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To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (51863)	4/23/2000 8:47:00 AM
From: Alex	Respond to of 116764

Fair use etc...Outdoors show instructor demonstrates art of gold panning By AMANDA BOHMAN Staff Writer If you're an amateur gold panner, there's something you should know: Brand new gold pans are no good. You have to age your pan for it to work best, according to gold panning instructor Jim Madonna. To do that you pour salt in the pan, wet it and set it outside overnight. You do that every night for a week. "That way it will be pitted and have a rough surface," Madonna, 62, said. Madonna spent 10 years working in a mine--he says it was five years too many--before coming to Alaska in 1970 to study mining and geology, so he knows about mineral extraction. He's taught the Carlson Center outdoors show gold panning class for several years now though the former university professor was a little nervous before teaching this year's class. He said a friend, who is one of the outdoors show organizers, told him to just show people how it's done. The friend stroked Madonna's ego saying, "You're the best gold panner in the state." Madonna doesn't accept that label. "I'm a good panner. I'm not the best panner. I don't want to be tagged with that. There's a lot of guys out there who are very, very good." About three times as many people attended Saturday as did last year, Madonna said. "Interest is up." The key, he said, is to try to develop your own technique and not mimic others. "There are as many ways to pan gold as there are people to pan it." Madonna uses the dunk-swirl-fan-dump technique. He prefers panning along river beds as opposed to smack dab in the middle of the water. The best places to pan gold are along the edges of big rocks--be sure to check their crevices too--and on the inside curves of river bends. Madonna recommends gold panning in the Interior Gold Provinces--places such as Coldfoot, Wiseman, Circle and 40-Mile. First you dunk your pan into the river muck and scoop up some gravel and water. Then you swirl it around, sort of like the washing machine when it's agitating. Don't lift the pan out of the water. Keep it resting on top of the surface, Madonna said. Agitating is crucial, he added, because big rocks may have clay on them and the gold will stick to that. Agitating increases the chance of freeing the gold from the clay. "You should get the gravel moving in the pan so the gold falls. You'll feel it," Madonna said. He advises agitating the gravel so much that when you stop swirling, it is still moving on its own, "like when you are driving on ice and you try to stop your car. It slides." Next you tip the pan forward so that the sand and gravel fans out. "Don't worry. You're not going to lose any gold. It's all at the bottom." The ripples in the pan will keep the gold, once it has sunk beneath the muck, from exiting the pan. Madonna advises letting the water do the work. Tip the pan forward and submerge the fan of sand and gravel allowing the water to swallow it--that's the dump. You repeat these steps until almost all of the sand and gravel is removed leaving behind, hopefully, pebbles and specks of gold. Don't let the water go further inside the pan than the first ripple in the pan, he said. The ripples in the pan obstruct the materials at the bottom--where the pay dirt is--from coming out of the pan. Madonna says you can remove big chunks of rock with your fingers but he doesn't recommend using your fingers to swoosh around in the muck looking for gold. "I see people who have half the gravel gone and they're running their fingers through the gravel. What a waste of time." One guy Madonna knows found a nugget sifting through the sand in his gold pan but it took him three hours. At the end when it's just the gold and some black sand, Madonna recommends removing the black sand with a magnet and a baggy. You put the baggy over the magnet and attract the black sand, he said. Once it's stuck to the baggy, you move it out of the gold pan and remove the magnet, letting the black sand simply fall or blow away. It took Madonna less than 30 minutes to find the tiny pebbles and specks of gold from a can of "spiked" gravel he brought from his wife's shop, Alaskan Prospectors, for the demonstration. "You got a few specks of gold. How do you get it out of the pan?" Madonna recommends a suction bottle to suck it up and put it in a vial though gold will also stick to your saliva-dampened fingers. "What is the point? The point is to find one particle of gold. More of it's there." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ¸ 2000 MediaNews Group, Inc. and Fairbanks Publishing Company, Inc. newschoice.com