Classifying material properly before you ever put a pan in the water

Screening material through a stack of graduated mesh sizes before panning, coarsest on top, finest on the bottom, is one of the single most effective time savers in gold panning, since it removes oversized rocks that were never going to hold gold before you spend any time actually panning them. A common approach uses a half inch screen, then a quarter inch, then an eighth inch, checking and discarding the larger material at each stage after confirming nothing obvious is visible in it. What passes through the finest screen is the material that actually goes into the pan, dramatically reducing the volume you need to work through by hand.