Back in the early 1990's, when I still had a C-Band satellite dish one of my favorite channels was the Outdoor Channel. There was a guy on there by the name of George "Buzzard" Massie. He was the founder of the Gold Prospectors Association of America and a co-founder of the Outdoor Channel. The Buzzard had a program called Gold Prospecting. You can still see some of the old programs online at this website.
Watching those programs back then really gave me gold fever. I even joined the GPAA and fully intended to go and do some gold prospecting. Unfortunately, I had a full time job and enough other responsibilities to occupy my time. I never got around to doing any prospecting.
Fast forward to this year. Around the first of October, I was out on eBay looking for something and I came across a guy out in Arizona selling 2 pound bags of paydirt from his gold claim. I still had my gold pan that I got back when I joined the GPAA so I ordered a bag to try my hand at panning. What the paydirt amounted to was the concentrates that this guy got from his sluice box after running the raw materials through it. In other words, it was 2 pounds of sand, clay, small gravel up to about pea sized and with any luck at all, some gold. Now the bag only cost $10 so you don't expect to find much gold, if any. Well I panned it out and sure enough, there was gold in there. Not much. In all about .06 grams which at the current price of $1600 per ounce is worth a little over $3. But it wasn't about the money. It was about getting to pan for gold. To actually take some rocks and dirt and pan it down to where there was something of worth left in the bottom of that pan. It was just as much fun as the ole Buzzard had shown it to be on TV.
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