GOLD  PANNING  EQUIPMENT

If you pay for a 10 minute taxi ride to a stream and then spend all day panning for gold, you more than likely will NOT find enough gold to pay for that taxi ride there, never mind pay for the taxi ride back home!

Secondly, such finds are incredibly rare and the origin of such items may not be actually from the UK, as they may have been brought here from somewhere else.

The odds are higher with winning the Jack Pot on the National Lottery!; however some people have been very lucky or have spent considerable time in finding such.

However any such river veins would more than likely have been already exploited over the last few thousand years, and also more recently in the last few hundred years by the "old-timer miners".

How much diesel will it have cost you to have run that material? A hundred times more in money than those few pin head speaks of gold would be worth!

Never mind how long it would take you to manually dig out and classify that one cubic meter square of dirt by hand!

So it is not worth even considering digging into the landscape for gold in the UK. Don't even be tempted!.

The streams and rivers in the UK are very small in comparison to the large gold bearing rivers in the United States and other parts of the world so you more than likely won't even cover the cost of the fuel running the dredge.

"the UK is mineral rich and known for its rare Welsh, English Cornish and Scottish Gold"; the word "RARE" (very little) should now be getting clear!

Sometimes the surface of the bedrock can be loose and moving this aside sniping and crevassing cracks can reveal additional colour!

However do avoid breaking up and kangoing out the bedrock, the streams in flood and spate do enough of that. Viciously breaking bedrock up may be considered environmentally damaging!

Let's examine "Recreational Gold Panning":

Recreational Gold Panning in the UK should NOT involve the use of any powered device such as a power dredge, no matter if it has a suction hose diameter of only a few inches.

Although in other countries this may be deemed as recreational mining, usually that type of dredging takes place in much larger steams than the small burns we pan on in the UK.

Even if the land owner grants permission to use a power dredge then surely this type of action is no longer "Recreational Gold Panning"?

So for "Recreational Gold Panning" using a manual two inch Henderson type pump (manually pumping like inflating a bicycle tyre with a hand pump) action; would take so much human effort to maintain a significant length of continuous pumping to cause that level of silt movement that a power dredge does.

You would probably have a heart attack before even starting to keep up with that type of consistent and constant pumping action.

When the smallest of burns and river tributaries are in flood or in spate so much material gets pushed down stream ripping up bedrock; like using a hydraulic digger and tromel in commercial mining. It would take a lot of gold panners all working together without stopping to have that sort of impact!

Digging and manually pumping through stream gravels and running through a classifier, sluice or gold pan is done in short spates, and not for prolonged periods of time, and in fact more often than not small fish jump (ok they swim) at the chance to to feed on small stream insects and larva which are released whilst manually moving the gravel.

Unlike other outdoor activities where rubbish and debris get left behind, gold panner's take theirs away with them.

Most gold Panner's have great etiquette like:

Good metal detectorists will fill in the holes they dig, so do gold panner's back fill with the gravels they move.

Responsible fishermen (ladies) should not discard line and weights, or through unused line bait or ground bait endlessly into streams or environmentally friendly campers should not leave rubbish behind wherever or not it's bagged up.

Walkers and ramblers when tracking through wildlife environments, and treat such habitats like responsible rock climbers in not trampling down plants whilst makng their way to crags.

Therefore this would also cause long periods of silt movement as would using a power dredge, and therefore would be considered the same as power dredging; and not as kind on the enviroment like "Recreational Gold Panning" ment as a hobby activity rather than a commercial mining engagement!

Such window for spawning usually takes place between the beginning of October and the end of May.

Important fish spawning and rheophilic invertebrate species rely upon natural channel-features habitat like riffle-pool sequences created in the stream gravels.

These are crucial for both salmon and trout to spawn and an important factor is the size of the gravels and their coarseness to which the fish can excavate and move. Sizes of such gravels that can be moved depends upon the size and type of the fish.

Unfortunately when these gravels get compressed down over long periods of time in the stream beds prevents the fish from being able to move them and spawn in them.

So when gold panner's dig down and move these compressed gravels actually increases the possibility of the stream naturally re-creating such channel features, with loosened and separated gravels which have been released.

After finishing with the working area gold panner's generally back fill the holes with the larger and heavier rocks first, then shovel back the smaller stones over them filling in between the gaps.

Small amounts of tailings left by panning out or from sluices usually comprise of the small gravels which can either be pumped back over the area or simply left for the stream to be now able to recreate such channel features with the freshly loosened and separated gravels which have been released.

Quite often around sluices (usually less than one meter in length) we will build small dams to help the flow of low pressure water through the sluice. However, these are very small and actually help to re-oxygenate the water, where current is slight sped up. After the days finished, the rocks get re-distributed.

Working areas in the streams where there is little or almost no flow the water can became stagnant. Working in such areas can help move water about whilst we will build small dams to help the flow of low pressure water through sluices (sluices are usually kept to less than one meter in length and only about 30cm wide!) . However these dams are very small and actually help to re-oxygenate the water, where current is slight sped up rushing over the dam rocks. After the days finished the rocks can be re-distributed back.

Fact:

In degraded rivers gravel additions are manually implemented to provide suitable spawning locations for salmonids and provide spawning-bed enhancement to improve embryo survival.

This has been carried out in large rivers where comercial daming has taken place, for example hydroelectric dams, and the flow of the river has been reduced to almost nothing.

In comparison to how much pollution is carried into streams from crop pesticides, industrial discharges, chemicals, oils and washed in pollutants from roads and much more; If any small amounts of natural lead or mercury are displaced by shifting through river gavels, then this would be absolutely minimal, and at no extra amount that could get released by natural stream flood and spate.

Using continuous small manual dredging techniques for long periods of time may discharge some level of mineral displacement, however this would remain minimal. Compare to that of a few days of heavy rain when a stream starts to flood!