Gold Panning

After you have all the material inside your gold pan, make sure you wet the entire contents of the pan right away. Doing this will allow the gold to settle down to the bottom of the pan. 

If you are practicing by using a bucket, tub or some sort of container, put the pan under the surface of the water and make sure you cover it completely with the water. If you are doing this in an actual stream or river bank, put the gold pan in an area where there is shallow water but where the water is deep enough so as to cover the entire pan. One thing you should be careful about is that you do not pick a place in a stream or river bank that has too strong of a current because this will only make the job more difficult and you are risking losing your gold. If you are in an area where the water is simply too deep for placing the pan in safely, then sit down, hold the pan between your legs and hold onto it securely. Doing this might not seem like the easiest thing to do at first but when you are in this type squatting position you will be able to do so with the back of your upper thighs and this will allow you to hold the pan and will not allow it to tip forward. It is a good idea to invest in some good rubber boots when doing this kind of work, as they will help to keep your feet dry. A lot of times when panning people place their feet inside the water and sit on a rock or squat down. If you do not have boots you will need to be careful about how you squat if you are trying not to wet your feet. It’s highly recommended to have boots though.

After you have placed your pan under the water completely, put your hands inside the material down to the bottom of the pan and mix the contents very well, as if allowing the water to mix through everything. If you have any big rocks or roots inside the pan, wash them well and then discard them from the pan. Be very careful though to not lose any of the smaller contents inside of the pan.

If you notice there are big pieces of talc or clay in the pan, don’t discard them quite so quickly. Make sure you wash and squeeze them down to where they become dissolved completely and of course make sure when doing this and the above, to do it directly over the pan so that you can avoid any loss of gold in the open water. The reason you should dissolve the clay and talc is because they have a tendency of gathering the gold that is in your pan in a very similar way to mercury, (they are actually called “gold robbers”). If you throw them out without having dissolved them completely, you may just be throwing out a good amount of your gold back into the stream and it will then be impossible to recover.

There are people that shake the pan before the material inside the pan gets completely wet but this is not useful because it will only cause some mud to flow up in the pan. Before shaking the pan you will need to make sure that the material inside of it is completely wet and this process will only take a few seconds. After you have eliminated the larger rocks and excess amount of debris from the pan are you ready to learn about what to do next.