As many professional and recreational prospectors know, one of the best places for gold panning around the world is Alaska. Known for its rugged terrain and vast wilderness, Alaska offers a rich landscape in which to find gold. Shows like Discovery Channel's Gold Rush, which features the mining of gold placer deposits found in the Alaska and the Yukon, feature the struggles that professionals experience in their pursuit of gold. 

Finding gold is not necessarily easy. You can't just pan anywhere. Prospecting is allowed on only certain pieces of land. Private and public lands are designated for gold panning, and the cost ranges from free to $50. Here are some of the most popular spots to go to find the shiny stuff, at a low cost:

1. Fairbanks, AK. Home to some of the most famous mining attractions in the state, Fairbanks has a range of locations for gold panning. Just north of Fairbanks, the country side is dotted with hundreds of small backyard gold mining operations and thousands of gold mining claims notices. Though you can't pan without permission on claims, places like the Gold Daughters offer great gold panning tours and pay dirt for sale!
2. Hope, AK. Located in the Kenai Peninsula, Hope is a small town of about 200 people. You can do a demonstration-based gold tour at Indian Valley Mine a few miles south of Anchorage, then continue another hour onto Hope where you can pan in Resurrection Creek. See Safety Tips for Gold Panning on the Kenai and Kenai's Mining History.
3. Girdwood, AK. This resort town is home to Crow Creek Mine, a place to learn all about gold mining and find some gold!
4. Juneau, AK. The capital city of Alaska, Juneau has a rich history that involves gold. There are some very popular gold panning tours, including the Historic Gold Mining and Panning Adventure, as well as the Gold Creek Salmon Bake. 

As many of you know, it's very important to get the right gear before panning. Though many people invest in dredges and heavier equipment, all you need to have a good time is a Gold Rush Nugget Bucket. Cheers and happy panning!

If you are serious about finding gold, then you want to be serious about sampling. I am going to discuss my preferred method of sampling a gravel bar to find pay streaks in this post.  

I enjoy sampling, it allows me to explore the river at a leisurely pace, get a bit of exercise, and at the same time, find those pay streaks to come back to with the family. That’s not to say that sampling can't be a family event because it sure can! Just set the kids up operating the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket and they'll have a blast playing with the gravel and water!

To start out, you need only a few tools. You will need a shovel. I use a small one since I am only moving a small amount of gravel. You will also need a Gold Rush Nugget Bucket, as it is light weight and contains two classifiers. It also contains a gold pan and catches material in a fluid/sand trap bowl ready for easy panning.

 Example of what to look for in a river for finding gold.

First of all, we need to read the river. We need to look for places where gold will fall out of the water and rest in the gravels or bedrock. The key is to look for inside bends on the river and back eddies areas of low pressure. Remember we will be searching on a gravel bar that was submerged some time in the past. If there is a big, round boulder high up on the bar, it was likely put there by a flood in the past or possibly by glacier action. 

Illustration of what to look for in a river bend when gold panning.

Lets assume we have found a great gravel bar. We want to sample the area every six feet from the water to the bank, and every 12 feet along the length of the bar. Since we are mainly looking for flood gold, we will be digging sample holes six-inches deep and six-inches square. I put the sample in the water pail that comes in the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket, then process each sample in turn by pouring them in the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket, then pan out the results. I record in my pocket book the number of specs, or flakes of gold found in that hole. I also draw a picture of the gravel bar and place numbers of the sample points to use as a reference when mapping the gold occurrences, such as the picture above.

Once the gravel bar has been fully sampled, you will have a nice map of where the pay streak is running and the most productive areas to hit hard on your next visit.  With this sampling system, I can usually map several areas in a day without tiring myself out. So remember your shovel and your Gold Rush Nugget Bucket; they are the only the tools you need to successfully sample for gold rich pay streaks!

How To Make Recreational Gold Prospecting Lucrative and Efficient

I like to define the term “Recreational Gold Prospecting” as going out with family and friends, washing rocks on a pristine river, and finding a bit of gold. Imagine this, you’re out with the family enjoying the day on the river with your Gold Rush Nugget Bucket, and you find a spot that has the potential for an large amount of placer gold or perhaps larger flakes that you never have found before. There may be a more concentrated amount of fine gold there as well, which continues for several yards up the river about six inches deep in the water. What are you going to do, buy a large and expensive High Banker or Sluice Box, then come back lugging in heavy tools?

Flour gold in a vial.

If you want an easier solution that’s lightweight, affordable and fun, consider the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket. I'm not talking about competing with the big equipment in Alaska or the Yukon, we are just moving from a “recreational prospecting model” to a “recreational production model.” Hypothetically, our own placer gold pay streak is in an area of six inches deep by two feet wide, and stretches for four yards. We discovered this by playing on the bank with the kids and testing several spots on the inside bend. A rough calculation will tell you that you will probably need to move and process roughly 1/2 of a cubic yard of gravel and cobble. Lets break that down a bit further: that is about 20, 5-gallon buckets worth of unclassified material. After lifting that much material, I want to know one thing: how is your back feeling?

