Nuggets of News Blog 

A gold pan is the simplest and most basic prospecting tool and is one of the oldest types of gold concentrating equipment. Plastic pans are recommended over the steel pans used by the 49ers. Plastic is light weight, so when you add water, dirt, and gravel to your pan, your arms won't get as tired compared to using a steel pan. And they do not rust or conflict with the use of a magnet.  Size, color, and shape are really a matter of personal preference. You might want to have a couple different sizes of gold pans on hand (10 inch, 12 inch, and 14 inch are the most popular). Plastic pans generally come in green, black, and blue. The color doesn't effect performance, but green is the most common. The bright blue cone-shaped batea is the newest type of gold pan to hit the U.S. market. Gold panning kits are often the most economical way to purchase gold pans and classifiers (often called sifting pans) and other small accessories all in one convenient box.   

The point of panning is to shake the gravels, allowing the gold to settle downward and then to wash the lighter material off the top. When all the lighter material has been removed, only the heavy concentrates will remain in the bottom of the pan, including, hopefully, some gold! With a little practice, anyone can learn to pan for gold. Buying a bag of gold-bearing paydirt to use over and over again for practice in a tub is one way to  get good at panning without ever leaving home. Gold panning “how to” steps founds here.

When outdoors in a stream digging gravels, remove big pebbles and stones from your pan before you begin.  When looking for a place to pan, look for cracks and crevices in the bedrock of a stream (bedrock is a general term for the solid rock that sits under all sand and gravel) because gold can get caught and accumulate  in cracks. Gold moves during periods of flooding and can drop out of fast-moving water into crevices. Mossing for gold is another technique that is easy to do with a pan. The green moss that grows on rocks near the edge of a stream often has a surprising capacity to catch and hold fine-sized gold. It’s almost like the matting on the bottom of a sluice (often called “miner’s moss”). Gold can get caught in the tendrils and structure of the moss and while the gold recovered from moss is tiny, sometimes there is a significant amount of it. Take the moss off the rocks from a spot close to the stream and at a level where, when the stream is in flood stage, the moss will be underwater. Carefully peel the moss off the rocks, breaking it up and washing out all the sand and silt. The material recovered from the moss can then be carefully panned out.

Gold concentrations are spotty, even in known gold-bearing areas, so sample and test often. Be sure to move on with your gold pan and don’t stay in one spot less you have good results. If you find a spot with fairly large amounts of gravel that yields good gold, then it’s time to bring in a sluice box. A sluice is simple to operate and have been used all across the world for thousands of years. After you’ve mastered gold panning and are ready to increase the amount of gravel you can process, a sluice box is your next step up from hand panning. Sluices come in a variety of sizes, most with gold-catching matting in the bottom that you need to clean up at the end of the day. Other models such as the Gold Well Vortex Drop Riffle Sluice, has no matting or carpets and uses vortex technology to catch fine gold.

The basic sluice box is set in a stream and runs off the natural flow of water in the rivers. An experienced prospector might be able to pan up to a cubic yard of gravel per day, yet you can run that same cubic yard of gravel through a sluice box in less than an hour. Surface flood-type gold or gravel bars on inside bends of streams can both be very productive with just a simple sluice. It’s not too difficult to operate because it is fairly forgiving of the surges of gravel that drop in with each shovel full. To work properly, a sluice needs a good amount of water. The simple rule is just enough water flow should be going in the feed gravels to move the material through and out of the sluice in a reasonable time, allowing only a little of the heavier materials to build up behind the riffles. With too little water, the incoming material simply piles up as the rocks stop and get stuck in the sluice box. If the flow is too fast, fine gold will be blown out with the gravels. The optimum water flow is just what it takes to keep things clear in a reasonable time — no more than 20 or 30 seconds. The riffles should not become fully buried, with the entire bed of the sluice blanketed over by gravel. For maximum recovery, the flow should be a little turbulent, yet not frothy in any way. Excessive turbulence results in poor fine gold recovery.

As with the pan, the real secret of successful prospecting is not in operating the equipment, but in the skill of finding those natural gold catches. Learning to read the river or stream and recognize the places where gold might accumulate and then sampling those places to see if you are correct is the best technique. Inside bends, behind boulders or bedrock outcrops, and inches above the stream flow are all good places that you might sample, but there are plenty of other possibilities as well. The sluice and the gold pan may be among the most basic prospecting tools, but they are tried and true ways of finding some good gold!