Now that you know what you need, you need a place to go. The most important consideration is that you do not prospect on anyone else's claim or property without permission from the owner!!! That cannot be stressed enough. You will not only be in legal trouble, but you'll be giving other prospectors a bad name. Always know where you're prospecting. The Bureau of Land Management and some local town offices can give you the information you'll need.
If you are fortunate enough to live right by an old gold mine, or by a creek downstream from one, you can go right out in your back yard and get to it. Even then, while gold has been found in each of the fifty states, your back yard is not likely to put South Africa out of business. As strange as it may seem, I've had my best days in areas that had already been "cleaned out", especially by big business mining companies, years ago. The bulk of my prospecting has been done in the mountains East of Breckenridge, Colorado. That area is only 20 miles from my house, so I get out there as often as I can in the summertime, since it is covered by alot of snow nine months out of the year. This does not seem to bother some people, but I'm not as hardy (foolhardy?) as them. In fact, one of the highest producing mines in the area was found under 10 feet of snow. Rumor has it that one of the Indian tribes near here had a word for gold that translated literally to "yellow metal that makes White man crazy".
There are different tricks to prospecting drier areas, such as the Nevada deserts, which I don't know but if you live near a mountainous area where gold has been discovered in the past, this page will give you everything I've learned in the past 5 summers without all the discouragement that I went through. By no means do I claim to know everything there is to know about mountain prospecting, but I can help a beginner get started.
The basics to look for are:
gold mines... obvious, maybe, but when you consider that most gold mines were found using a process exactly like what you'll be doing, not really. What the old "hard rock" miners did was look for a stream with "placer" (rhymes with passer, as in football) gold in it. Placer gold is what you'll be looking for too. It is the gold that was in the rocks that have eroded away over time and washed downstream. The miners moved upstream until the placer gold was no longer there, then dug in a pattern on the hills on either side of the stream, keeping track of how much gold they found in each hole, until they had a good idea of where the source of the gold was, then they got out the dynamite. I don't know much about that, don't like to keep dynamite around the house.
tailing piles... These are the big fields of rocks left behind by the dredge boats that dug down to the bedrock in and around the streams I was talking about above. Dredge boats started at the lowest point of the stream that they could turn a profit from. They dug down and made their own pond which they floated in, working their way upstream. They were, in simplest terms, a huge floating sluice, looking for placer gold. The gold, being about the heaviest of the elements, would work its way down to the bedrock, and it took alot to get it to move from there. These dredge boats were "big business" with a constant eye on the bottom line. This means that they did not go to extreme efforts to get in between all the cracks and crevices in the bedrock. They also used a classifier on their sluice which means they had to have a man standing constant watch over the stuff they were throwing away, lest they lose a nugget. They still lost a few. This should be of great interest to those with high quality metal detectors, but be aware that the ground is extremely mineralized, and it challenges even the best detectors. Even so, Breckenridge is one of the best nugget shooting areas in Colorado. What all of this adds up to, is that they did not get all of the gold there. I've found 1/4 ounce in one "three hours after work" trip in a slab of bedrock I found sticking up out of the tailings. This is where a heavy duty prybar is necessary.
Look at the countours below the mines... Try to figure out how the gold got from the source rock the hard rock miners were looking for to the streams the dredge boats mined. This is one place that might have been overlooked, although the destructive method called "hydraulic mining" may have gotten there first. Hydrualic miners used powerful jets of water to wash down the side of the mountain into their sluice boxes. It should not be hard to tell if this method has been used. Even this was not a 100% surefire way to get all the gold, though, so you might give it a shot there.
Join any local prospecting clubs... This is a good idea in several ways, not the least of which is that they might have a few claims. It is not a good idea to go prospecting alone, there is some treacherous terrain in the areas I've described above. I still do it, I know I shouldn't, and I may pay the price someday. At least let someone know where you'll be and when to expect you back (probably when it's too dark to see your pan). Joining one of these clubs may help in this matter as well. Plus you can get one-on-one hands-on instruction from someone who's been prospecting a while. You won't need the trial and error process I went through.
Inside the bends in streams... Dig on, in, and around the inside of the curves in the streams. Gold and other heavy metals will concentrate in the eddies there. Also dig behind boulders and other obstructions in the stream, or where the stream used to run if it has changed course or if it floods. Sometimes nature makes its own "sluices" if you look closely.
That should get you started on the where, now let's get to the how.
Back to WHAT IS PROSPECTING?
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