Why a pan separates gold at all
Panning works because gold is far denser than the material around it. Pure gold is roughly seven times as dense as quartz sand, and even the silver-bearing gold found in most streams is several times heavier than the common gravel minerals. When a pan of wet gravel is shaken, the grains are briefly lifted and loosened, and in that loose state the heaviest ones slip down through the gaps while the lighter ones rise. There is nothing magic about it: panning is a small, hand-held copy of what a stream does in flood.
That gives panning two distinct jobs, and it helps to keep them apart in your head. The first is stratifying: shaking the pan under water so everything sorts itself by weight, with gold and black sand at the bottom and light sand and pebbles on top. The second is stripping: tilting and washing so the top layer leaves over the edge. Every style you will see, fast or slow, is some repetition of those two jobs.
Almost every beginner’s problem comes from blending them — washing while the pan is still mixed. Gold only settles during shaking. If you wash a pan that has not been stratified, the water carries off whatever happens to be on top, and in an unsorted pan that can include gold. So the rule is simple: shake until you think you have shaken enough, then shake a little more.
Setting up before the first pan
Where you pan matters nearly as much as how. Look for calm water deep enough to submerge the pan while you sit or kneel comfortably — a quiet pool at the edge, a backwater behind a boulder, or a tub you fill yourself. Fast current washes the pan for you, uncontrollably, and fine gold is the first thing it takes. If you have to pan in moving water, keep the pan low and let your body block the flow.
Classify the gravel before it goes in. A screen that holds back anything bigger than a pea, set over the pan and shaken under water, removes the stones that stop the pan from sorting. Before you throw the oversize away, glance over it: coarse gold is rare, but when it turns up it sits on the screen in plain sight. Then fill the pan no more than about two-thirds; while learning, half is better, because small careful pans hold more gold than big sloppy ones.
Finally, break the material up. Clay and packed silt grab fine gold and carry it out in lumps. Submerge the pan and knead the load with your fingers until it is loose and the muddy water eases, pick out any remaining pebbles by hand, and only then start shaking. A few minutes spent here can save the whole pan.
- Calm water deep enough to submerge the pan
- A seat or a stable kneeling spot at the water’s edge
- A screen over the pan that holds back pea-size stones and larger
- Oversize checked before it is discarded
- Pan no more than two-thirds full
- Clay and lumps worked apart by hand under water
The shake-and-wash cycle, step by step
With the pan submerged and level, shake it firmly side to side and in small circles. The motion should be short and quick rather than wide; you want the whole load to shiver, not slosh out. Keep going for longer than feels necessary. You will see light material rise and cloudy water drift away, which is exactly what you want.
Now tilt the pan slightly away from you, riffles on the low side, and lift it until the front edge is just under the surface. Use a gentle forward-and-back dip so the water rolls the top layer over the lip. Take off only a thin top layer, then bring the pan level and shake again. Wash, level, shake, wash: the rhythm matters more than speed. As the pan gets lighter, make the washes gentler, not harder.
Every so often lift the pan out and look. Pebbles that surface can be raked off with your fingers; they came to the top because they are light. When the load is down to a few handfuls of mostly dark sand, stop washing in the stream and switch to finishing with a little water in the pan. The steps below are the cycle in the order you will use it in the field.
- Submerge and shake hard until the load is loose and sorted
- Tilt forward, riffles low, and wash off only the top layer
- Level the pan and shake again every few washes
- Rake surfaced pebbles off by hand
- Stop at a small amount of dark concentrate and finish with little water
Finishing: black sand, the fan and the snuffer
The last stage separates gold from the heavy minerals that settled with it — mostly magnetite and other black sand. Leave a little water in the pan, tilt it slightly, and swirl in slow circles so the concentrate spreads into a thin crescent across the bottom. Gold, the densest thing left, lags behind at the upper end of the fan while the black sand trails out below it. Colours often appear right there, as steady yellow points on a dark background.
