Anybody remember the movie “Paint Your Wagon”?  “Gold, beautiful gold!  Got a dream boys, got a song….  Where am I goin’ I don’t know, When will I get there, I can’t ain’t certain.”  I know that movie got me thinkin’ about it.  I never laughed so hard in my life as I did when No Name City sank into all the tunnels.  What a riot!  The lure of the yellow metal brought easterners across the Great American Desert in search of wealth and settled this part of the country in record time. Before that, the Spanish searched for and found enough metals of all kinds to set death traps to keep anyone else out if their mines were found.   And, they are still there and working.  Whether you are just starting out or are an old hand, gold prospecting is fun and exciting, and gold panning is an essential part of the process.  The thing you want to learn is how not to lose the gold out of your pan, and learning to do that will take some practice.

How does gold panning work?

Do you remember learning about specific gravity in school? Specific gravity is the relationship between water and everything else. That is what makes gold panning work. (Yeah, all the kids complain that we have to do SCIENCE in the summer when my wife and I teach panning at the fairs)  When you put some material in your pan with water, the gold will be the heaviest thing in the pan.  If you are in the river, take your #2 shovel and dig some material from a likely place and place it in your pan. You can use a classifier that is placed over your pan to classify the bigger rocks out or not as you like.  Make sure to wash the bigger rocks off and discard them before you begin panning the rest of the material if you do not use a classifier.

What’s next?

How do you keep from dumping the gold out of the pan?  You need to get the gold to the bottom of the pan and wash the sand and dirt out. To do this you need to put the pan under water and get all the material in the pan moving around. Most people learning to pan are too careful when they move the material in the pan. There is no right or wrong way to pan. You need to learn which method works the best for you. What I recommend starting out is to hold both sides of the pan and move it from side to side quickly, 2 times per second and 4 inches in length. This will loosen the sand and allow the gold to settle to the bottom of the pan and is called stratification.  Now how do you get the sand out? The second motion is to wash some sand out of the pan. To do this you stop the side to side movement and, under the water, move the pan front to back bringing water into the pan on the forward motion, and floating the lighter materials off on the backward motion. It is almost a dipping and pulling back motion. (Clear as mud now, huh?) This is a bigger, slower motion so get your arms and moving!  Make sure to have the water wash just the top layer of sand out of the pan.  Don’t let the material in the bottom of the pan move. REMEMBER, ALL THIS WORKS UNDER THE WATER.  Water is your friend! 

Well, those are the only two motions you need to make.  Stratify and wash.  As you remove more material you will need to keep tipping the pan more. (Steepen your angle) Each time you shake you will bring additional lighter sand to the top to wash off.  REMEMBER to stratify (side to side) twice as much as you wash (front to back) and you will save the gold.  When you get down to a small amount of material it is time to see how much gold you have found. If you are fortunate you will be able to see nuggets! All the rest of the gold may be dust or flour gold, but that isn’t bad.  That fine flour gold can be cast into bands for rings.  Take the pan with a little water in it and swirl the water around in the pan slowly. The gold will start to show as you wash the black sand off of it. Remember the gold is heavy. It will be under all of the black sand on the very bottom of the pan. If you shook and washed correctly it will stay in the pan.  Tap the 12:00 o’clock (top) of the pan with your thumb (my brother-in-law showed me that one) or fingers hard enough to make the gold jump farther into the side and suck it up with your pipette or sucker bottle for further cleaning at home. 

To further clean your gold at home, you will put all of your black sand and gold that you have in your sucker bottle of vial back into your pan with water and swirl and tap until you have the black sand worked off.  You can use a magnet to pull off some of the black sand, but ONLY WHILE THE SAND IS DRY, and definitely save anything you pull off in another pan ‘cause you may trap small particles of gold between the pieces of black sand.  REMEMBER to place a piece of paper between the magnet and the sand, or you will have iron particles all over your magnet that you may never be able to completely remove.

Sounds like a lot, huh?  Well, I bet you didn’t learn to do anything you are good at in 5 minutes.  It takes a bit of practice, and a hands-on demonstration, sometimes, to get it all right.  But practicing anything makes you get better.  Lots of people try to skip learning to use a pan, and lots of people have gold trapped in their black sand that they can’t get out only because they won’t take the time to learn to use the pan.  Placer mining begins and ends with the pan.  When you have learned to keep the small stuff you will increase the amount of gold you find simply by being able to keep it, and by finding the better places to use whatever equipment you have.  A spot may look good, but someone else may have thought so to.  Without the test pans you may work a long time without finding much.

Practice

            You can learn to pan at home. What you will need.

1.      Gold pan

2.      Tube of water

3.      Some BB’s or lead shot  to simulate the gold  (flatten the lead

Then Practice- Practice- Practice-

Different types of gold pans

There are many different types of gold pans you can use. What I recommend are the plastic pans with grooves or ribs in them. They are made in many sizes and colors. The size I use is 18” diameter and 4” deep with 4 to 7 grooves. The larger the pan the more material it will hold which should mean more gold.  However, they can also be heavy and more difficult to work, which could mean less gold.  The 18” is usually a good size for everyone to start with.  Color is up to you, but the black ones can make it harder to see the black sand and get it separated from the gold.  They are good for general panning but not as good for separation.  I prefer the blue colors, my wife the green. 

Why is it important to know how to pan?

Gold panning is the easiest and fastest way to test an area to find out if gold is present. That is why the old prospectors always had gold pans with them where ever they went. They tested like we do today to locate an area that has gold. I have heard of people setting up a dredge or high banker and processing material all day only to find out there was no gold there. Why not test an area first. The old prospectors probably did not use just a pan unless it was very rich. They would test to locate the gold then build long toms or sluices to process a lot of material. There is a lot of gold still left out there to find. Go out and find some for yourself.  Where you say?  Start where they found it before.  Be careful of private property and posted areas.  Just get out there.  It’s loads of fun.

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