GALICE, Ore. For 16 years, Geoff Garcia mined the ancient riverbed that holds the gold on his Last Chance claim.

But now the workhorse of his business, his trusty old bulldozer nicknamed Cable Mabel, sits idle until he figures out how to mine without being busted again for sluicing mud into southern Oregon's Rogue River.

Garcia was fined $5,045 by the state Department of Environmental Quality following misdemeanor convictions for discharging muddy water without a permit and degrading state waters.

''It's a big gamble to begin with,'' Garcia lamented. ''Is the gold there? Is the price going to be right? Is the equipment going to fall apart? Then you add that somebody might drive up and say, 'You can't mine anymore.'''

After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974 with a geology degree, he labored 5,000 feet underground in an Idaho silver mine and tramped the creeks of Alaska's Brooks Range as a field geologist.

He moved to Galice in 1977 to mine between summer field seasons in Alaska. The mine was a reliable source of cash when consulting work as a geologist got slow.

Living on his claim with his wife and three kids, Garcia is part of the self-reliant tradition that settled the West.

Now he figures people like their gold miners safely in the past, building parks, ski resorts and golf courses that memorialize operations that could land a miner in jail today.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management culled 60 percent of the 42,000 mining claims in Oregon last fall and stopped granting patents outright ownership of profitable claims pending reform of the 1872 Mining Act.

BLM was worried that requirements that claim holders do $100 a year of assessment work often amounted to more environmental damage than real mining, said Pat Geehan, deputy state BLM director for miner

al resources.

Oregon has toughened regulations on the new heap-leach process where cyanide trickles through piles of low-grade ore to draw out gold that could never be mined by the old 49ers.