If black sand still covers the gold, tapping helps. With a thin damp layer in the pan, tap the side of the pan with your hand or knuckle; the vibration makes gold creep toward the tapped side while lighter grains stay behind. Work slowly and look often. You do not have to separate every last grain: once gold is visible, pick it up and pan the rest again later, at home, in good light.
Pick up flakes with a snuffer bottle — squeeze, set the tip next to the flake, release — or lift a single flake on a wet fingertip and tap it into a water-filled vial. If there is a lot of black sand, save the whole concentrate in a lidded container instead of rushing it on the bank. At home, a magnet in a plastic bag lifts out the magnetite; pan what remains in a small finishing pan. Never use mercury to collect gold: it is toxic and it pollutes the stream.
Where gold is lost, and how to catch it happening
Most losses come from three habits: washing before the pan is stratified, washing too hard, and letting the riffles swing round to the high side. Each one lets water move gold before it has settled. Fine gold is the most vulnerable because it behaves more like light sand than like a heavy grain; a pan can look clean and still have thrown out the flour gold that made up most of what it held.
Grease is the other quiet thief. Oil, sunscreen or a waxy film on the pan stops fine gold from wetting, so it rides on a skin of water and slides off the edge. Keep sunscreen off your hands while you pan, and scrub a suspect pan with sand and dish soap. A dark pan helps too: on dark green, black or blue plastic fine gold stands out, while on a light pan it disappears.
You can test your technique instead of guessing. Drop a few small pieces of lead shot, or a flake you already own, into a pan of ordinary gravel and pan it as usual. If they are all still there at the end, your method holds heavy grains; if one goes missing, slow down and work out which step lost it. Repeat this whenever you come back after a break. Collecting the tailings of a few pans and panning them again is another honest check.
Reading a spot with test pans: a worked example
One pan tells you what one scoop held. A set of pans tells you where the gold sits, which is what you actually want to know. Say you reach a gravel bar on the inside of a bend. Take one pan from the upstream head of the bar, one from the middle and one from the downstream tail, all from the same depth. Then dig one hole down to the deepest layer you can reach — ideally hard clay or bedrock — and pan the gravel from its bottom separately.
Suppose the head gives nothing, the middle two small colours, the tail one, and the bottom of the hole six colours with a dark band of black sand. That pattern says the gold is low in the gravel and may be strongest at depth toward the head-to-middle part of the bar. Your next pans go there, deeper and a little upstream, rather than along the surface. If every pan is empty, the deep one included, that is a result as well: move on to the next trap.
Write every pan down. Memory is tempting, but after a few outings the details blur, and it is the pattern across many notes that teaches you a stream. A map-based score such as GOLDONGO’s can point you to segments with trap geometry; only test pans say whether a particular bar actually holds gold. When one spot keeps producing colours, that is where a sluice starts to make sense — not before.
- Location, as a marker on a map
- Depth and the layer the gravel came from
- Number and rough size of colours
- Amount of black sand
- One photo of the finished pan
Hard conditions: cold water, dry beds, awkward spots
Cold water quietly ruins technique. Numb hands shorten the shaking, harden the washing and lose the fine control you need when tilting the pan, and that is exactly where gold goes. Wear neoprene gloves, keep sessions short and warm your hands in between. In winter many people carry gravel in a bucket to a tub of less cold water and pan there, sitting comfortably. You lose speed but keep control.
On a dry bed you have to bring the water with you. Dry panning — tossing and blowing the material — recovers only coarse gold; fine gold leaves with the dust. A few containers of water and a tub are enough to pan gravel from a dry bar properly; empty the mud that settles in the bottom of the tub now and then so the water can be reused. Dry washers designed for arid ground exist, but they are processing tools, not prospecting ones.
In a tight or steep spot where you cannot stand steadily in the stream, do not try to pan there. Fill a bucket or a bag with gravel, carry it to a safe, level edge and pan it there. Panning from an unstable stance loses gold and is the easiest way to fall on wet rock. Panning is a patient job, and any place where you are uncomfortable is the place that runs out of patience first.