There’s something undeniably American about searching the American Southwest for gold. As a young man, Mark Twain traveled to the Nevada Territory and, among other adventures, became a gold and silver prospector.
He wrote about the thrill of a strike: “You sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest — and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold.”
Like so many throughout history, Twain’s search for gold wasn’t about the riches—it was about adventure. One of Twain’s contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson, put it this way: “The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.”
If you ask Dan Torongo, that’s it exactly.
Most of the time, Torongo is an engineer with his own firm in Brighton, Michigan. He specializes in gas and diesel aftertreatment systems and components, in clean air. But his family caught the gold bug as far back as the 1970s and has long held claims in the Chuckwalla Mountains of California.
Hellbound and Down 