How do prospect?

The basic method for cleaning your ore, or the dirt that you've dug up from what you hope to be a gold-producing area, is by panning it.

Another method that dramatically increases the amount of ore you can process is sluicing. Here is what a sluice looks like. As you can see from the photo, it is a very simple device, you put the ore in the wide end and the water washes the lighter material out, leaving "concentrates". You then pan the concentrates out.

There are many other ways to get the gold, but these are, so far, all that I am familiar with. The next step up would be a dredge, and they are a little out of my current price range. You can get a good one for about $1000, maybe a little less. There are also some restrictions on where they can be used. They basically have a suction hose which sucks up ore from the bottom of a stream and discharges it into a sluice. You also might need some scuba equipment to get really into this method of prospecting.