Once you’ve seen the glimmer of real gold in a gold pan, there is no going back! Although gold fever is somewhat exaggerated, it is real and many men have fallen victim to it in the past! And while in a state of excitement over your find, it’s natural to envision the vast quantities of gold you’ll be finding if you just roll up your sleeves and get to work.
So, how much gold can you pan in a day?
If you are using a gold pan, it is possible to pan up to a quarter ounce per day. However, a brutal majority of prospectors won’t be able to reach anywhere near that number. The amount of gold you can pan depends completely on the site, your ability to pick the right spot, and the equipment.
It’s extremely important to note that no serious gold miner is using a gold pan as a production tool. It simply is too slow to be able to process the amount of material that is needed to retrieve any significant amounts of gold, when found in normal concentrations.
Of course, if you find really rich ground, you can get some nice returns with nothing else than a gold pan at your disposal. One example is the kind of prospectors who focus on cleaning out crevices in bedrock, which can result in some surprisingly high concentrations of gold. Then a gold pan can yield quite some gold, and has the benefit of being light to carry to remote places.
How Much Gold Can You Recover With Other Tools?
Now, there are other gold recovery methods that are much more suited when you want to work through more material, and therefore let you recover more gold.
Let’s have a closer look at them, and how much gold you could realistically make using them.
Sluice Boxes / Highbankers
Most gold panners will struggle to process more than one cubic yard of material per day. With a sluice box, prospectors can process tens of times the material, meaning that the amount of gold that can be recovered in a certain timespan also increases manyfold. In addition, the recovery rate of a good sluice box that’s set up correctly is really high, and comparable with that of a good gold pan.
However, most of the time you won’t be operating your sluice box at its full capacity, as you first need to get the gravels to the sluice and then run them through. This often includes digging, which further reduces the amounts run through the sluice.
We must also consider that the gravel shoveled into a sluice box usually contains lower concentrations of gold than if you were to rinse bedrock crevices and behind boulders, which is often the case with panning. Or put differently, when using a gold pan you choose your gravels more carefully, since you know your processing capacity is limited.
So with that said, an estimation is that you can get up to half an ounce of gold per day, in really rich grounds.
Dredges
The gold dredge is a fantastic piece of equipment, and in the right conditions, it can help process up to 100 times the amount you would be able to process using pick and shovel. And as you can expect, this has a quite dramatic effect on the amounts of gold that can be recovered per day.
A moderately sized gold dredge can produce up to several ounces of gold per day. Due to the large amounts of material that can be processed, the recovery rate also tends to be more consistent.
So, gold dredging really is the most effective way of recovering gold as a small scale miner, provided that you have access to good gold-bearing gravels.
Metal Detectors
Metal detecting, to a large degree, is a hit or miss practice. You can have great success during a session, and then go several days without finding anything. That’s really the nature of it when the difference between success and failure could depend on just one gold nugget.
Due to the great variability in results between sessions, it’s impossible to give you an idea of what is reasonable to expect from one day of metal detecting.
How To Find More Gold!
Regardless of what tools and methods you employ in your search for gold, the richness of the spot is going to be the major deciding factor in how much gold you can find.
Here are some things you can do to ensure that you are looking for gold in the right place!
Do the necessary research!
There is loads of information out there that can give you a good idea about where gold has been found in the past. And if you just try to focus your efforts on those areas where gold is known to exist, you have a much better chance of finding some for yourself.
Here are some sources of information you should make sure to look closer at:
- Books: Quite a lot of states have some books about possible mining locations, and these can really help to give you a push in the right direction!
- Geological Mining Reports: If you are looking for a somewhat more detailed resource, many states have had stage agencies create detailed reports about where gold has been found in the state, or in a specific mining district. Often you also get to know the size and quantity of the gold that has been recovered at a site. While they contain a lot of information, they aren’t as friendly to the casual reader, as they essentially are scientific papers.
- Old mining town newspapers: If you can get your hands on historic newspapers from the time around the big gold rushes in your area, you can be sure to find a lot of helpful information about, what were then, new gold discoveries!
- Gold Panning Buddies: Make sure to join a local prospecting club! As a member, you will be able to connect with old veterans who surely know a lot about gold in your area. In addition, a membership often gives you access to claims that are known to contain real gold!
Learn How Gold Behaves
In addition to finding a gold-bearing area, you need to be able to read the geology of the place. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should at least know the basics of how gold deposits in rivers and creeks.
Prospect More!
Your main goal as a prospector is to map out where the gold is and in what quantities, in order to be able to focus your time only on the richest, most rewarding spots. In that sense, you need to get out there and try out various places. Most of your attempts are likely to prove fruitless, but sooner or later you will find a place that’s worth working further!
However, it’s imperative to understand that gold can be really spotty, even in a good location. Many times, paystreaks can be as thin as a couple of inches, which means that you could be missing the good stuff by as little as a few feet. Try different spots and depths at the location you’re examining, and don’t get stuck digging in one place only!
Conclusion
Today, very few use the gold pan as a production tool, and that’s quite understandable. With the advent of portable sluice boxes, metal detectors, and dredges, only to name a few pieces of equipment, there are better ways available for those who want to process large amounts of material.
However, the gold pan comes in handy when you are mining limited amounts of really rich gravels, like when cleaning out crevices in the bedrock.
Happy Panning!