Welcome to Litsy!

If you haven't seen a Discovery Channel gold-hunting show, you might picture a gold prospector as a relic of the Wild West: a TNT-toting, bearded old man wildly swinging a pick on the hunt for nuggets, guided by old maps, superstition, legends and instinct. It's still predominantly a man's world, and still often fanatical, but these days the golden dream attracts people from all walks of life and 25-year-old Tyler Mahoney is leading the way. Hailing from Kalgoorlie, Tyler is a fourth-generation gold miner and has seen up close how gold fever makes normally reasonable people do the most irrational things. From mysterious corpses in the desert to huge heists, back-stabbings to life-changing finds, Tyler unearths hair-raising stories and legends from Australia's gold prospecting past and present, while sharing her experience forging her way in a traditionally male domain. She writes candidly about the push and pull of the gold world in her own life, as well as her struggles with bipolar disorder -- a mental-health challenge that in some ways parallels the feast-or-famine nature of prospecting itself.