In order to be as efficient as possible, we want to move lots of material reasonably fast. The Gold Rush Nugget Bucket will need a bit of help so lets introduce a couple items, starting with the “Bucket Grizzly.” The Bucket Grizzly sits on top of a 5-gallon pail and you shovel the gravel onto it. It classifies the gravel to 1/2 or 1/4 inch depending on the screen, and uses an electric 1100 GPH pump with battery. Now you can wash the gold and sand from the rocks as it goes through your Bucket Grizzly, and then supply water to the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket with minimal effort. By filling the top tray of the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket with 1/2 inch classified material, you can process it faster than trying to wash off larger cobble.

Example of a Bucket Grizzly on a 5-gallon bucket.

I have found that two people are required for maximum efficiency in production mode. One person classifies, the other runs the classified material through the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket. I have also determined that over-filling the top tray with material will actually slow the process down. Two shovels per tray is best. You will want to check the bottom tray consistently to decide when it needs to be emptied. We keep everything from the bottom tray in a separate container so we can search for “pickers” later. For every 20 of the top trays we empty the catch bowl into, we keep the rest of the concentrates and process them once we get home.

Recovering fine gold on a miller's table at home.

To ensure we don’t miss the very finest micron gold, I add a disk of “Miners Moss” to the bottom of the concentration bowl. Every hour, we pan out the catch bowl to make sure we are still on the gold and then continue with production. From one trip to the North Saskatewan River in Alberta, Canada and with 10 hours of work, we classified more than15 Gallons of river bed material, classified it to 1/4 inch through the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket, and came home with only three 5-gallon buckets of concentrates. A quick test showed 300 specks of ( -100 ) gold in only a tablespoonful of the concentrates, all thanks to the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket, which really catches the fine stuff. Next post I will be discussing my “Gold Sampling Procedure.”

Hydraulic and Gravitational Methods For Gold Panning

The tools used and the ways humans have prospected for placer gold over the centuries have changed immensely. The tools that have been most effective in recovering gold have always used at least one of two primary functions: hydraulics and gravity.

Gravitational gold prospecting, such as gold panning, belongs to the group of gold recovery devices used explicitly by hand. This technology came to North America during the mid 1800's and likely coming from Mexico, where a wooden conical shaped bowl had been used to retrieve gold from the rivers and streams there for hundreds of years. Gold pans are still in use much of today, though they are highly evolved from their ancestors in both design and material. In contrast, today’s gold pans are made of light durable plastics instead of heavy metals or wood that made panning a laborious chore in the 1800's.   

While gold pans were the main prospecting tool of the 49ers during the California Gold Rush, other technological improvements came along with the introductions of the sluice and rocker box. The sluice box predates the rocker box and was much simpler in design. A simple trough made of wood with riffles, laden with carpet, blanket material and/or moss was used to get the finer gold. Prospectors would burn the moss or material and pan out the ashes left behind to retrieve the gold.

Example of a "Sluice Box" used for collecting fine gold

The rocker box was designed with a hopper for loading and classifying material to smaller diameters. The collected material would be washed with water across an incline of carpet or moss, designed with riffles and moved by a rocking motion provided by hand. This allowed a prospector to process larger amounts of river gravels down to a manageable amount without large rocks accompanying the rest of the smaller materials. This made it so that one or two people could pan out more concentrated material resulting in more gold per day.  

Example of a "Rocker Box" also used for collecting gold

These technologies are still in use today, but their utility is diminishing. Sluice and rocker boxes are now made of metal or high impact ABS plastics and they are not always welcome on many rivers and streams due to an increasing number of environmental laws prohibiting their use. Additionally, the weights of some of these items make it difficult to walk in with your gear and family in tow.

Luckily, the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket is so light, weighing in at 7-pounds, that even an eight year old can carry one. The Gold Rush Nugget Bucket uses classification, hydraulic, gravity and fluid bed technology to capture even the finest flour gold particles without burning a thing! From testing for hotspots and pay-streaks to actually using it as a hobby production gold collection device, this will be your favorite way to go gold prospecting.  In Bill's next post, he'll show you how he uses the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket as a production device on a Canadian flour gold pay-streak. Stay tuned prospectors!

Placer Gold: The Stuff You Gold Pan For

To start off, there are two types of gold deposits: lode and placer. Typically, lode deposits are the traditional veins of ore that are embedded in rocks and minerals. To recover gold from lodes, miners have to blast, mill, or treat the rock with chemicals to recover the gold inside.

The process for the creation of placer gold begins when a lode deposit is eroded by weather and environment factors, leaving the "heavier" minerals, like gold, to be transported down a stream or river. Many of the other heavier minerals that erode are also transported with the gold, eventually becoming black sand, which settles on the bottom of riverbeds and depressions. Where there are depressions in a riverbed full of black sand, there is a good chance gold may be there as well! And this is exactly the type of gold that can be recovered by gold panning with the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket!

Much of the gold that travels down the streams becomes weathered and separates into smaller particles, known as micron gold, or fine gold. This gold is often difficult to find as it's micron size makes it so it often requires a costly and large sluice or machine to recover it. Luckily, the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket's funneling system allows anyone to recover the gold. Find out how the Gold Rush Nugget Bucket works to recover find gold!