I have been given the opportunity to maybe teach you guys how to pan some gold and find some gold. I’ve been prospecting, my family been prospecting for many years. So we have a good mine just up the road. And hopefully today we can go out and find a little bit of Gold and anybody can go out and find with just a gold pan. That’s my goal just to find some gold, get it in the pan and show you guys what to do so let’s have some fun.

We’ve got a stream here and we know it’s a gold bearing stream we are in an area that’s produced a lot of gold, so nobody has mined in this section right here so today I want to go up and check out different elevations and see what we can find for finding some gold lets have some fun.

As you can see I’m not going to dig right off, right at the bottom of the stream bed. We’ve got this hill that’s sloped off here and its showing me gravel from when the stream used to be up there. It may have been hundreds of thousands of years ago that stream was up there and it left those gold bearing gravels. So the first place I’m going to try is up on the face of there where I know I can be closer to the old bed rock. Now ill carry my material down to the stream and will pan it and see what we get. Hopefully we find some color.

So the reason I chose this spot on the hill is because of these rounded rocks. This is telling me that sometime in the ancient past that gold bearing stream below us was here and its left these washed and gravel here. So its left these gravel here there is also a good chance that it left some gold and I don’t have to try to dig really deep in the stream below. SO my best chance for prospecting is on the side of this hill. So hopefully we can find some gold and have some fun.

So basically what I’m gonna do here I don’t wanna carry all these big rocks down to the stream off the hill and this material dries so I’m gonna classify some of it. There are couple ways you can do it:

If I don’t have a bucket, I just go a pan and a classifier ill just bring it up the hill with me take some of our material throw it in our classifier leave our big rock on the hill *shakes classifier* and there’s our material to take down in our pan. Now I don’t have to carry all these big rocks down to the stream if your material is wet you may have to carry some of the rock down. There you go one simple stream one simple pan one little shovel and u can be off panning gold on your own.

Also brought a bucket, that way I can carry more material off the hill at one time if I been backpacking prospecting But today we are close enough that I’m gonna carry a bucket. So what we will do is classify all our material into the bucket. If you’re in big nugget country check out the top of your screen and make sure u r throwing any gold off and we r basically just gonna fill this bucket till we r comfortable with the weight of it to carry.

Classify our big stones off and get our material to take down to stream in the pan. I’ll take a little bit of material for multiple places when I am first sampling I don’t just dig one hole , I’ll take a scoop from here a scoop from there and a scoop behind that big rock classify it down and take it down. It gives me a more random area than just digging in one spot cause gold might not be in just one spot so it just gives us an opportunity to cover more ground.

So basically we r using our classifier to keep the big rocks out of the gold pan. So what we are going to do is put our shovel in and move it around with our fingers and you can spin it or you can bounce it which basically makes all the material fall through our classifying holes. I’m gonna classify as much material as I want to carry off the hill then we’ll take it down to the stream then we’ll pan it out and see if we’ve got any gold in there. Hopefully we find some colour.

So we’ve got our classified material that we’ve packed off the hill. When you are first starting out, try not to put too much in the pan, start out with a little bit say a quarter of the pan then we will take it into the water and see what we find. Hopefully we can find some colour in it. So when you start out get your pan underwater, get that material suspended we want all that light material just suspended under water and that will allow the gold to fall through it to the bottom of the pan. So basically we just want to swirl that material around.

Get that fine sand. If you put your finger in it, you can feel that that sand is kinda floating. It’s in suspension, and that’s what we want. That allows our heavier, the gold, to fall out to the bottom of the pan. So we’ll just keep doing that for a second. We’ll get that material where we’re confident that gold has settled to the bottom. Then we’re gonna bring our material forward and then we’re just gonna start sweeping, using the water to sweep that light material off of the top. We’ll go back and forth. We don’t wanna throw that material outa the pan; you never wanna throw it out. We’re always using that water to gently sweep that material off of the top. We’ll do that for a little bit, then we’re gonna bring our material back in the pan, get it suspended again in the water. Slowly bring it forward. Then we’re gonna sweep, more of that light material of the top.

