This is a present-day story with historical roots in the gold and silver found in the mountains and high deserts of the old west. Greta Sadler, an attractive woman in her early thirties, returns home to Reno, Nevada after ten adventuresome years on the east coast. On the way home, she encounters Alex Mackenzie, a brainy but rugged, geology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. They become living-together lovers against her father’s wishes. Greta is the only remaining child of the President of the Sadler Corporation, a 90-year old family company that is an icon in northern Nevada. The professor’s younger brother, Quid, shows up penniless and unexpectedly after years in the U.S. Navy and, recently, some time in jail. He finds a bowling alley job in Reno, learns to play blackjack, and eventually meets a wizened 5^thgeneration gold prospector, Frank Adams, who believes he is close to locating the legendary Lost Pants Mine first reported in an 1879 San Francisco newspaper story. That story triggered forty years of searching for the mine by many people, but it remained lost. A hundred years later Alex, Frank and Quid team up to complete the search. Meanwhile, Greta and Alex’s separate stories become more and more interwoven as external events pull each of them into difficult, life-altering decisions and some unexpected consequences. Love, money, ambitions, and family frictions intersect with a desire they each have to prove themselves to themselves and others as they traverse their thirties with nagging, unanswered questions flickering in their heads.  

This is a present-day story with historical roots in the gold and silver found in the mountains and high deserts of the old west. Greta Sadler, an attractive woman in her early thirties, returns home to Reno, Nevada after ten adventuresome years on the east coast. On the way home, she encounters Alex Mackenzie, a brainy but rugged, geology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. They become living-together lovers against her father’s wishes. Greta is the only remaining child of the President of the Sadler Corporation, a 90-year old family company that is an icon in northern Nevada. The professor’s younger brother, Quid, shows up penniless and unexpectedly after years in the U.S. Navy and, recently, some time in jail. He finds a bowling alley job in Reno, learns to play blackjack, and eventually meets a wizened 5^thgeneration gold prospector, Frank Adams, who believes he is close to locating the legendary Lost Pants Mine first reported in an 1879 San Francisco newspaper story. That story triggered forty years of searching for the mine by many people, but it remained lost. A hundred years later Alex, Frank and Quid team up to complete the search. Meanwhile, Greta and Alex’s separate stories become more and more interwoven as external events pull each of them into difficult, life-altering decisions and some unexpected consequences. Love, money, ambitions, and family frictions intersect with a desire they each have to prove themselves to themselves and others as they traverse their thirties with nagging, unanswered questions flickering in their heads.