Tuesday, 24th July 2007 (2444 views)

Local prospectors still pan for gold in the San Gabriel River, California, 160 years after the gold rush occurred, it has been revealed.

The Los Angeles Times reports that prospectors in the region hold out hopes that the river holds hoards of the precious yellow metal.

Gold-panners often discover gold dust and flakes and search with vacuum hoses, circular pans and sluice boards in the shallows.

"The gold looks so good underwater. After you've been at it for a while, you start to wonder if it's worth it. Then you find something and you [think, 'yes']," Coel Schumacher, a 19-year-old junior at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo told the newspaper.

And Ron Strand, a fellow panner, added "I think there's endless amounts of gold up here, we just need a good storm to wash it all out".

The gold-panners work by shovelling mud from the river onto the sluice and then wringing out the gold-trapping sluice liner into a bucket from which point the mixture is then placed into a circular pan, swirled, tipped and shaken until the gold appears.

 

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