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Full disclosure...I own iPan4Gold and I sell paydirt.

I have gold fever. I admit it. I love finding gold. I love working a pan of material and having that Eureka! moment when the gold suddenly reveals itself...I love it. I marvel at how I can take seemingly just raw dirt and sand and work it down to find gold. It simply amazes me every time.

The way I got started in gold panning was buying paydirt and learning the characteristics of gold.

I have purchased paydirt from probably 15 or so different providers and now have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

I have also become proficient is panning, and mostly from panning purchased paydirt.

I have no illusions of heading off to the gold fields of California or Colorado and spending my days prospecting, or dredging, or running a highbanker for weeks at a a time. I am pretty much resigned to Saturday excursions and weekend panning on my patio...and I am very content with that.

I am grateful to live close enough to Dahlonega GA and the Crisson Gold Mine. That is where I learned to pan, run a trommel, a highbanker, and a Gold Cube. I likewise appreciate being able to purchase 800 pounds of paydirt at a time to feed my patio panning hobby. And I still purchase paydirt from a few key suppliers.

In my opinion, there is no substitute for learning to pan with real gold, the real thing. Panning lead shot is...well, panning lead shot. It can only take you so far in developing your panning skills. Why? because gold comes in every shape and size and every piece has its own characteristics and presents its own challenge from a panning perspective.

Anyone can find nuggets in just about any sluice or pan configuration, but the fine gold, 50 mesh and smaller is a bigger challenge. They say that 97% of the gold in the world is not nuggets and pickers, but fine gold. Everyone wants to find nuggets or at least pickers. So do I, but I love finding grams of fine gold, and the panning process for capturing fine gold is different and more complicated than finding nuggets and pickers.

So why buy paydirt? It's simple, really. How many of us have ready access to gold bearing ground? How many of us have all the right equipment. Answer, not that many of us. But that's the neat thing about it, you don't have to have all those things to get started. You can start with just a gold pan for maybe $10...But you still need some paydirt.

In most cases, purchasing paydirt is a very economical way to gain experience and feed the need to see some color in your pan. Compared to all the time and effort it takes to assemble all the equipment, travel, food, gas, lodging, etc. and having access to a place that actually has gold, purchased paydirt in an attractive alternative. It should be part of every small scale gold miner's experience. The guys who have all the equipment and access to the best gold fields in the country may sneer at buying paydirt. As for me, I find it thoroughly enjoyable, especially every Sunday afternoon on the patio of my own home.

As far as how to do it, salting your own dirt may be the cheapest method, but it is, to me, anti-climactic. It's just not the same as having your own Eureka moment. A key part of gold fever is the thrill of discovery. Knowing what to expect ahead of time diminishes the thrill...the exhilaration of discovering gold yourself, without any expectations, is priceless.

Think about it...if you saw your friend put a bunch of gold in a pan of dirt including a 1/4 oz nugget and a 1/2 oz nugget and handed it to you to pan, you would not be satisfied to just find the 1/4 oz nugget...you'd be especially upset if you didn't find the 1/2 oz nugget too.

Whereas if your friend just handed you a pan of material without knowing what was in it, and asked you to pan it for him, you'd have a Eureka moment when the 1/4 oz nugget showed up, not to mention the 1/2 oz nugget!

There are hundreds of paydirt sellers out there but you have to be careful. Otherwise you will pay for dirt and that will be all you get....dirt! 

I recommend the following paydirt providers: Dirt Hogg, Goldstrike Adventures, Carolina Prospectors, Crisson Gold Mine, and of course my own, iPan4Gold.com. All of these will provide you with a good value for your money and an enjoyable panning experience.  

Read the posts on this website and you'll find plenty of reviews and/or comments about various paydirt providers.

Support the sponsors on this site as they in turn support the site through paid advertising.

Just my opinions. Good luck and I hope you experience the rush of gold fever for yourself. :-)

mdv

Legand of a Bucyrus Crane

                       By Sharon Bissell

She worked this land
Many years ago
Now off walking
She will go
To another mine
She loves so fine
Digging that yellow stuff
We love so fine
Each step she takes
Brings her closer
To her new gold filled home
Oh the stories she could tell
And how the crowd would listen
About the days of gold
Their quest for gold
They were so bold...
So listen closely
To her tracks
As she slowly makes her way
Down this busy highway
Let it take you back
To the time her work was new
Shell'll tell the tale of riches
And dreams that never came true
Her days at Franklin
Are still recalled
As they were like yesturday
This was the place
She made it big
As it was where
They found the most
There were 2-U Cats
Of every size
But only one Bucyrus
So now she's walked not her last
But a new story is starting fast
So listen to those tracks
The stories they could tell
It's not the treasure of the Atochia
Or that of the Golden Reef
Although its's mystery is unknown
This quest for gold
Can steal your soul
If you listen to a Bucyrus
                      *2008*

In memory of Harold Mitchell.  He was owner of mine at Mosquito Fork Bridge, Near Chicken, Alaska.   Harold was from Baraga Michigan which in the upper peninsula of Michigan.  He passed away in 2009 at his home.    