The more you do it the better you’re going to get at it. The first pan will take you a while the second pan will be a little faster and within a day or so you will probably be really good at it. We also have a technique where we can go side to side, we are sweeping that material off gently side to side. And we are going to bring our material back swirl it in the pan bring it back forward. We are going to try to make our gold concentrate right in the corner of the pan, the opposite side of this, right in the corner is where we want to put that gold, we want to make it stay there. We gonna to bring it back again, SUSPEND IT and then gently sweep it off again. You can see we already knocked about ¾ of this material out of the pan, so we are just gently gonna do it. Now when you start getting rocks pilling up in your pan like that even though we classified it there still some rocks in there some 3 inch rocks. So , what we do is we will gently pull those to the side and make sure they are clean make sure you don’t have any nuggets in them, because if you go through all this work and you have a big piece of nugget in there you don’t want to throw it out, but it shouldn’t be on top. So we will stratify it again, then we will start sweeping it off gently, bring it back suspend it, and start sweeping it off. Haul our big rocks out make sure there is no gold in them and just kick them off. You can see we are down to the last little bit, Now a mistake a lot of people will make they will get down to right there and become impatient ], there is still a lot of material a lot of light material in the pan and they will start to swirl it around to see what they got . Be just a little patient, you know, get it right down to the last stuff, don’t leave too much material in the pan because you want to look and I know it’s hard because you want to see what under there . Be just be patient keep sweeping that material off and hopefully there is gold at the bottom of your pan. You see we are just gently washing the light material off the top we aren’t trying to throw it out we are using the water to wash it out. Now we can either make it go straight and wash it off or you can make your pan a little longer and tip it under there with the side to side action. You can see that material is going back and forth and actually makes your pan a little longer. But whatever technique fits you the best, whatever you feel comfortable with, or a combination of both, it doesn’t really matter.

We are going to wash a little bit more of that light stuff off , get it in the corner , little bit more of it off , we are getting down to the goodies now , all that’s left is the heaviest stuff in there. So one more time back and we will knock a few more of those tans off. So now we are going to swirl our heavies out of the way and look there so fine gold not a lot it’s not worth a lot of money but tell you what there 10 colours in there is. Really fine colours and that’s what we are looking for right there, that yellow gold, that’s what we are after.

We’ve tapped our gold up into the side so it’s clear of most of the sand. Now we are gonna take our guzzler bottle we want water in it. So we are gonna put some clean water in our bottle just fill it right up. Put the l’d back on and now we are ready to pull our gold out of the pan. We can use the water a couple of ways:

We’ll take with it full of water and squeeze the bottle in and we will go over where our gold is and there it is its picking it right up. We will give it a few more taps clear some more gold out and we will use our sucker bottle to suck those little pieces of gold right up. If you see one over here or over there just take your bottle and it will suck it right up and there we go. We’ve now successfully sucked the gold out of the pan.

Now our gold’s in here. Next thing we do, give it a few taps make sure our gold’s down in the bottom of the bottle we take our little vile and open it up and I’ll show you here: We’ll take and we’ll pull our straw that’s in our both down into the bottom so it’s in the cap and none of the straw is sticking up through just make sure it’s to that point, then we will put our cap back on. And there we go: those little bitty pieces of gold are now in our jar.

Another very handy thing with this style pan are these riffles built in the back of the pan. Those are designed so you can pan a little quicker without hardly having any chance of losing gold in it so ill spin it around to the riffle side now, I’m gonna to liberate my material, get it suspended in the water, get it over to that side and now any gold that on that side of the pan and going up it can’t get away from us because its trapped in those riffles on the back side and we will still just sweep our material off the top. We will still just sweep sweep then we will bring our material up, knock it down get it suspended and do the same thing we will use our water to sweep that off. you can see how these riffles are holding that material in the corner , it’s very helpful , especially when you are starting to pan or learning to pan, cuz it give you confidence that any gold that’s stuck to the bottom you aren’t gonna throw out so use them. Now we are bringing our material out, we are gonna take those rocks, the big rock we know that there no gold in and we just gonna gently take those out, and getting down deeper and we will bring our material back, we will suspend it again work it around, and then let that water sweep that light material off, we are just gonna gently sweep it out just the light stuff bring our material back again, swirl it and gently sweep it off. Now when I get down to this point, these riffles are helping me old the gold in but there are also holding the light material in now. So when I get to this point ill bring my material to the bottom of the pan, I’ll turn my pan around to the smooth side now we are gonna finish the last of our pan, so we’ve knocked most of our pan down with the riffles, now we are gonna finish it up over on the smooth side, you can see the black sand starting to show up.

So we want to slow down a little bit, we will take here and knock these rocks out, we will bring it back and get that material suspended , get the light to the top , when you are doing this your light material is coming to the surface and your heavy material is falling to the bottom. So we will bring the light stuff to the top, and we will gently sweep it off, we are just using the water as a broom. We are sweeping the light stuff off, go down a little ways, do it again.

