Yukon Gold Panning Championships: 'Trust the pan'

​The first thing to know about panning for gold in Yukon is that Klondike River water, even if it's been sitting in a tub in the Fourth-of-July sunshine for several hours, is shockingly cold.

I will now stand in it for 10 minutes while Diane Schroeder shows me how to separate gold from dirt and rocks the old fashioned way. About halfway through, my feet are basically numb.

We are at the Yukon Gold Panning Championships in Dawson City, an event that draws hundreds of tourists and dozens of eager entrants, ranging from first-timers to salty old veterans of the goldfields.

Competitive gold panning is a thing and there's a little bit of artifice to the procedure. Competitors line up in front of huge tubs of water and are given a gold pan and a bucket of gravel and dirt, which has been spiked with a few flakes of gold. 

The goal is to sift through the mud to find as much of the gold as fast as you can. Schroeder, a Dawson City resident who's been competing in this event since 2008, says the pros can finish the job in two minutes flat.

I, however, am not a professional.

Shake it off

The physics of gold panning are pretty simple: rocks and dirt are eight times heavier than water, and gold is 19 times heavier, so with the right touch, the flakes sink to the bottom.

I start with a pile of earth dumped into a pan. The basic technique is to sink the pan into the water a bit and start shaking it back and forth and side to side. This washes out some of the sand and smaller rocks. "Now do it again, only kind of like you mean it," Schroeder says. 

The next step is to hold the pan level just beneath the water's surface and swirl it around in a circle. The centrifugal force pulls away the larger rocks. I'm instructed to keep repeating the process until most of the material is washed away. "Trust the process," Schroeder says. "The gold will stay."

Relying on the physics to do the work is a theme that keeps coming up. 

"Everybody has their own method but it just comes down to paying attention to what you're doing," says Art Sailer, a 51-year veteran of the gold patch. "You let the water do the work and get the flakes in the bottom."

Practice is key, says Joel Flamanbaum, a gold panner visiting from Carson City, Nevada. His wife, Marjie Newman, who finished seventh at the World Gold Panning Championships in Sweden last year, says it's important not to be timid when you shake the pan.

"Trust your pan," she says. "The pans are designed to capture the gold, to hang onto the gold, so you need to have a certain element of trust that the material is going to go off but the gold is going to stay in the pan."

Next comes luffing, the process of dipping the front edge of the pan into the water and moving it around to clear out as much of the remaining rock and sand as possible. At one point I nearly wash everything out of the pan and into the tub. 

'I just do this for fun'

But eventually, what's left at the deepest part of the pan are a few flakes that look less gold than tobacco-orange. Fishing them out requires a dry fingertip (they won't stick if your hands are wet). Finally, you put your gold-flecked fingertip to the mouth of a vial filled with water and turn it upside down. The water takes the gold safely away to the bottom of the vial.

In competition, participants are scored on their time and penalized one minute for each flake of gold they fail to count. I count half a dozen in my vial, but I've taken nearly 10 minutes so I'd have been an also-ran anyway. 

Considering miners during the gold rush were known to pay for nearly everything in gold, I can't resist a question that seems like it would have been important back in 1898: how much whisky can I get for these flakes?

"I just do this for fun," Schroeder says. "I have no idea."

It's a fair answer. It was fun. Even if it took a while for the sensation to return to my feet.