Gold panning is a lot of fun! As long as you’re not planning to get a lot of gold and resolve any financial difficulties you might have…

We went gold panning many times. The very first time was in the creek near Columbia Historic State park. We were in Columbia and we had our newly purchased gold panning gear in the car… so we just kept driving on Italian Bar Road until we got to a creek that looked promising. I’m from Ukraine, we don’t have poison oak there, and I’m glad I looked online so I knew if saw it… Well, poison oak was everywhere and I’m not kidding! Almost all green on the ground was poison oak, but we both never had poison oak rush before and we drove so far already so we carefully approached the creek and started to pan gold. Well, we didn’t find any, LOL and I think at that time we were just not doing it right! The place was awesome - clean cold water in the creek, birds singing, little fox jumped from the bushes right next to us, saw us and jumped back. Very nice place indeed! But no gold, LOL!

We panned for couple hours then decided to take a walk around the place.  There was an entrance to the abandoned mine nearby, and we also found “Private Property”, “No tresspassing” signs up the creek, we could see dredge and other equipment behind the fence so maybe there was some gold somewhere in that creek…

Italian Bar Road at some point becomes unpaved road and very narrow. Not everywhere 2 cars can drive together so be very careful!