     Original owners were in the history books under the name Bob and Molly McCombs.   They were the first to frieght supplies into this region of Alaska.   On week of June 16, 2008.    Harold Mitchell and myself and others were walking this crane down the Taylor Highway.  This was a slow process and Harold was piloting the van as to warn others this crane was walking or coming down the road.  This was a 4 1/2  hour walk as this was a big crane.  Traffic was minimal and everyone was there to help.  As this crane was walking on the still dirt road I listed to the crane and I asked Harold if he had pen and paper and he said yes and that is when this little poem came to life.  And now I again share with everyone.     Sharon
Ham Mining
Chicken, Alaska

Pans!

I don't know how many times people have come up to me and said, "All you really need is a pan to find gold." Technically that's true. All you really need to find gold is a pan. At some time, even with machinery, you will probably pick up a gold pan. Maybe not at the start, but more than likely at the end.

However, gold is a numbers game. The more dirt you process, the more gold you will find. Unless you hit the Mother lode, and are digging nuggets of gold. You are dealing with something much smaller. From flour to flakes to pickers. (Sounds like a double play team in baseball. “5-4-3 Double play!” I can almost hear the PA announcer.)

That’s where machinery comes into play. However, this isn’t about machinery, it’s about pans. Probably since the dawn of time, or at least when man first discovered gold, there have been gold pans. Sluices made of gold, were discovered in King Tut’s tomb. I would imagine there were gold pans made of real gold as well. But even before that, most likely pans were made out of slices of a tree trunk dished out. Wood has one problem, it swells, shrinks and cracks. So maybe the first real gold pans, as we know them, were made during the Bronze age.

However, where you find relics from gold rush times, you will find wooden pans. They could be turned out on machinery run from water wheels driven by long belts. Someone had a bright idea to go to the maker of a Knights armor and turn out gold pans. These would have been made of iron, as a Knights armor were iron plate. Eventually steel came into play, and I’m sure steel gold pans followed.

A mixture of steel and wood pans have been found from California to Australia. The Chinese prospectors are credited with introducing the riffle to the Gold pan. And you can still see a form of it today in modern steel pans. Prospectors really like steel gold pans because it served two purposes. First, of course, it was a gold pan. Second, it was their dinner plate. The pan could withstand heat, they ate off of it, cleaned it up and go back to prospecting. Maybe old time prospectors were the original , “Multi-taskers”?

Back in the mid-70’s, 1970’s that is, I’m not THAT old! I started with pie pans, which I liberated from my Mom’s cupboards. (Liberated sounds so much better than just helped myself, without ask asking. IE: Stole!) I had already been bitten by the Gold bug at age 10. However, I had no clue on how to actually find gold. (My first discovery was Pyrite, that I thought was gold.) I met a couple of guys prospecting the Whitewater River in Southern Indiana. They both had steel pans with grooves formed in the sides. They had found these in the back of “Popular Mechanics” magazine. (Might have been “Popular Science.” It’s been a long time for my memory.)

They are the ones that told me to,, “go get your Mother’s pie pans.” They had a wooden homemade rocker box lined with Shag carpeting! (This was the 70’s.) Back then, I didn’t know anything about flour gold. I thought all gold were nuggets, or at least pickers. So, I’d sift through sand from the river looking for gold I could see. I pretty much never did.

Fast forward to today. Today we have gold pans, still in steel. However, now there’s copper and the most one used are plastic. Plastic has opened up a world of new shapes, sizes and colors. (Again, another Triple Play team?) Today’s modern plastic pans come in round, square, rectangle, triangle, hexagon, U-shaped, to name the popular ones. And just about every color. Blue, green, red, black, purple, maroon, white and pink! Blue and green are the most popular, followed by black. Green and blue will make your gold stand out as well as your black sands. Black pans will make your gold “pop” out, but will hide fine black sands making final clean up difficult. The other colors, have their fans. I like blue, maroon and red for final clean ups.

Green is the most popular, but if you suffer from color blindness, then you want to stick with blue. Blue pretty much is still blue, throughout most color blindness. However, green can show up as various colors, including shades of yellow. They also come with various sizes of riffles. From no riffles to quite large riffles.

Sizes. Plastic pans range from 10” to 16”. Again, typically, bigger pans are used to work off the dirt and gravel and smaller pans are used for final clean ups. 16” pans can be a hand full, especially loaded with dirt and gravel. 14” can be as well, but is still easier to work off. 10” pans you can use one hand, but you’re limited to the amount of over burden you can work off at one time.

