Gold panning gear: what you actually need to start

Gold panning gear is cheap compared to most hobbies. A plastic pan with molded riffles is easier for beginners than a steel pan since the riffles trap fine gold better and plastic is lighter to work with all day. Get a stack of classifier screens, commonly a half inch, quarter inch, and eighth inch mesh, to screen out oversized material before you pan so you are not wasting time working rocks that were never going to hold gold anyway. A snuffer bottle (a squeeze bottle with a fine tip) is the standard way to suck up individual flakes without losing them, and a small glass vial with a tight lid is the usual way to store what you find. A strong magnet is useful for pulling magnetite out of your black sand concentrate later. If you want to move more material, a sluice box lets a creek do the separating work for you, though check your local rules first, some areas restrict sluice use or require a permit, and motorized equipment like suction dredges and highbankers is regulated much more heavily and is banned outright in some watersheds and states.