Ever since the days of the 1849 California Gold Rush, prospectors, treasure hunters and vacationers have flocked to the west coast to hunt for gold. They use gold pans, sluice boxes, metal detectors, dredges and drywashers in their prospecting from Canada to Mexico.
Recreational gold prospecting and gold panning has today become a popular hobby. A simple gold pan is effective in detecting and recovering small amounts of gold from a streambed and letting you know where to set up a sluice box.
Metal detectors can be used to detect larger nuggets in dry desert washes, and with the right coil, in those rare running streams in gold bearing desert areas. Drywashers are also used to great advantage in recovering gold in these same arid areas. In places with running streams,
inexpensive light weight sluice boxes are often used to increase the amount of material being washed for gold .
Where To Look...
There are classic stories of ignorant prospectors following their burros into some very unlikely places and striking it rich. Perhaps the secret to finding gold is only known by burrors. Could be burrors are smart after all!
The old 49'ers had a funny but very good saying that is still valid today..."gold is where you find it!"
Very young or very old mountains are likely places for gold. Mountains of tertiary or quaternary age are good. This means that in the United States most all mountains west of the Mississippi are good candidates, especially the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. Gold is mixed with rocks formed under great heat and pressure. The rock is worn away over many years by wind and rain. The gold then becomes seperated from the rock and is washed down into streams and rivers. Being very heavy it gathers along banks and behind boulders.
This kind of mining is called "placer" mining and the stream deposits are called "placers".
A good clue in a dry wash is black sand. Gold is often mixed in with black sand. The black sand is called magnetite and is magnetic. A small magnet will pick up a huge amount of it. However, if the black sand is very evenly distributed, the yield of gold will be poor. But if it shows in sharply defined layers or bands then the gold may also be concentrated in these strata and bands.
Placer Nugget Prices $$$
A small one ounce placer nugget, the type found in a stream bed, or in the riffles of a drywasher, can be worth many times the current gold price to jewelry makers and collectors. I'm told that currently, a one ounce gold nugget is worth somewhere between $2,000 to $4,000!!
A good gold pan is always important no matter what type of gold prospecting you are doing at the moment. If you are in the southwestern deserts of the U.S., a gold pan is necessary to "pan out" the material from behind the riffles of your drywasher. In gold producing mountains with running streams, your gold pan will help in locating the correct area in the stream to set up your sluice box, so that you won't have to haul material any great distance over boulders and old tree stumps to get to pay dirt.
How To Pan
A good way to learn how to pan for gold and use the gold pan correctly, is to first condition your pan (see below). Then fill your pan about half full of sand along with 5 small lead BB's. Mix it all together, add water almost to the top, and shake it hard. The shaking is important as it causes the lead BB's (or gold) to settle to the bottom of the pan.
Now practice swirling the water around in the pan and letting a small amount of the water & sand mixture slip over the edge with each swirl. Keep doing this until you see the BB's at the bottom of the pan. Do not worry about how long this takes, because you will get faster and faster with practice. Now count the BB's, there should still be five! Practice this a few times and you will be ready for an adventure on the stream, river, or out in the desert with your trusty gold pan and drywasher.
Conditioning Your Gold Pan
What most people don't realize is that new plastic gold pans have not been conditioned for panning. When the pans are manufactured there is a wax residue and possibly some oils left on all plastic pans thanks to the molding process. Keene Engineering Company recommends cleaning a steel gold pan with the solvent acetone and fine steel wool, but with a modern plastic gold pan, using something like Simple Green cleaner is a much safer alternative and works just as well. Keep cleaning your pan until the water in it wets the bottom and sides and doesn't bead or puddle up. Try it! It works!
Important Panning Tip
Here's a good tip and it's what I do. I keep a small bottle of dish soap handy when I'm out prospecting and I add just one or two drops into the pan near the end of my panning. This will break the surface tension of the water and keep the fine gold flakes on the bottom of the gold pan. This works with both plastic and steel pans. Only a drop, you don't want any suds!
