…the sluice is a normal first step up from a gold pan for many prospectors. They are simple to use, easily portable, can capture a lot of gold, and can process gravel 10 to 20 times faster than a person can pan…

While recovery rates are important, they must necessarily be secondary to the volume of material processed. Running more material at lower recovery rates is generally preferable to increasing the efficiency of the system.

Watching for these areas is one of my primary targets during the winter. It doesn’t take but a few inches of the surface moving away to give a fantastic target response that you didn’t hear prior to the washing of the surface.

What I hope to do here is to give you some information that will help you, the reader, pick out locations that will be better for you to detect and give you a possibility of finding gold.

Then I came to a section of recently exposed gravel that looked unworked. Water seeped out all around, making the ground beneath a sea of slick mud.