My first panning experience.

[OwenT]

Sorry, no pics of an awesome first day, but to tell the truth I didn't expect to find anything. Sounds crazy right, going panning without expecting to find gold? Well I was up near Cle Elum WA this weekend and just decided to bring the pans because it's closer to gold country than home. I went down to Big Creek and dug a couple samples at different points along the creek. No record of gold in this area but I checked the spots where I thought it would be anyway. This creek was hard to read though. Bedrock must be buried deep under what seems like endless river rock, not a lot of dirt so I just took what I could from inside bends and depressions. In every pan I ended up with a little bit of black sand and in two I saw what seemed like a tiny spec of gold. They seemed to stick the bottom when I swirled the water, unlike the other material, but they were almost too small to even see. Does it sound like I'm on the right track, just need to get to a area with good gold?

 

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[ekev22]

Sounds crazy and fun! I did that yesterday up near a town that is known for gold (Auraria, GA... the first gold town in GA, maybe the entire U.S.).

I'm sure it's far more productive to do the research and plan it all out but I found it quite fun to just stop at a random location and do some test pans. I didn't find much either but I think there's a lot of potential because of the amount of quartz and black sand in my test pans. That being said, I'm very new to all this so I could be completely wrong and wasted an entire day. Either way, it was fun so no real loss. I brought my family for the road trip and just started taking random dirt roads while watching google maps and following random rivers and streams.

 

[arizau]

It sounds like you are on the right track but, as you said, in the wrong location. That said...Just because an area is not noted for gold doesn't mean that there isn't any and you may have proved that. The old timers were smart so if they didn't find any or enough gold to make it worth their effort they moved on. That may be the best idea for you too if, with some more sampling, your results are not improved. In any case I always find it somewhat exciting to find gold and too often my results are similar or worse than what you reported.

Check out these recorded gold occurrences in WA if you have not already done so. Some give some fairly detailed location info. They are listed by county and it looks like there are 11 pages of them. Mineral Location Search

Good Luck

PS: Tiny specks of gold are much more commonly found than any size larger. If what you found/observed acted like gold it probably was.

 

[OwenT]

Tiny specks of gold are much more commonly found than any size larger. If what you found/observed acted like gold it probably was.

Cool! Makes sense, thanks.

 

[KevinInColorado]

Sounds like gold to me, congrats!