Service declared in 2012 that the dam posed a threat to the survival of those fish species. Coming up with a solution has been difficult as the dam has been mired in controversy for nearly 50 years about who is responsible for its maintenance and management.

“Within a few decades, Gold Rush mining created impacts that have lasted over 150 years. We’re finally taking action to reverse those impacts,” Willie Whittlesey, general manager of the Yuba Water Agency, said Tuesday during a news conference attended by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state, local and federal officials.

The three fish species are born in the cold, freshwater rivers filled with snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada. Once they hatch and grow big enough, they migrate through the river delta to the Pacific Ocean. They then return to the rivers, swimming upstream to where they were born to lay more eggs.

Dams stop the fish from reaching their spawning grounds. It's a big reason why populations have plummeted, along with droughts and diversions that reduce the flow of water in rivers while increasing the temperature of the water. Commercial salmon fishing was closed along much of the West Coast earlier this year because of low fish populations.

Aaron Zettler-Mann, interim executive director and science director for the South Yuba River Citizens League, said he is excited about the idea of large amounts of fish finally being able to bypass the dam. But he said it's still not the best solution for the species.

He said fish naturally swim upstream and aren't looking for side channels to bypass dams. Plus, he said the river has lots of gravel in it that will eventually clog the channel, making it difficult for fish to use it without regular maintenance.

Instead, he said the best option would be to remove the dam entirely, something he says at least two studies from the federal government have pointed to within the past 20 years.

“I think that if those people stood there together and said, ‘Hey, we want to pull this dam out,’ they probably could have gotten the political will to make it happen,” he said.

Whittlesey said the dam still has its uses, including making it easier to divert water from the Yuba River for nearby farms.

Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the channel will mimic the natural flow of the river before it was dammed. Once opened, he said it will give fish another 12 miles of habitat.

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Officials plan to install new screens to keep the fish from getting into the other canals that send water to irrigate agriculture. And they are planning to study taking spring-run Chinook salmon above New Bullards Bar Dam further north along the Yuba River.

“Not all dams should be removed. Most of our infrastructure is essential, and it still serves a useful purpose,” Bonham said. “So you get creative.”

Scott Artis, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association, said non-governmental organizations working along the Yuba River were not included in the planning of this channel.

“Thus, it’s hard to comment, as we simply have not seen the terms of the deal,” he said. “In principle, we support both passage around Daguerre Point Dam and reintroduction to the upper Yuba. But the details matter.”

The project will cost $60 million, with $30 million coming from the state and the rest coming from the Yuba Water Agency. Gov. Gavin Newsom said keeping the funding in the budget is a priority for him despite the state facing a nearly $32 billion budget deficit this year.

“Despite a modest deficit, we’re holding the line on these projects,” Newsom said Tuesday. “These are tangible. You can see the fruits of your tax dollars.”

In 1851, a gold prospector sat in a saloon in Nevada City, roughly 50 miles west of Lake Tahoe. He slowly began trading the newly acquired cash in his pocket for drink after drink, and before too long, despite being sworn to secrecy, he broke the vow he’d made just days before. The prospector told his fellow pint-swinging countrymen about the source of his newfound wealth: a source of gold in the hills just a few miles away.

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As one would expect from any desperate gold rusher, they followed him home the next morning back to a tiny river in the Sierra foothills. However, his hopeful pursuers found no traces of gold near his supposed claim and deemed the effort — and the entire area — a humbug. In miner speak, a total bust. But today, it’s a bonanza — for anyone who likes to hike, that is.

That’s the supposed story of how the town of Humbug — and the nearby enormous mine that would eventually yield more than $3 million in gold — came to be in an otherwise nondescript section of what’s now Tahoe National Forest.

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Today, the park is Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park. “Diggins” was the parlance of the time for any mine site, while the “Malakoff” moniker came from the town’s early French settlers, who named it for their country’s victory at the 1855 Battle of Malakoff. It’s one of the least-visited state parks in California, despite a few compelling reasons to visit. It’s home to a near-complete gold rush ghost town, a packed mining museum, and 20 miles of hiking trails that pass everything from a historic cemetery and schoolhouse to the “diggins” itself: a 7,000-foot-long pit more than 600 feet deep that led to America’s first-ever environmental law.

