Kit for finding, not for volume
The most useful decision to make before buying anything is what a day on the stream is for. On a prospecting day you are gathering information: which bars show colours, at what depth, in which layer. That job needs a pan, something to dig with and something to keep what you find in — little else. Volume equipment belongs to a later stage, after test pans have shown that one spot is worth working.
Buying in the wrong order has a real cost. A sluice in the boot tempts you to shovel from wherever the water is convenient, and a day spent feeding it from an unproven spot teaches you almost nothing. A pan, by contrast, gives you an answer every few minutes. Beginners who carry little tend to sample more places, and sampling more places is how you learn a stream.
Weight matters for the same reason. Everything you carry has to be walked in, often over wet rock, and a heavy pack shortens the day and makes you stop at the first convenient spot rather than the right one. Keep the prospecting kit light enough to forget you are carrying it, and leave the rest in the vehicle until you know where it is needed.
The starter kit, piece by piece
The pan is the centre of the kit. A medium plastic pan with moulded riffles, in dark green, black or blue, suits almost everyone: it is light, does not rust and shows fine gold clearly. A second, smaller pan is handy for finishing concentrate. Metal pans work and last a long time, but they need the factory coating burned off and can rust, which is why most people start with plastic.
Next comes something to dig with and something to screen with. A short-handled strong shovel or a sturdy trowel moves gravel in a hole; a folding shovel is light but struggles in packed material. One coarse screen that sits over the pan and holds back stones above pea size is enough for panning. A bucket carries gravel from a dry bar to still water, holds screened material and doubles as a seat.
The small pieces make the difference between seeing gold and keeping it. A snuffer bottle lifts flakes out of the pan in seconds; a small screw-capped vial filled with water holds them. A hand lens settles gold-or-mica questions on the spot. Assembled prospecting kits are often fine, but buying these pieces separately usually costs less and gets you the things you will actually use.
- Medium pan with riffles, in a dark colour
- Short-handled shovel or strong trowel
- Pea-size classifying screen that fits over the pan
- Bucket, ideally with a lid
- Snuffer bottle and a water-filled vial
- Hand lens
Digging and bedrock tools
Gold settles low, so the tools that reach low are the ones that pay. When you dig a bar, the aim is to get through the loose top gravel to the compact layer or the bedrock beneath it, and a small pick helps break packed gravel that a shovel bounces off. A pry bar lifts slabs and boulders, where heavies often collect in the gap underneath.
On exposed bedrock the work changes from shovelling to cleaning. A crevicing tool — a thin, bent strip of steel — scrapes packed sand out of cracks; a flat screwdriver or a bent spoon does the same job. A stiff brush sweeps the last material off the surface into a scoop or straight into the pan. Everything that comes out of a crack goes into the pan, fine clay included, because that is where fine gold hides.
Where cracks and pockets are under water, a hand-operated suction tube — a hand dredge or suction gun — pulls sand and water out of places fingers and scoops cannot reach. It is one of the most effective hand tools for bedrock. Bedrock work is slow and precise; expect to spend an hour on a few metres of good bedrock and to learn more from it than from a morning of surface gravel.
Concentrates: magnet, finishing pan and storage
Most days end with a container of concentrate rather than clean gold, and that is normal. A lidded bucket or jar keeps it from spilling on the way home. Finishing it at a table, in good light and with no current, recovers fine gold that is easy to lose on the bank. That is also where the finishing pan earns its place: a small pan gives fine control over a thin layer of sand.
A small, strong magnet removes magnetite, which is usually the bulk of black sand. Keep the magnet inside a plastic bag or use a magnet-on-a-stick, so that when you pull the magnet out the sand drops away cleanly. Fine gold can get trapped in clumps of magnetite, so run the magnetic fraction through a pan once before discarding it. What remains after the magnet is panned or worked slowly with very little water.
Store gold in a water-filled vial so flakes do not stick to the glass, and label each vial with place and date. One vial per spot turns a season of outings into a record you can compare. One firm rule: never use mercury to collect fine gold. It is toxic to you and to everyone downstream, and it stays in the stream for a long time.
Volume tools: when, and when not
A sluice box is a channel with riffles and matting along its floor. Water flowing over the riffles forms small eddies behind each one; heavy grains drop into those low-energy zones and are held by the matting while lighter material washes out of the end. It processes far more gravel than a pan, but it tells you nothing about where the gold is. That is why it comes after the pan: on a spot already proven by test pans.
A sluice only works when it is set up well. The slope should be steep enough that gravel does not pile up behind the riffles, yet gentle enough that the riffles are not scoured empty; you judge it by watching them. Feed slowly and evenly, screen the feed, and pan a sample of the tailings now and then. If the tailings show gold, slow down or reduce the slope. A highbanker, which is a pump-fed sluice, and motorised gear take this further in both volume and weight.
Rules on what equipment is allowed differ from place to place, and sluices, pumps, dredges and anything motorised are the gear most often restricted. Check what applies where you are going before you take any of it. A metal detector is a separate specialist tool: in the right ground it can find coarse gold on bedrock, but it will not find the fine gold that makes up most placer gold, and dense black sand can make it noisy.
Clothing, safety and carrying
The stream itself is the main hazard in this hobby. Wet rock, especially rock coated in algae, is where most injuries start, so footwear with good grip and ankle support matters more than any tool. In cold water, chest or hip waders let you work longer; in warm shallow streams, quick-drying trousers and boots are simpler and safer if you fall, because waders that fill with water are hard to move in.
Dress in layers that dry fast, cover your head and use sun protection — but keep sunscreen off your hands and the pan, since grease makes fine gold float. Neoprene gloves help in cold water; numb hands lose control of the pan. Leave a full set of dry clothes in the vehicle. You will get wet; what matters is being able to warm up afterwards.
Carry a small safety kit even on short trips, and tell someone where you are going and when you expect to be back. A frame pack or a sturdy backpack with the pan strapped to the outside handles a day’s kit. Your phone is usually enough for navigation and for recording sample points, as long as you bring a battery pack.
- Basic first-aid kit and a whistle
- Headlamp
- Space blanket
- More water and food than you expect to need
- A way to call for help where there is no signal, if you go remote
- Battery pack for the phone
Maintenance and a last check before you leave
A plastic pan needs little care, but it dislikes two things: long hours of sun and grease. A pan left in the sun turns brittle over time, and a surface touched by oil, sunscreen or hand cream makes fine gold float. Rinse the pan after every trip and let it dry in the shade. If water beads up on its surface it has picked up grease; scrub it with sand and dish soap and rinse, repeating until water spreads evenly across it.
Steel tools rust in a wet bag, so dry the shovel, crevicing tool and pry bar when you get home. Brush grains out of the screen so that sand from one place does not end up in the next trip’s gravel. That matters more for your records than it sounds: if concentrate from two different spots mixes in one bucket, you can no longer tell which bar produced the colours.
A short check before leaving beats discovering what is missing at the stream. Are the pan and snuffer packed, is the vial full of water with its cap tight, are the phone and battery pack charged, and have you told someone where you are going? Anything that only makes sense once gold is proven — a sluice, a pump, large screens — can stay in the vehicle or at home. The point of a prospecting day is information, and a pan delivers it faster than anything heavier.