Harry's First Time River Panning for Gold

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Hi, welcome to Mine Operator. My name is Harry. Today I'm on a river. This is the Noosack River in Washington and I was given intel that there is very, very fine gold in this river.

[00:00:18]Not expecting to pay for the fuel or even my lunch on this trip, but all I brought was a shovel, a pick, a gold pan. I don't even have a snuffer bottle.

[00:00:29]I'll hike down a trail along the water here. I found a nice little spot underneath a tree. Nice and shady.

[00:00:38]There's lots of moss here.

[00:00:40]And I'm told that this moss in certain areas can contain little small specks of gold. So, I'm going to spend my day off enjoying the sun and hopefully I find a little bit of gold to show you. I'm going to start by working these little benches here. Uh there's like a little little natural catch. Uh there's a couple more over there. I think I'm just going to stay in one spot for today and not get too adventurous.

[00:01:06]There's big old pieces of quartz laying around here.

[00:01:12]Look like good stuff to me.

[00:01:15]But I've never panned on a river before.

[00:01:18]This is my first time.

[00:01:21]So hopefully I find something.

[00:01:24]You just work in this little spot here.

[00:01:27]Getting some material in the pan.

[00:01:31]Some nice moss here.

[00:01:54]I don't have a classifier either.

[00:01:56]Wouldn't fit in my backpack.

[00:01:59]So, I'll uh clean all this moss off and pan this down.

[00:02:58]A lot of little bits of quartz in here.

[00:03:03]A lot of quartz actually. Some of it kind of looks like the stuff we see at Jason's mine.

[00:03:48]One of our uh one of our subscribers recently moved to uh Washington out uh more on the coast in the islands I should say and they were looking for some hard rock and I was like, well, I don't know any out there. But there a lot of rivers in Washington have some small gold. So, if you're looking to have fun, there's there's plenty out here.

[00:04:09]But, like I said, you're not you're probably not even going to pay for your fuel on the trip. So, you just be going for fun just to get out of the house on a nice day like this.

[00:04:25]I don't even care if I find gold, but would be cool to see something.

[00:04:38]And I'm a hard rock panner, so I don't pan the way everybody else does.

[00:04:44]I speed pan just to see if there's color.

[00:04:50]And if it's heavy, it'll go to the bottom of the pan. So, I'm not really too worried about it.

[00:04:55]I'm noticing that in this spot there's a lot of these uh iron stained or orange rocks. There's a decent amount of black sands for what I put in the pan. Not concentrated.

[00:05:20]All right, let's see what we got.

[00:05:30]Anything?

[00:05:32]Nothing.

[00:05:34]Well, there's a couple mini specks in there. You're not even going to be able to see these.

[00:05:40]Yeah, there's one tiny tiny little speck right there.

[00:05:50]Tiny tiny tiny little guys.

[00:06:01]Think that's it. Just uh maybe like four pieces in there.

[00:06:08]Can't even see it.

[00:06:13]Yeah. There you go. Mini mini fly poops.

[00:06:18]mini gold. There's my second pan.

[00:06:22]Well, that's the biggest piece I've seen out here so far.

[00:06:27]I'll uh clean it all up and show you what I got.

[00:06:31]Here we go. I got one little guy right here.

[00:06:36]Tiny speck there. And then little group of three right there. Make that four.

[00:06:43]So, it's more than last pan.

[00:06:47]I can see why everybody likes the pan on the river. This is really nice. I've not really experienced this before.

[00:07:00]Oh man, what a sweet place this would be to dredge if only. Right.

[00:07:06]Pan number three. I'm right there.

[00:07:10]And I'll kind of work underneath this little this little little deal here.

[00:07:14]here. I don't know what you call this, but to me it seems like, you know, this river runs pretty good after all the snow melts.

[00:07:24]And uh any gold up in the hills here will kind of maybe get caught in this stuff. I don't know. You guys tell me. I don't know. I don't know plaster very well, so you tell me where it is. I just know if I go down there and bedrock with a dredge, you get gold. But on the banks, you know, this is out of my wheelhouse.

[00:07:44]Need a bunch of little ones.

[00:07:53]Tiny, tiny, tiny. But that's good. Three pans. You're getting something.

[00:08:01]For pan four, I'm going to take what was underneath the moss here and try that next.

[00:08:20]Hand number four.

[00:08:23]That's a pretty rock.

[00:08:32]There's pan number four. Getting better.

[00:08:45]little guys.

[00:08:47]Here's my grubby little finger for scale.

[00:09:04]Pan number five.

[00:09:06]All right, there's pan number five.

[00:09:09]Yeah, like three little specks in there.

[00:09:11]They're very small.

[00:09:18]One there, two, three, four. Five little specks.

[00:09:24]All right, train strategy here. I just wanted to try some of the surface gravels here. So, a little bit from here, a little bit from there, and a little bit from right here.

[00:09:36]about a maybe half a pan.

[00:09:40]And it's still got something in there.

[00:09:42]Not much, but little little guys, but they're here. This might be actually a decent little spot to run like uh one of those little mini mini slooes. One of the electric pump deals.

[00:09:58]That'd be cool to take the uh the mini mini dredge slle up here. It's uh it'd be cool to take a little electric pumpage pump and do a little mini high bank or something like that out here.

[00:10:14]It'd be fun. You wouldn't pay for anything, but that's still pretty cool.

[00:10:18]I just took stuff right off the surface.

[00:10:20]This is not a bad spot if you were to be able to run volume, but this was nice. I think I'm going to move.

[00:10:30]I know there's gold here.

[00:10:34]Good ones.

[00:11:04]Well, I was going to leave and then I found this flat spot. Now I have to try it.

[00:11:17]Nice little flat spot.

[00:11:20]Yeah, I'm going to try that next and see what I get.

[00:11:26]My little flat spot. I'm going to try this one.

[00:11:39]Lots of quartz.

[00:11:42]What you got here, bug?

[00:11:47]Lots of quartz in here.

[00:11:49]Chances of finding golden quartz here is almost impossible, but I still look.

[00:11:53]It's the principle of it being a hard rock guy.

[00:12:06]Not so good.

[00:12:08]One tiny speck. Where'd it go?

[00:12:12]Yeah, right there. One little speck.

[00:12:16]Forget that. H. Looks like someone else is already out here before me.

[00:12:22]They went down here underneath the roots.

[00:12:25]I dug all that out. I wonder what they got.

[00:12:29]It was a long time ago cuz I don't see any of their panning at all. Someone was in there.

[00:12:38]There is all the gold from five pans. Pretty terrible, but still a good time. I enjoyed it.

[00:12:47]I do that again.

[00:12:51]Look how small that is.

[00:12:55]He floats.

[00:13:08]I'm done.

[00:13:11]So, I'm going to take off.

[00:13:14]That's the end of this one. Thanks for watching.