The destructive cost of gold

For prospectors, Humbug had its pros and cons. The pro was that there was indeed “gold in them thar” hills — and plenty of it, at that. The downside was that getting to it was extremely labor-intensive. Instead of being in a gold vein — or, better yet, in sizable nuggets like those in nearby Virginia City, Nevada — Humbug’s gold was embedded in rock and gravel, in tiny pieces and flakes that couldn’t be sorted or separated by hand or sieve.

Instead, miners expanded on the concept of a sluice box, which used water to separate tiny flakes of gold from dirt. But the scale of the hillside around Humbug required a supersize system. So miners began a new method of removing gold from the hills: hydraulic mining. Miners used high-pressure hoses to blast roughly 1 million gallons of water per hour at the hillsides. The force sent water, rock, dirt and anything else in the earth funneling into a supersize sluice: a water-filled, angled box that separated heavier gold from lighter debris like dirt and rocks.

The town became rich. It had 2,000 residents at its peak, and the world’s first long-distance telephone line ran through the town. Electric lights were installed. The name “Humbug” became not so fitting, and it was changed to “Bloomfield” in 1858 (and later “North Bloomfield,” when residents got word that a town of Bloomfield already existed in California). The town had several hotels and breweries, stores and restaurants, a school, a post office, and everything else a wealthy California mining town would have in the 1860 and 1870s.

Unfortunately, everyone else in Northern California felt the impact of blasting 25 million gallons of water per day at the hillside. Hydraulic mining sent hundreds of cubic tons of rocks, gravel and earth crashing into the Yuba River, which flows to the Sacramento River and eventually San Francisco Bay. Records estimate that the roughly 1 billion tons of debris released from the mine raised the bottom of San Francisco Bay by 3 feet and the Sacramento River by 16 feet, flooding farms and killing livestock, eroding private land, and delaying commerce along the all-important transcontinental railroad.

In 1882, a nearby landowner filed a lawsuit against the mine. And in 1884, the decision came down on Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company: Companies would no longer be allowed to dump any leftover materials — or “tailings” — caused by mining into rivers in the Sierra Nevada. It was the first pro-environment court ruling in the U.S. and effectively shut down the Malakoff mine, as well as all future hydraulic mining operations to come.

The ramifications were immediate. “From Dutch Flat to Red Dog,” wrote the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a report on the ruling, “unemployed miners walked aimlessly about muddy streets muttering to hotel owners and shopkeepers whose consternation matched their own.” The mine shut down, the saloons closed, and some houses were dismantled for lumber during World War I.

Aside from a brief uptick during the Great Depression when struggling families moved into the town’s empty homes, the town’s population fell to fewer than 20 stragglers by the 1950s. It became a state park in 1965.

Hike through a ghost town and an underground mining tunnel

Because the town of North Bloomfield became a state park soon after its abandonment, most buildings have been maintained, or at least occasionally repaired since their inception. The result is a protected 3,000-acre site with several excellent hikes through the ghost town and abandoned mine site, made all the more excellent by their relative lack of crowds and gentle elevation gain.

From the historic townsite, it’s a no-brainer to make the quick hike to the Marten Ranch (less than 1.5 miles round-trip). You can also park at the trailhead and cut off the .2-mile hike each way from the townsite. Not much is known about the still-standing homestead, including whether it had anything to do with the actual diggins. There’s very little elevation gain, as well as very little foot traffic, so it’s not unheard of to see black bears along this trail. Act accordingly.

However, for most people willing to make the rather windy drive to the park, the main draw is the actual mine site. There are multiple ways to reach it, including through the mine’s original Hiller drainage tunnel. It’s a mile-long tunnel tall enough to walk through and connects the parking area directly to the mine. If you choose this route, expect to trudge through knee-deep water and across large, slippery rocks in pitch-black conditions. You’ll need your hands free to hike, so cellphone flashlights won’t cut it — wear a headlamp.

Visitors who prefer to stay above ground should take the park’s easier Diggins Loop (2.6 miles, 200-foot elevation gain). The trail encircles the mine site, now resembling a massive canyon, and offers the chance to see multiple layers of rock in the exposed hillside. This area is prone to erosion and rockslides, so the lowest parts of the mine have filled it with soil and vegetation. It now looks more like a grassy plateau than anything else, belying the grand-scale environmental disaster it once was.

Combining the park’s Rim Trail and Slaughterhouse Trail Loop into one 5.5-mile loop will also reach the mine, passing the town’s original cemetery, church and schoolhouse on the way.

