Pinecrest lake is a very popular destination in the western Sierras!  Located just a bit off of Highway 108, at an elevation of 5600 feet, it offers a refreshing change of scenery to many visitors from the Central Valley and Bay Area.  Unlike Lake Alpine on Highway 4, Pinecrest Lake has a relatively highly developed resort sort of feel to it.

There’s a lot offered at Pinecrest Lake including swimming, boating, fishing, camping, picnic areas, restaurants, etc.

The lake has a surface area of about 300 acres.  There are designated, buoyed, swimming areas where no boats and no fishing is allowed.  The swimming area is near the main parking area, right off the day use beach.

One thing to note about Pinecrest Lake… it is NOT dog friendly.  Dogs are not allowed in the Day Use Area between May 15 and September 15.

Another thing to note is the reason given for the restriction on dogs… “because of the very high visitor use”… This is a VERY popular place.  If you’re planning on going up on a weekend or holiday, get there early or you may not find a parking place.

There is a very nice picnic area with a beach and the swimming area near the main parking lot.  There are 50 picnic sites with grills and plenty of extra space if you don’t need to use their tables or grills.  There is also piped water and flush toilets in the day use area.

Just to the north of the Day Use Area you’ll find the Marina, Snack Bar and Boat Ramp.

The Marina offers rentals of Canoes, Kayaks, Paddle Boats, and even small motor boats.

Motor Boats are allowed on the lake, but there is a speed limit of 20 MPH, and 5 MPH in designated areas like near the swimming area, dock, etc.  So don’t plan on doing any water skiing at Pinecrest.

For those of you planning on bringing your own boat, or RV, there is a designated parking area specifically set aside for vehicles with trailers or RVs.  However, when things get busy, some of the parking spots are bound to get filled by other visitors desperate to find parking so plan ahead and come early.

Near both the Day Use Area, and the Marina you’ll find a variety of shops including a General Store, A nice restaurant, a bike shop where you can rent a bike for the day, and the Pinecrest Resort.

The General Store sells everything from Groceries for campers to fishing gear, to floaty toys for the kids.

Speaking of campers, camping is one of the biggest attractions at Pinecrest.  There are 3oo campsites in two separate campgrounds.  The campgrounds have flush toilets and running water.  There are also 3 different group campsites.

One of the campsites, Pinecrest Campground,  has quite a few sites located just across the street from the lake.  Many, if not all the sites in this campground are within easy walking distance of the beach, general store, etc.

The other campground, Meadowview Campground, is located over half a mile further to the west so often times campers at these sites will ferry kids and gear over to the Day Use Area.

The town of Strawberry, just up the road (North) on 108 from the Pinecrest Lake turnoff, has a larger general store as well as another nice restaurant.  They also have cabins for rent in the area.

In case you want to “get away” in the area but don’t want the beach and crowds, there’s plenty of other things to do in the area.  From the turnoff for Pinecrest Lake, if you take the road up toward the Dodge Ridge Ski area, you’ll come across signs directing you to several popular hiking trails in the area.  There’s also a driving tour called the Sierra Grandstand Tour located in the same region.

If you plan on hiking in the area I’d suggest checking with the ranger at the Pinecrest Lake turnoff regarding permits, trail conditions, etc.  If you don’t already have a good topo map of the area, pick one up while you’re there.  And, if you came completely unprepared, I’m sure you can get a compass either at the Pinecrest or Strawberry general stores.

Another activity we stumbled across in the area is provided by the Aspen Meadow Pack Station.  They’ll take you on a horseback ride for anywhere from an hour to a whole day in the beautiful western Sierras.  They provide animals and  services for longer pack trips.

We ran into a group of new riders just getting started and it looked like they were having a blast!

Take a look at the map at the beginning of the article to see where things are located.  The downloadable KML file can be used in Google earth, and the gpx file, once unzipped, can be used in a lot of GPS devices

As always, use at your own risk!  This is an outdoor activity.  You should rely on your own experience, knowledge and judgment when deciding where to go or what to do.

We’ve put together several articles on Gold Panning.  Hope you have fun with them!

