gold panning
Sluicing for nuggets
Gold panning is the practice of using a shallow pan to separate gold flakes or nuggets from river sediment.
The miner swirls water and gravel in the pan, letting lighter material wash away while heavier gold settles to the bottom.
The technique dates to ancient times but is most associated with the California Gold Rush of 1849: We spent the afternoon gold panning in the stream.
- prospectorsMineral deposit searchers
- panShallow cooking vessel
- sluice boxChannel for separating ore
- classifierAssigns items to groups
- bedrockSolid stone underground
creek bed · boomtowns · mining town · pay dirt · mother lode · nugget · dredge · black sand · mining camps · color · Yukon Territory · sluicing · forty-niners · strike it rich · swirling · placer · Klondike · rocker
- Gold CountrySutter's Mill, forty-niners, prospectors, Columbia, Sonora
- Old Westcowboy, cowboys, cowgirl, sheriff, sheriffs
- Gold Rushgoldfield, prospectors, sluice, forty-niners, Sutter's Mill
- separationseparate, sieving, straining, divide, filtration
- treasure huntingmetal detecting, beachcombing, geocaching, prospecting, relic hunting
- child laborchild labor, child workers, child labor laws, bonded labor, debt bondage
gold panningindustrial mining
Large-scale mineral extraction operations
strip mining · open-pit mining · mountaintop removal · dredging · underground mining