We want that gold right in the corner of that pan, we are gonna sweep it again. You can see the heavy material starting to show up , so watch with your eyes over on the side and make sure you are throwing any fine gold out when you get to this point, because we are at the very last of our pan. So you don’t want to pan it all the way down, and then throw your gold out at the end so just gently going to knock it down , slowly, sweeping the material off, we will just take and pick those rocks out. Those bigger rocks that are in there and we know they aren’t gold bearing so we are just going to discard them with our finger. We are just going to keep sweeping it down. Take it down far enough that you don’t have a lot of material left over in your pan, and then we are going to bring our pan up and have a look. We are going to swirl it around there’s a piece of gold showing up just some really fine gold but no matter how fine it is gold is gold. There we go as you guys can see we go 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 11 colour in the pan.

So we just came over her to another spot and we gonna try some of this bench gravel here. It’s out on a fan over in our neighbor’s mine. We will see if we can get some colour in the pan. We will once again get all our material suspended in water and that will allow our light stuff to come to the surface and heavy to drop, so if there is any gold in it, it will drop to the bottom of the pan. So we will just get our material suspended, get that material dropped then we are just going to sweep it off, not push it out just sweep our light stuff off the top. Once again, get it suspended we don’t throw our material we just sweep it off gently sweep it off. Just slowly working down the same procedure over and over again, just keep sweeping it off we get any rocks in there we just clean them up make sure they are clean and throw them out of the pan. Using the ruffle side of the pan right now I’m going to spin it in just a moment, bring it up again suspend it. Now, I’m going to bring that material over to the other side of the pan and it’s the same thing, we are just going to slowly sweep it out and hopefully when we get down to the bottom there is gonna be some colour in there. Just be patient with it and don’t throw the material out of the pan. See the heavy’s are starting to show up now, black sands , we will slowly take that light sand off the top of our heavy’s, get it just a little bit father and have a look at it and see what we got for colour. So you want to shake it around and suspend it and the lights come to the top and our heavy’s go deep again. Now we have a look and see what we got, see here gold’s starting to show up in the corner right at the tip of my finger and that’s what we are after it is not a big piece but its gold in the pan.

See it right there, there are some more little guys right on the edge, that the best piece there also more along the edge. It nothing to write home about but its gold in the pan. This is my brother derrick he’s been prospecting and mining back and forth in this country for decades now so he probably knows this area about as good as anybody.

-Take a pan, prospect around a little bit, it your own gold around here so we have to pan it here and there and see what we can find out, F-See what you get.

D- A little colour right there still a bit little chunk and I think a couple more just showed up there too. Little bitty guys. There’s gold in there.

(Little boy)- Make sure all the dirt is out of the sifter and what you want to do you want to get all the material out first. Just want to go slowly back and forth to get the big material off and get to the finer material you want to get the sandy stuff out. You just wanna sweep the light material out of the pan. And once you get most of the material out you will start to see black sand, and that’s what you wanna see when you are getting close to see your gold. If there is colour you want to look just around the edges of the black sand, like right there and there and there. There are about 6 colours in this pan.

Ok when you get your new pan these pans are plastic pans they used to be steel years ago but they replaced them with plastic .Plastic of course is made with oil and oil and gold don’t like each other very much a lot of these pans will have a little film of oil and they will be slick so I usually do when I get a new pan is take some sand or gravel whatever I can get, a really fine emery and I’ll take it down to the water and ill scrub it and it’s just like washing a dish in the you just take a little sand work it around in there and do all your services and not only will it take the oil off but it will rough that surface up a little bit and gold kind of likes a rough surface and in the old days we used to burn our steel pan with torch till they were blue and then set them outside and rust them up a little bit and make that rough surface you can get that done here with some real fine sand and gravel , water and you just go around it, give it a good scrub and it may take a few times to get it to work in the way you want to so.

Little colours, not a lot but there is some colour in it, it about 20 mash piece right there so not great (let me knock it down a little bit more) not great but it’s got some gold it. It’s hard to see it in this water, you can use any water to pan, the clearer it is the easier it pans, and you can see what you’re after. This fine colur is all we got there.

So guys, it’s been a fun day I hoped you learned something, something on panning and something on where to look for gold and if you live in a part of the country where you don’t have gold or you’ve never panned before, get yourself a pan, just some sand, some beach sand and out some bob’s in it and practice you can practice right at the tub in your house. With practice and the right place you can find yourself some gold like that. The most important thing is have fun. This isn’t just something to go panning it’s also something to get you out in an environment like this, some absolute beautiful places and beyond that it gives you an opportunity to find some gold. Take your friends, take your kids, go out gold panning and most of all have fun.

Thank you. Another thing guys in our world today Kids don’t get out enough, they sit there and play video games they sit on the couch, they don’t get out to see a beautiful place like this and also just take them out, prospecting for the chance to find some gold may be what they need to get them out the couch and go out and have fun because nothing is better than this just look around.

Another good this about prospecting is fishing gif you are going out fishing a lot of times just take a gold pan with you never know the stream you’re in has gold and fish so if you’re going fishing I always have a pan.