The gold country I grew up in, with the trees and buildings stripped away. Lidar shows the ground the miners left behind, and the old USGS topo maps mark thousands of the shafts, adits, prospect pits and tailings piles they dug.
The Mother Lode is a line of hard-rock gold deposits about 190 km long and 1.5 to 6 km wide, running along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It follows the Melones Fault Zone, the seam where an old volcanic island arc was jammed onto North America in the Jurassic. Later, in the Early Cretaceous, gold-bearing quartz veins formed along that seam, some of them 15 m thick.
Miners came at the gold three ways, one after another: panning and sluicing the surface gravels from 1848, washing whole hillsides down with water cannons from the 1850s, and following the quartz veins underground from the 1860s on. Columbia is the first two kinds. The Harvard pit at Jamestown is the modern version of the third, dug from the top instead of tunnelled.
Relief composite is the all-purpose view: lit from every direction at once, so no slope hides in shadow. Local relief subtracts the big landforms and keeps the small ones, warm for bumps and blue for hollows. Dumps and pits stand out there. Sky-view is darker wherever the ground is enclosed: pits, ditches and the slots between limestone pinnacles.
The mine symbols come from USGS topographic maps, most of them drawn decades ago. A symbol marks what a surveyor saw then. Some of these features are gone, and many sit on private land. Please look from the road or the trail.
Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program, streamed from the public point-cloud archive on AWS (surveys CA_SierraNevada_12_B22, flown 2021–22, and CA_CalaverasTuolumne_2011). Mine features: USGS USMIN (prospect- and mine-related features on USGS topographic maps) and the USGS Mineral Resources Data System. Geology: Mother Lode (Wikipedia), Macrostrat. Relief methods after Hesse (2010), Zakšek et al. (2011), Yokoyama et al. (2002) and Kokalj & Somrak (2019), via Project Kiva.