All you need to pan with is a shovel, a pan, tweezers, and a canister to put your gold in. You can find a gold pan at hardware shops, rock shops, hobby shops, and metal detector stores. The kind of tweezer I use is a suction tweezer that looks like an eye dropper. The canister can be about anything, such as an empty film canister or a see-through glass or plastic vial. Using a sluice can help speed up gold recovery by washing away most of the tailings (the lighter gravel) instead of panning them out. Classifiers can be also used to seperate the size of gravel. Just make sure to check the classifiers real good so that you don't throw away large nuggets.
According to the Department of Agriculture, no permit is needed for recreational gold panning and gold prospecting in the general national forest areas, provided no machinery is used, such as dredging equipment. Some people also pan under state highway bridges. There are places that sell maps in either the prospecting stores or online. There are also clubs that you can join that have their own claims for club members. The easiest way to get started is to just look for locations that have gold mine tours with panning, such as the Phoenix Gold Mine. Most of these places charge for panning, but they usually give you a short instructions on how-to.
Panning is relatively simple but take a lot of experience to get proficient at it. First, you fill your pan with gravel. Then, stick the pan into the water at about a 45 degree angle and move side to side. If the pan has ridges, the ridges should be on the bottom half. The side to side action will wash away the lighter gravel leaving the heavier material such as gold near the bottom. Check your pan regulary for nuggets and flakes of gold by taking the pan out of the water and swishing the pan in a circular motion. Gold is of a buttery color and you should be able to distinguish it from pyrite, which is called fool's gold. When you see the gold, use your tweezers to remove the gold and then place into your canister. There is also a thing called a gold magnet that doesn't actually pick up the gold since gold is not magnetized but removes the black sand, which is usually a combination of minerals that are magnetized, such as pyrite and magnetite.
Here's my set-up and I hope you have fun panning as I do.
My pans with my suction tweezers, a film cansiter, and a plastic vial.
My sluice. It should be placed in water that is moving somewhat swiftly.
My classifiers. There are commercial classifiers out there, but I decide to use some things from home. Notice the spaghetti strainer.
Emptying the sluice into a container. Make sure to wash each part of the sluice into the container.
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