After a lifetime of gold fever, Dan Rouse finally has hit paydirt owning a store in Tigard specializing in gold-mining equipment, supplies, books – and his deep well of knowledge and know-how.
The year-old location of Prospector’s Treasure Trove at the busy address of 11572 S.W. Pacific Highway is supplying his operation with the traffic it needs to make a profit, Rouse said. Rouse relocated the then-3-year-old shop from a Beaverton location in April 2025.
Now, a wide array of customers frequent the store, from new local enthusiasts of gold panning to sophisticated international traders of mining products. In one half-hour one recent day, he sold a total of $809 worth of gear to three customers in 20 minutes.
Among them was Andy Fatheree, a 51-year-old military retiree who admits that he and his wife came down with gold fever in the spring. It all started when the couple were stopping by the banks of the Rogue River in her home region in southwestern Oregon.
“I was just standing on the bank, and I could see shiny stuff everywhere,” Fatheree said. “I said, ‘Oh, wow. Honey, what is that?’ She’s like, ‘It’s gold.’ I’m like, everybody would do it if it were that easy. That’s not gold. Well, they’re just flakes, but sure enough, little flakes everywhere. You can see them sparkling in the sun. And I was captivated. At that point in time, I knew (gold mining) was something I wanted to do.”
Since then, Fatheree and his wife have spent all the time they can sifting gold from dirt. Fatheree drove from their home in Forest Grove to Tigard to buy gear at Rouse’s store.
One item the couple picked up was the so-called “pay dirt” from Rouse, a concoction he sells in bags and medicine bottles for hobbyists to practice separating gold from soil.
A retired Walgreens manager who worked closely with pharmacists, Rouse sells his pay dirt with labels that read, “Rx PROSPECTOR’S TREASURE TROVE PRESCRIPTION – PAY DIRT – ALLEVIATES THE SYMPTOMS OF GOLD FEVER. Symptoms may include: confusion, paranoia, itchiness, outlandish behavior, obsessive tendencies, low motivation & brain fog. CAUTION: Gold Fever is potentially fatal if not promptly treated. D.R. Rouse.”
It’s a remedy he said he ships “all across the United States.”
Fatheree’s wife literally and figuratively digs the stuff, using an illuminated magnifier and a pair of tweezers to cull gold particles, he said. Over time, their goal is to melt down their take into a ring for her, Fatheree said.
“I’d like to find enough to make my wife a ring one day,” Fatheree said. “But if I ever do that, I’m happy.”
Doing that same thing for Rouse’s wife was the only time Rouse has done anything with the gold he has collected, he said. “She actually wears the gold that I found,” he said.
Though gold has more than doubled in value in recent years, many gold specialists, like Rouse, never mine for money. “Every piece of gold I’ve ever panned I still have,” he said.
His biggest strike? A 10-gram nugget from No Name Creek in southern Oregon worth roughly $1,200 today, he said.
For Rouse, gold mining’s appeal is to be the first to find the element of gold that was forged by dying stars and arrived on Earth aboard meteorites. “It was born in the stars,” Rouse said.
Though Oregon, especially its southwest and northeast corners, is a rich gold source, Oregon has not been known for them, partly because gold that historically was mined there often was exported to ore-buying centers in California or Idaho.
Rouse’s roots as a gold bug date to when he was an Iowa teenager who liked to dig for agates and fossils, then panned for gold in South Dakota on a family camping trip. The trip planted a seed in Rouse, he said.
He focused much of his adult life on career and family. Finally, in 2022, he opened his shop at its first location in Beaverton, selling everything from high-end metal detectors and sluice boxes to hand tools and handbooks.
Metal detectors offer convenience. Instead of driving to a remote wooded creek to pan for gold, users can harness their equipment virtually anywhere. Just around his store, Rouse, 49, found four pre-1959 so-called wheat pennies.
Now, his business – the only store of its kind in the Portland area – is finally profitable, and he’s widely sought out for gold-mining advice. His shop offers monthly courses. He’s president of the Portland Gold Prospectors club. He’s a fountain of gold-prospecting folklore, history and technology. He maintains mining contacts all over the country.
Of his business, he said, “I feel like I’ve been tending to this flower for a long time, and now it’s finally blossoming.”
Along the way, Rouse has treasured seeing the hobby take hold of peers just as it did him, he said.
“At first you’re just out there messing around,” he said. “There are days when I’m just laying on a rock watching the river go by. There are other days when I’m digging to China. It’s going to be in that next shovel full, you know?”