I recommend getting this Gold Panning Kit This kit contains everything you need to learn how to pan gold FAST! I use a black pan but they offer several different colors.
The eastern desert area of Southern California and Southern Nevada is dry and hot in the summer, cold and windy in the winter, but this has not deterred modern-day prospectors from hunting for small gold nuggets worth $1000's of dollars each in those dry desert washes.
Drywasher Basics
The drywasher as a method of gold recovery was first used sometime in the early 1920's and is a device that will seperate heavy gold from lighter material using air and not water. The basic principle is that of winnowing, where gold bearing material is placed on a blanket, and tossed into the air to fall back onto the blanket. While the material is in the air, wind currents will carry away most of the lighter componets leaving the heavier gold behind to return to the blanket.
In the drywasher, dry material, sand, gravel and small rocks, are shoveled into the hopper or "grizzly" as it's called. This device screens out the larger rocks and allows the sand and small gravel to fall onto the riffle board.
The riffle board has a cloth that allows air to pass through as the sand travels over it and also a series of riffles, much like a sluice box, that the sand must cross. Air is blown into the bottom of the riffle box and the sand and light material is blown away.
As the material travels down and across the riffles, any gold present will be trapped behind the riffles. These are then removed and the remaing material put into a gold pan and panned out.
Drywashers can be "home built" very economically, and drywashing is known to be one of the fastest methods for recovering gold from dry sands.
Drywashing Areas
There are many hundreds of dry washes reaching down from the mountain ranges of the high deseert areas of California, Nevada and Arizona. These offer great opportunities for using a drywasher to recover gold.
Many people are surprised to learn of the vast extent of gold mining and prospecting sites in Southern California. This is in fact partly due to the massive amount of publicity surrounding the discovery of gold in the northern Mother Lode area of the state and the resulting California Gold Rush. These same early prospectors also found gold in the dry desert areas of Southern California. As an example of a little known area, the Escondido District, which is 25 miles north of San Diego, is where Mexican gold prospectors mined the rich surface ores many years ago.
There was considerable activity in this district in the 1890's and early 1900's. The rich Dale or Virginia Dale District is another example in southern San Bernardino County and northern Riverside County. It extends about 50 miles east-northeast of Palm Springs.
There are many gold deposit sites between Palm Springs and the Dale District all good areas for drywashing. Perhaps you could vacation in Palm Springs or Las Vegas and pay for it all with your gold prospecting. I'm sure its been done.
Here's a tip when looking for a drywashing site that produces gold.
Look for the small tailing piles of rocks and sand that other drywashers have made. You will find gold there. If there are many old tailings that look like they have been there many years, then run those through your drywasher. Older drywashers were not very efficient at recovering small flakes of gold and you may find these to be a bonanza.
Visit some of the old Ghost Towns of Southren Nevada and California. Most of these were "hard rock" mining towns where the gold was removed from the rock ore, but this does not mean there is no placer (surface) gold there in the washes. After all that might of been the way they located the mine in the first place. Look for other drywasher tailings and set up shop. However, make sure you are not on private property!
The history of Holcomb Valley is interesting. During the great California gold rush, Bill Holcomb left Indiana to find gold in the mining camps of Northern California. He gave it a good try but it did not work out for him up there and after a year of not finding much gold he became discouraged and drifted south towards Los Angeles. When he arrived in Los Angeles he happened to meet a man from San Bernadino who told him about a small gold find east in the San Bernardino Mountians.
It was late fall in 1859 when Bill Holcomb left L.A. for "Starvation Flats" as that area was called then.