So, there you have it. Most small scale prospectors have many pans in there inventory. Lately there seems to be 1 - 2 new pans coming out every year. They always seem to have their supporters and their opposition. Like I always say, it’s what works best for you. I always seem to end up buying the new ones and trying them at least a few times.

Until next time, this is the old prospector.

Good Hunting!

Hello everyone. I am new to the site, but my father and I have been prospecting for a couple of years now. I have been thinking of offering a panning class through our local community education service. I have been thinking that with the renewed interest in gold prospecting, that it might be an interesting way to pay for our own prospecting. I would like everyone's thoughts on the idea. I will probably need to buy some concentrates if I do offer the class, as our area may or my not have much gold. I would be interested in finding out who has the lowest price on possible gold bearing concentrates also. Well, that is my first blog post here. I hope that everyone reads this and gives me their input.

Thanks,

Dan

Gold Panning…The simplest way to prospect for gold!! Alot of recreational prospectors just simply “pan”, if you think about it, you grab a gold pan and find a river or small body of water and you have the ability… if in a known gold bearing region, to actually come up with some color in your pan!! Thats when it all goes down hill from there. First you find a little color.. then a few pickers, next thing you know your looking to buy a sluice and then a highbanker and when that doesn’t cut it anymore your packin in a 6″ dredge!!! So basically the meager gold pan was your gateway drug into the world of gold fever!! 98% of all gold prospectors never recover!!

JUST KIDDING!!

Sometimes as I begin to ramble I tend to look back on myself as an example, so work with me…as I am a recovering gold-a-holic, and I love to test out various types of gadgets designed to make gold recovery either faster..easier.. or funner, but one cannot forget where it all began, and thats with the very simple yet still effective gold pan.

Gold pans come in many different shapes, sizes, and colors, the round ones are the typical pan most people are familiar with, but all are designed to keep the heaviest material at the bottom. Back in the 1800′s the miners used round metal pans and more skill was needed to keep the gold in it until the Chinese miners invented the riffles, if you pound out riffles in your metal pan and get the angles and depth just right well… it sure is alot harder to lose your hard earned gold, and they (the Chinese gold prospectors) were some of the most efficient miners to hit the gold rush!! They went at it in a very methodical and well planned way, and left nothing of value in their path, when they were done working an area you better believe it was cleaned out.

Over the years my gold pans have served me well, as a hat..as a plate…(it holds alot of chunky soup, although the peas get stuck in the riffles…the potatoes are easily panned out)…and as a frisbee when bored, but after using alot of  gadgets and toys for finding gold, one usually ends up right back at the panning tub for a final cleanup, so don’t forget to always keep at-least a gold pan in your recreational vehicle just in case you come across a spot that just looks too good to NOT have gold in it, because its cheap and doesn’t take up much space behind your seat and its easy to use, and don’t forget there are plenty of articles and websites online that can teach you how to pan for gold, as well as video’s on “you-tube” under “gold panning” But its up to you to practice your gold panning, so get out there and pan for gold !! with a little practice you’ll be a gold panning pro in no time!

For though’s of you gold prospectors things to look for when locating or discovering an ancient riverbed gravels to harvest for the weekend gold prospectors. Might be common sense to some, but to others.. it might be helpful!

Gold prospectors moraine tips

For the weekend Gold prospectors this glacial rock, mud and gold materiel may have been pulled off a valley floor as the glacier advanced foreword or it may have came off the valley rock walls as a result of freezing and thawing wedging or landslides. Moraines may be made of deb-re in size from silt-sized genealogical flour to huge boulders. The debris is mostly sub-angular to rounded in shape as it is ground up by the weight of ice. Moraines may be on the glacier’s surface or left as piles or sheets of debris where glaciers has melted.

Glacial drifts in the Midwestern and North Eastern United States. These areas were previously not widely known for gold occurrences, but after increased attention they have surprised a lot of people with the amounts of gold now been recovered.

To give a little background, understand that during the ice ages, (both Wisconsin and Illinois stages), the glaciers acted like giant bulldozers pushing enormous amounts of rocks and (gold bearing) gravel down from the sources in Canada many states were completely covered by the glaciers and (left with) moraine (gravel) deposits in bands (see moraine deposits, maps of Michigan, etc.). we also show the Moraine terminus (Southern extent) in all of the Midwestern and northeastern states certain states have incomplete (NY, PA, NJ, MN), or no specific (NH, VT, MA, CT, RI, ME) Moraine information by researching state or regional glaciation books (. Available at college geology apartments or in state geological surveys), you can then determine more specific Moraine deposit locations. Another way of determining moraine locations locally is by simply locating area gravel pits.

read the rest here and video at  http://prospectminingforgold.com/glacial-drift-gold-prospectors-tips/