Running a 5 gallon bucket isn't prospecting, it's mining. Save the mining until you have found a good deposit by prospecting.
Prospecting involves sampling and sampling and sampling some more. The samples I run go anywhere from a tablespoon or two up to a two pound scoop in the pan. Grid your area and take a small sample from each grid square. Pan each sample and inspect the results with a 10X loupe.
Keep track of each grid sample for location, amount of gold, size of gold and appearance of gold. Keep an eye out for what type of minerals are associated with the gold, they will be in your sample and they can tell you a lot about the local mineralization.
I take my samples from a uniform depth, usually about 6 inches. For location I use a hand drawn gridded map with numbers in each grid square corresponding to the numbered and bagged samples I've collected for each grid square.
Tally each grid for the 3 factors I noted and you will quickly see which grid square(s) has the best possibility of producing good gold. If they all come up pretty much the same move down to one edge of your previous grid and start again. You are looking for the best spot, not just a spot with some gold.
If you see some samples with much better gold than the others and you gridded with big squares (30 ft or so) you will want to make a much finer grid (5 ft or so) on the best grid squares from your first sample batch. Do the same process as before and you can narrow down the best grid spot to start testing.
Testing involves carefully digging down at your best grid spot. You should sample pan a bit every 6 inches or so. If you are seeing good gold on the way down stockpile what you are digging to run later. Keep track of the depth and quality of the samples just like with the grid sampling.
When you have finished that process you should know where and how deep the best gold is in the area you are prospecting.
If your results don't show much difference between the different grid and depth samples you might want to run a single random 5 gallon bucket to get an idea of the general yield of the area you prospected. Mark that down in your notebook because you need to move on to another area to prospect and keeping track of your results will teach you where to find the best gold in the area.
If the results show a "hot spot" run a 5 gallon bucket from that spot and ask yourself if it's worth digging more. Each spot requires different effort to dig and process the material so the quantity of gold recovered is only part of the equation. This is where experience comes in to play. There's only one way to get experience.
Keep prospecting work and mining work separate (even on a small scale) and you will get more gold with less effort.
Notice I didn't suggest a certain pan or tool? It doesn't matter. The most successful prospector I've met uses an old horn spoon to pan his samples, he works for the largest gold mining company in the world. It's not about the tools it's about working smart.
Heavy Pans