There he met other miners who were preparing for winter. Bill was a good marksman and was hired by the other prospectors to get bear. He set off through Polique Canyon looking for bear. When he reached the top of the ridge he looked north and saw a beautiful valley about two miles away. It was getting late so he headed back to camp. The next day he and an Indian friend set off again in search of bears for food. They tracked a grizzly into that same valley he saw the day before and as they caught up to the bear they noticed a large outcrop of quartz. Bill being a prospector, forgot about the bear, climbed up to the outcrop and saw that it was shot full of gold. The gold was in veins running all through the shattered quartz in that outcrop. Holcomb Valley had been discovered. The news of the find spread like wildfire and by late spring in 1860 the valley was swarming with prospectors.
Just east of that original discovery, a small town sprang up almost over night. On July 4th 1860 the many miners now in the area celebrated and the blacksmith's wife, Mrs. Van Dusen, made a giant flag out of available materials. Everyone liked Mrs Van Dusen so much they decided to call the new town Belleville after Mrs. Van Dusen's pretty little daughter Belle. Belleville had one general store, two butcher shops, two laundries, one bakery, three carpenter shops, two blacksmiths, one stamp mill, one saw mill and of course three or four saloons. The Presidential election that year saw 307 votes from Belleville for Abraham Lincoln and the following year Belleville missed becoming the county seat of San Bernardino by only two votes!
By early 1875 most of the gold had been found and people were beginning to leave. That summer, Bill Holcomb returned to the small valley he had discovered 15 years ago. There he saw the last futile searches for gold taking place, most of the area now deserted and Belleville was quickly turning into a ghost town. The story that most people don't know is that in those few years more gold was taken out of Holcomb Valley, per square mile, than anywhere else in Southern California.
Holcom Valley is located northeast of San Bernardino on the north side of Big Bear Lake. Get a map of the area around Big Bear Lake and you'll be able to drive right to it.
On this occasion, a long time friend and I were trying out my new sluice box on a rare desert stream in the Black Hawk mining district, just northeast of Big Bear Lake California. This area is well known for producing silver, but gold has also been found there as well.
My friend and I were in a narrow canyon in an area where there was actually running water in the rocky stream bed, but it only ran for a hundred feet or so before it sank back underground. We ran some shovelfuls of gravel from the hillside and a few hours later actually found a small nugget the size of a small dried pea.
We were so excited you would have thought we found the Mother lode, not just a tiny little nugget, but in the excitement and passing it back and forth between us, it was dropped and disappeared once again into that gravel bed.
Of course we tried hard to find it, but the day was getting late and the sun was setting so we never did. To this day we refer to that area as "The Lost Nugget Mine"! It turns out that we were not that far from the old ghost town of Holcomb Valley, about which many stories of lost gold are told.
There are still areas where you may prospect, and if a discovery of a valuable, locatable mineral is made, you may stake a claim.
These areas are mainly in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
Such areas are mainly unreserved, unappropriated Federal public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of the U.S. Department of the Interior and in national forests administered by the Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Public land records in the proper BLM State Office will show you which lands are closed to mineral entry under the mining laws.
These offices keep up-to-date land status plats that are available to the public for inspection. BLM is publishing a series of surface and mineral ownership maps that depict the general ownership pattern of public lands. These maps may be purchased at most BLM Offices.
For a specific tract of land, it is advisable to check the official land records at the proper BLM State Office.
Current Gold Prices
Price chart for my good friend Nevada gold miner Gary Clendening
Gold Panning Painting by Evelyn Carpenter 
A good way to learn how to pan for gold and use the gold pan correctly, is to first condition your pan (see below). Then fill your pan about half full of sand along with 5 small lead BB's. Mix it all together, add water almost to the top, and shake it hard. The shaking is important as it causes the lead BB's (or gold) to settle to the bottom of the pan.
The drywasher as a method of gold recovery was first used sometime in the early 1920's and is a device that will seperate heavy gold from lighter material using air and not water. The basic principle is that of winnowing, where gold bearing material is placed on a blanket, and tossed into the air to fall back onto the blanket. While the material is in the air, wind currents will carry away most of the lighter componets leaving the heavier gold behind to return to the blanket.