None of the state park’s trails are particularly well-trodden, so be prepared for overgrown plants and carry a map to help with basic route finding. Tall socks are a good idea.

80% of the ghost town’s gold remains

While it’s a long drive to visit the park and not explore the surrounding landscape — it’s a roughly three-hour drive from SF and two hours from Lake Tahoe — Malakoff Diggins does have one other big draw: the chance to strike it rich yourself. Visit at 3 p.m. on a summer Saturday, and you can learn the basics of gold panning from the park’s free classes at the ghost town’s Humbug Creek. Visitors can also bring their own gold pans or borrow one from the park visitor center to use on their own in the creek bed. And visitors committed to finding the next big bonanza will be happy to know sites at the park’s Chute Hill Campground are both reservable online and typically available last-minute.

The park’s museum and visitor center is staffed daily between Memorial Day and Labor Day and on weekends during the rest of the year. There’s a reasonable $10 parking fee that drops to $5 from September to May, and free walking tours of the ghost town are offered every day at 1:30 p.m.

More California Hikes

— This underground hike leads to an abandoned Calif. gold mine — with gold left — The easiest, most eye-popping hike on the California coast — This is the most amazing place I’ve hiked to in 37 years of living in California — I hiked to a magical sea cave in Santa Cruz and want to live there forever — A visit to the 'crown jewel of California’s state parks': Point Lobos

There's no doubt that money can be made by owning shares of unprofitable businesses. For example, although software-as-a-service business Salesforce.com lost money for years while it grew recurring revenue, if you held shares since 2005, you'd have done very well indeed. But while history lauds those rare successes, those that fail are often forgotten; who remembers Pets.com?

So, the natural question for Reunion Gold (CVE:RGD) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of cash burn. For the purposes of this article, cash burn is the annual rate at which an unprofitable company spends cash to fund its growth; its negative free cash flow. We'll start by comparing its cash burn with its cash reserves in order to calculate its cash runway.

See our latest analysis for Reunion Gold

When Might Reunion Gold Run Out Of Money?

A cash runway is defined as the length of time it would take a company to run out of money if it kept spending at its current rate of cash burn. When Reunion Gold last reported its balance sheet in June 2023, it had zero debt and cash worth CA$26m. In the last year, its cash burn was CA$37m. Therefore, from June 2023 it had roughly 9 months of cash runway. That's quite a short cash runway, indicating the company must either reduce its annual cash burn or replenish its cash. You can see how its cash balance has changed over time in the image below.

How Is Reunion Gold's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?

Because Reunion Gold isn't currently generating revenue, we consider it an early-stage business. Nonetheless, we can still examine its cash burn trajectory as part of our assessment of its cash burn situation. The skyrocketing cash burn up 178% year on year certainly tests our nerves. It's fair to say that sort of rate of increase cannot be maintained for very long, without putting pressure on the balance sheet. Clearly, however, the crucial factor is whether the company will grow its business going forward. So you might want to take a peek at how much the company is expected to grow in the next few years.

Even though its increasing cash burn makes us a little nervous, we are compelled to mention that we thought Reunion Gold's cash burn relative to its market cap was relatively promising. Summing up, we think the Reunion Gold's cash burn is a risk, based on the factors we mentioned in this article. On another note, Reunion Gold has we think you should know about.

Of course, So take a peek at this and

In summary

The California Gold Rush redefined how Americans saw failure and success. Today, the state’s economy still benefits from entrepreneurs eager to take big chances.

A sawmill worker discovers gold along the American River near Sacramento in 1848. Soon more than 300,000 people rush to California, eager to take big risks in the hopes of getting rich quick.

This founding myth enshrines risk-taking as a key part of the California Dream. Most miners did not find great wealth, but the Gold Rush shaped California’s early economy, putting it on a path to becoming the world’s sixth largest today. And that acceptance of failure continues to attract the kind of entrepreneurs who keep the state’s economy growing.

“The idea that failure could be almost a prerequisite for success — you had to be willing to take those risks — sank roots very early in the California consciousness,” says H.W. Brands, a University of Texas at Austin historian.

Until then, Americans tended to see success and failure as a sign of character, according to Brands. “If one failed in the East, one had to look inside to ask, ‘What’s wrong with me?’”

But those early California miners looked at success and failure differently.

One prospector reached into a stream and pulled up a precious gold nugget. Another reached into the same stream and pulled up a worthless rock. The one who failed to get rich saw the other’s success as little more than luck.

