GOLD!! We're back to get some.

Gold Pan

As I told you in my first story about going gold panning, a drive to the Mokelumne river is a day trip. And if we were going on a day trip, Mom would make some sandwiches and maybe potato or macaroni salad. John and I were armed with our gold pans and our fishing equipment just in case we wanted to fish. Dad always brought his fishing equipment because he wasn't going to pan for gold. Mom would just bring her crocheting and would sit and crochet. We'd load up the car and head out to the gold country.

This time John and I were more prepared. We had done some studying, or I should say John did some studying. He had done some reading since our last panning trip and we were ready to try our luck again. One thing different was, the first time we went out,  we were only armed with our gold pans. This time we had small spoons to get gravel and, hopefully, gold out of the cracks and crevices and screwdrivers for getting in the very narrow gaps. So now we could dig up the sand and gravel and then scrape out the crevices in the rocks collecting the gold that is trapped in them. Gold, as it moves down a river or stream, will roll along the bottom and, being one of the heaviest metals in the world, will fall into cracks and crevices and settle down to the bottom. This is called Placer Gold and is found loose in sand or gravel deposits. You need something to get the gold and gravel out of those crack and crevices. Small spoons and screwdrivers work well for this. You can scrape down in the cracks and get the gold out. Something you have to be careful about is mud sticking to rocks or mud balls. You have to make sure the rocks are washed off and the mud is broken up in the pan so if any gold is in the mud it will be in your pan. And then mud balls you have to break up in your pan full of water. If there's any gold in the mud it will settle to the bottom of the pan and then when you pan it down, if you do it right, it will stay in the pan and you'll have some gold.

Sluice Box

As you pan, almost every pan is empty. Gold is not an easy thing to find unless you get lucky and hit a pay streak, which is a vein of rich ore or layer of rich gravel.  You don't find much gold just panning. To find a lot of gold you have to move a lot of gravel. There are many ways to do this. One way is to use a sluice box. They can be made out of metal, wood or plastic and they are designed to be put into the river. You put it in an area of swift moving water and anchor it down, usually with some large rocks that you put on top of it. Then, what a lot  of miners do, is fill a 5 gallon plastic bucket with gravel and then get a garden trowel and pour the gravel into the sluice box. The river will make the dirt and rocks flow through the sluice and the riffles, which look like ridges, that are part of the sluice will trap the heavier stuff. What happens is, as the water flows over the riffles there is an eddy just behind the riffle and that slight calmness in the flow allows the heavier material to drop down. There are usually 5 or 6 riffles, size of the sluice also determines how many riffles. Also under the riffles the sluice has what they call miners moss,  Miners moss is very similar to indoor/outdoor carpet and it will trap the very fine gold, or what miners call 'flour gold'. Flour gold is very hard to trap and very hard to see but since we get a lot of flour gold it adds a lot to your poke, as they would say in the original 49ers days. A poke was usually a small leather bag with a draw string and that's what miners kept their gold dust in. Another word used by miners, dust. Again a word that is self explanatory, the gold being fine like dust.


As John and I panned we loved to talk about the things that we wanted to get, a sluice box, a dredge to use in the river and a metal detector  These are some of the things that we would love to have and they are some of the ways to find gold. Dreaming costs us nothing and so much fun. Back to reality, John  and I were panning pan after pan and finding nothing. But we knew it would not be easy and that we probably wouldn't find much gold. As we were panning and digging in the river I saw on the edge of the river a plant that had some moss at it's base. So I took my pan and put it under the moss and I took my spoon and scraped through the moss and collected the dirt that was trapped there. Then I took the pan and filled it with some water and I stirred the water around. This broke up any clusters that might have been in the pan and it allowed the heavier stuff to settle on the bottom before the lighter stuff. Then I shook the pan very vigorously, not so hard that anything spills out but what I wanted to do is get the water and gravel into a kind of liquid state. (This allows the heavier stuff to get to the bottom.) Then I started swirling the pan around in the process of panning the stuff down. I got down to where there was nothing but the heavy material, which is usually black sand and  gold. Now I needed to see if I had any gold. What I always did when I got this far in my panning process,  I would bring the pan up a little closer to my eyes so I get a better view and then start swirling the water around the pan. Not too swift, but enough to move the black sand around. What will happen, if you do it correctly, the water will wash the black sand away and expose the gold. Well this time as I was  swirling the water around, I saw it. There it was!  My first flake of gold, this very tiny piece of gold. No where near a nugget, but it was GOLD! So to make sure, I called to John and said "Come here and look at this". So John set his pan down and walked over to where I was and I handed him the pan. He was standing there looking in the pan and he said, " Jake, you found gold." (Jake is what John called me since we were kids and sometimes he still does.) John handed me back the pan and said, "Now you have to put it in a bottle." We had some little bottles for the gold. One of the first ways we would pick the gold out of the pan was to lean the pan so all the water ran off the gold, and then just touch my finger to it. Then when you lift up your finger, the gold would stick to your finger and then you could take the bottle and put your finger over the opening of the bottle and turn the bottle upside down so the water in the bottle would release the gold flake and it would settle to the bottom of the bottle.


How exciting! I found my first flake of gold in the wild. Out in a river, not in a controlled setting. So I had to take the gold and show my mom and dad. It was so cool showing off the first flake of gold that I had just panned. There would be more coming but I don't think that the gold we would find later would ever compare with that very first find. I returned to the moss and looked for some more moss and sure enough as I  panned out the moss the more flakes I found. That day I probably found about a dozen flakes. John found a few. All and all what an exciting second trip out prospecting. We now had reason to come back.


More gold... stories to come.