Gold Prospecting and Gold Panning How-To

As if I needed yet another hobby, I got interested in gold prospecting several years ago. My travels around the West often took me to old mining towns and mine sites where the pioneers had made a living by pulling the yellow stuff out of the ground. Eventually I got the bug too. Gold fever is a terrible thing. There is no known cure. It leads you to work harder on your vacations than you do in your normal working life, and all you have to show for is a little dirty, yellow metal.

I started out in prospecting using a metal detector to hunt for gold nuggets. I never had much luck. Nuggets are rare but metallic trash is plentiful. All I ever got out of nugget hunting was a lot of bullets, shell casings, nails, tin cans, aluminum foil, barbed wire, sunburn and frustration. It wasn't until I started panning for gold in various places around the West that I actually began to collect some of the lovely yellow stuff. This page presents a brief introduction and How-To on the art and science of gold panning.

The principal behind gold panning is really simple. Gold is heavy. Just about everything else is lighter. If you load a pie-pan shaped container with gold-bearing gravel and sand, proper agitation in water should cause the gold to sink to the bottom, while washing away the lighter stuff that rises to the top. Eventually, all that is left in your pan is the heaviest minerals, including (hopefully) some gold. It really is about that simple. Of course there is more to the story than that.

The rest of the story available Here

Also, check out his links at the bottom of his page to his jet engine, telescope, wind turbine, and homemade solar panel pages. Cool stuff.