“And I think that attitude toward risk is probably more distinctive in California than just about anywhere else in the United States,” says Brands.

He argues this Gold Rush mentality runs through California’s history. It helps establish an entertainment industry in Hollywood that today contributes $90 billion in annual economic output to Los Angeles County, according to the 2017 Otis Report on the Creative Economy.

An appetite for risk also fueled the growth of Silicon Valley, turning California transplants like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Elon Musk — CEO of SpaceX and Tesla — into billionaires.

“You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn,” the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs once said in an interview with the Silicon Valley Historical Association. “If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”

Indeed, California has seen plenty of high-profile failures. Prominent companies like San Francisco’s Pets.com flamed out quickly when the dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000s. Silicon Valley lost more than 85,000 high tech jobs in the years that followed.

And for every California success story — think Uber, Youtube or Twitter — there’s a competitor that failed to keep up, like Sidecar, Vidme or App.net.

That graveyard of failure has not deterred a new crop of startup founders from choosing to take their risks in California.

One recently settled into a former rave warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. The blacklight paint and dungeon doors don’t exactly scream “office environment,” but Joe Fernandez says it’s the perfect home for his startup, Joymode.

“It was actually the only place we looked at,” Fernandez says.

Joymode rents fun stuff to people who would rather not own it. The company’s warehouse shelves are stocked with everything from camping gear to movie projectors to giant Jenga blocks.

Joymode, which has about 40 employees, recently raised $14.4 million in a funding round led by South Africa-based tech investor Naspers.

Fernandez grew up in Las Vegas and went to college in Miami. But he says he always wanted to get to California.

“I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to build big things. And it was almost inconceivable to me that you could do that anywhere but California,” he says.

Fernandez originally tried to grow his previous company — the social media influence tracking app Klout — in New York. He says he felt more pressure there to turn a profit fast, to climb to the top and never fall down.

He moved Klout to San Francisco in 2009, primarily to be closer to social media giants Twitter and Facebook. But he says California also just felt like a better place to take a risk.

“In California it was like, anybody could show up, make something crazy, build something important and change the world,” Fernandez. “And if they fail 10 times doing that, that’s OK too.”

In 2014, Lithium Technologies bought Klout for $200 million. Fernandez decided San Francisco wasn’t the right fit for his next company, but he wanted to stay in California. So he launched Joymode in Los Angeles in 2015.

“What we’re doing with Joymode is, we’re trying to challenge the notion of ownership,” Fernandez said. “That’s a really audacious, crazy, likely-to-fail idea. And I think this is the only place you could do that.”

The numbers show that Fernandez’s risk-taking is common here. The Kauffman Index, one long-running measure of American entrepreneurship, puts California first among larger states — ahead of Texas and Florida — when it comes to the percentage of residents starting companies in a given month.

California companies in various industries like software, biotech and entertainment raised nearly $35 billion in venture capital in 2017. That’s by far the largest dollar amount of any state. The Milken Institute’s Kevin Klowden also notes that California leads the country when venture capital investment is broken down as a percent of a state’s overall GDP.

“There are more chances being taken per capita in California in terms of the kinds of investments being done than any other state,” Klowden said.

No state has a higher rate of new companies starting up and older companies failing, according to a recent report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2014 and 2015 shows that about 22.3 percent of companies in California are either newly starting up or going out of business each year.

That many companies going out of business may not sound great for job creation. But ITIF president Rob Atkinson says this “business churn” is actually good for a state’s economy.

“When you look at all 50 states, the states that were losing businesses actually had a higher rate of job growth,” Atkinson says.

That’s because newer, more innovative companies are stepping in to take their place.

The U.S. Census finds that while companies less than 6 years old only account for 11 percent of overall national employment, they’re responsible for 27 percent of job creation. Meanwhile, companies more than 25 years old account for 62 percent of employment but just 48 percent of new jobs.

Joymode CEO Joe Fernandez says California is not perfect. Taxes are high. So is the cost of living.

But, he says, “It’s hard to imagine leaving California. Yes, there’s more people. Yes, it’s more competitive. But there’s also more energy, and there’s also more opportunity. And to me that feels well worth the benefits.”

The California Dream series is a statewide media collaboration of CALmatters, KPBS, KPCC, KQED and Capital Public Radio with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the James Irvine Foundation.