How To Pan For Gold

When choosing a place to begin gold panning, find a spot where the water is not too deep and moves just swiftly enough to keep the water clear. Clear vision is vital so you can see what you're doing. Don't pan in fast moving water because gold could potentially get washed right out of your pan! Wear rubber boots or hip waders.

Remember, large nuggets are very rare so you will recover mostly fine gold with an occasional "picker" nugget. Place a small amount of material in your pan — maybe 1/4 to 1/2 pan full at first. Submerge the gold pan just below its

rim and shake side to side or around and around fairly vigorously. Be careful not to wash a lot of material out of your pan while doing this. The heavy material and black sands will work their way down to the bottom of your pan while the lighter and useless materials will rise to the top and can be discarded.

Move your pan slowly up and down in the water so that the water itself is washing off the lighter sands and gravel. Keep the material semi-liquid and continue to use the action of the water to wash the lighter material out of the pan until you see the darker more heavy material coming to the surface. Sweep just a little material off each time — don't get a huge tidal wave going in your pan or you are sure to lose your gold. Continue slowly sweeping this material out of your pan with water.

As you get further down in the material in your pan, notice how the heavier material turns darker and darker. Notice how it is increasingly more difficult to wash this material out. Resist the urge to wash harder. Continue sweeping the material out little by little until you have almost just black sand. Luckily, gold stands out well against this dark background.

Use a gold magnet to quickly separate the gold from the black magnetic sand concentrates. Place the magnet to the bottom side of your plastic pan and move it in a small circular motion with the pan slightly tilted. This will quickly remove the gold from the magnetic black sands.

Use a snuffer (snifter) bottle to quickly suck up any gold you see. A snuffer bottle is a small flexible clear plastic bottle with a small tube attached to its end. Squeezing the snifter bottle creates a vacuum inside, and submerged gold from the pan can be easily sucked up through the tube and saved by releasing the bottle and moving it around the edges of your pan showing gold. However, because time is often limited at the river, I recommend you use your time to actually dig, pan and find gold — use the time at home to finish the clean up and separate your fine gold from the black sands. Take your black sands home with you where you can pan in a controlled environment and go over each pan several times with a catch basin underneath to be sure you got all you can.

Back and forth, round and round, or side to side motion — it's up to you! As you practice, you'll find there are as many methods to panning as there are gold panners. After a while you will find your best technique comes automatically. Your panning will become swifter and your gold losses will become smaller.

Click here for Gold Panning Kits that will get you started having fun and getting the gold!

Quick Start Techniques: How to Pan for Gold

1. Fill pan about half full of gravel, small rocks, and sand collected from the stream bed

2. Put the pan under the water's surface, break up large lumps of clay or dirt, and remove stones

3. Continue to hold the pan level under the water with your hands on opposite sides, and tilt the pan forward, away from your body, and down slightly. Rotate and shake it side to side to let gravel and sand dribble out the front. Pick out the rocks.

4. Repeat step 3 several times until most of the material is removed, leaving less than a cup of fine-grained dark material overlain with a thin layer of light material at the bottom of your pan.

5. Rotate the pan in a circular motion. Notice how the water separates lighter material from heavier.

6. Stop rotating and hopefully you'll see a flash in the dark material remaining in the bottom of your pan! Use tweezers to retrieve the gold and place in a vial for safe-keeping.