Classifying and clean-up: snuffer, vials, drying, weighing

Classify in the field, finish at home

Two jobs share the word “classifying”. In the field, it means screening gravel before you pan so the pan holds only material small enough to stratify properly. At home, it means sizing your concentrate so you can finish each size fraction on its own. Both are about the same thing: gold of a given size only separates cleanly from other grains of roughly the same size. A ¼-inch flake in a pan full of ⅛-inch sand is easy; a flour-gold speck in a pan with pea gravel is gone.

Field kit: a stack of classifiers — ½ inch, ¼ inch, ⅛ inch — that sit on a five-gallon bucket. Screen once through ½ inch for general panning; in flour-gold country like Alberta or Ontario, screen again through ⅛ inch and pan the fines separately, slower. Check the oversize in the top screen before you dump it. Yukon lists a classifier among the hand tools allowed for recreational panning; B.C.’s list is pan and shovel only, so there the screen stays in the truck.

Take the concentrate home

Don’t finish fine gold in the creek. Pan each hole down to a cup of black sand and pour it into a zip bag or a lidded jar with a bit of water — one per spot if you are mapping the pay streak. One rule to respect: in B.C. panning reserves, gravels must be processed on site, and no material may be hauled away; a bag of concentrate is the processed product, but a bucket of raw gravel is not. Elsewhere, hauling gravel home is generally fine on open ground — and pointless, because it is heavy.

The clean-up bench

Dry it. Spread the concentrate on newspaper or a baking sheet and let it dry in the sun, or in a low oven with the door cracked. Dry sand separates far better than wet; damp clumps trap gold.
Magnet. Slide a magnet in a plastic bag or a sheathed “magnetic separator” through the dry concentrate. Magnetite, usually most of the black sand, jumps to it. Pull the magnet away over a second tray, release, and repeat two or three times — fine gold hides between magnetite grains and gets carried off the first pass. Re-check the magnetic pile before you discard it.
Screen. Size what is left through a kitchen sieve or fine classifier into two or three fractions. Coarse fraction: tweezers and a loupe. Fine fraction: back to water.
Re-pan in a tub. A small pan in a plastic tub, a drop of dish soap to break surface tension (flour gold floats otherwise), and good light over your shoulder. Swirl the fines out into a fan; the gold lags in a bright line. Snuffer it up.
Loupe check. Ten-power loupe on the tailings. Pyrite and mica pretend; gold in shadow stays gold-coloured. Everything that passes goes into the vial.

Vials, drying and weighing

Glass screw-top vials are the standard: gold shows through, water keeps flour from static-clinging to plastic, and you can decant. Keep one vial per outing until you have weighed it, then combine if you like. To weigh, tip the gold onto a folded square of paper, let it dry completely — a hair dryer on low works — and use a pocket scale that reads to 0.01 g, tared to the paper. Weigh twice. Log the number.

Why the fuss? Because a weight is the only honest measure of a spot. “Lots of colour” means nothing; 0.31 g from twelve pans on the head of the bar means everything, including whether the drive was worth it. In Alberta the log is also compliance: Crown royalty applies once you produce and sell more than a troy ounce (31.1 g) in a year.

What not to do

Do not use mercury. Old-timers amalgamated fine gold with it and poisoned themselves, the rivers and the downstream towns; it is a hazardous substance, it is unnecessary at recreational scale, and disposing of it is a problem you don’t want. Don’t use acids on concentrate without ventilation and eye protection — the loupe and a pin test answer the pyrite question fine. And don’t dump tailings back in the river from the bank at home; a bucket of black sand from another watershed is exactly the invasive-species risk the provinces warn about. Bin it.

General information for recreational prospectors — not legal advice. Rules change and vary by site; check the official sources listed under this article and the LocalKarat “Can I pan here?” wizard before you go.

Sources

Updated 2026-09.

Panning-area, claims, and regulation information on LocalKarat is general information for recreational prospectors — it is not legal advice. Mining, land-access, and environmental rules change and vary site by site. Verify current rules with the official sources linked on each page, get permission from private landowners and claim holders, and respect First Nations rights, settlement lands, and treaty areas.

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