Gold Panning In The Winter

!±8± Gold Panning In The Winter

If you think that you have to stop panning for gold when winter arrives I am going to say you are wrong.

Unless you live in the far north, and I mean far, there is no way you have to stop. Most of you know the first method - bringing home buckets of "cons" all summer and then "running" them during the winter. I like doing it that way but I get the feeling some days that it would be nice to be out on that old claim. Do you?

Working in your garage is not the same as being crouched in the creek anxiously looking in the pan as the dirt swirls over the edge. That is not to say that sitting in a warm garage (in my case carport) running the cons through my bucket sluice is not a bad way to spend an hour or two.

The second way to pan in the winter is to move South. Just for a couple of months. I cannot bring myself to do this. I happen to like the winter. And Fall. Snow and rain are relaxing and in the winter the big rivers are very low so you can get into the parts that are flooded in the summer and spring months.

What you have to do is figure out where you want to look for gold in the summer. I take a couple of pictures and mark them Then in the low water season I head out to the area I want to test and grab some samples. It is generally easy to get to bedrock in these areas because the flood waters will have moved a lot of the stuff you have to shovel if you are only mining in spring -summer.

The surprise is that if you watch the water levels and hit your target area as soon as it dries up the ground will not be frozen. If you are lucky you will get a couple of days worth of digging unless the temperature drops far below freezing.

You can get some good cons this way and also, in my mind, get out and away from the house into the nice crisp winter air. A useful item for accessing your claim in your winter mining is a "Sled" or snowmobile. The problem I have with using the Sled is that it is so much fun I forget that I came to do some serious mining.