Gold Panning Equipment… OK, so from the first episode you know that gold is dense and that’s why gold panning works.  Now we’ll spend a little time talking about the equipment you’ll need and some that will just make panning easier and more productive. So, here’s a snapshot of the equipment that I’ve found convenient:

Panning Equipment

We’ll go over each piece of equipment in a moment, but for convenience, here’s a list:

• 1 shovel
• 2 buckets
• 1 gold pan
• 1 trowel
• 1 hand pick
• 1 classifier (sieve)

The shovel, trowel, and hand pick are pretty familiar and common gardening items so I won’t be going into more detail about those other than to say that I’ve chosen mine to be easy to carry or put into a pack in case I need to tote them a ways. If you’re interested in getting your own equipment, I’ve provided links at the end of this article. The most important item of the bunch, and the only one that is really necessary is the gold pan itself.

Gold Pan

Modern gold pans are almost always made of plastic and have some sort of ridge structure to help keep the gold in the pan as water is being sloshed around. The one I like the most, shown here, is about 14 inches in diameter and green in color. There are many sizes, styles, and colors of pans available as you can see from this collection:

Variety of Gold Pans

• Black 10″
• Blue 10″
• Blue 12″
• Green 10″
• Green 14″

You can probably see that the style of ridges is different in these pans as well.  The green ones have a single set of deep cut ridges.  The blue pans have one set of deep cut ridges and one set of shallow cut ridges. I suppose that the theory is that you can move to the shallow cut ridges as you get down to finer and finer material while panning.  Personally, I have not found this very useful and do just fine with the single set of rides. The black pan is one of the type you’ll find in many hardware, sporting good, and novelty stores.  It’s made of plastic but is designed to look like an old fashioned steel pan.  I really recommend against them as they are not nearly as efficient as the others shown. What I do recommend is that you go with the largest pan you can get, with the deep ridges, that you can handle with it full of dirt and water.  One of the keys to panning is to go through as much material as possible in the shortest amount of time.  So, the larger the pan, the faster the panning!… unless it’s too heavy for you and you drop the whole thing in the creek. OK, let’s move on to the next piece of recommended equipment, the classifier.  It’s really just a sieve, but they call it a classifier because they come in several different grate sizes so you can “classify” the size of material that gets through.  Here’s what it looks like:

Classifier (or Sieve)

You see it sitting on top of a bucket because that’s how it’s used.  They’re designed to fit a standard 3 or 5 gallon bucket.  To use it, you dig up a shovel full of gravel and dump it in the classifier that’s sitting on a bucket.  Then, you use a second bucket to pour water over the material to wash the dirt, sand, and small gravel down into the bucket. You may need to use your hands to get all the larger material washed off and down into the bucket.  What you’re trying to do is get all the fine gold that may have been hiding in the sand and mud down into the bucket.  If there’s a hunk of gold large enough to be captured by the classifier, trust me, you’ll see it when you toss out the stuff that’s left after you’ve washed the mud off. So, that’s about it for equipment.  Pretty simple!  You need a pan… of course.  You need a classifier so you don’t have to stick 6 inch diameter rocks in your pan.  You need one bucket to collect the panning material and another to get water to wash it off in the classifier.  And, you need something to dig with. Whoops!  Almost forgot… Of course you are going to be lucky and find some gold so you need something to put it in.  One of these little glass vials works great:

Vial For Your Gold

So, that’s about it for equipment.  I hope to get down to the stream soon to show you how to use it!

joe

Resources:

Folding Shovel from Campmor

You can get 3 and 5 gallon buckets at almost any hardware store.

Hi Everybody!

To help understand the fundamentals of gold panning, let me introduce you to Specific Gravity… What, you didn’t think this was going to be a physics lesson?

Specific Gravity is the ratio of the density of a material to the density of water.  A more dense the material, the faster and farther it sinks in water or water soaked muck.

Water has a specific gravity of 1 because… obviously… it has the same density as water.  Gold has a specific gravity of 19.6, meaning it is almost 20 time more dense than water.  Iron, another common metal found in stream beads, has a specific gravity of around 7.5 meaning that gold is about 2 and a half times more dense than iron.

Now, compare those to broken granite, gravel, and quartz with a specific gravities between 1.5 and 1.7, and you can see why looking for gold using water is so popular. Gold is over 10 times more dense than the majority of stuff in any riverbed.

What does that mean?  It means that given even the slightest opportunity, gold will sink to the bottom.

The bottom of what you ask…

Well, the bottom of where ever it happens to be. That means that if it’s in the river bed, it’s going to eventually find its way down to the bedrock at the bottom of the river channel if it doesn’t get washed out to sea first.  If it’s in a bucket full of sand and gravel you’ve dug up, it’ll settle quickly to the bottom if you disturb the contents too much. If it’s in your pan, it’ll quickly and reliably find its way do the bottom of whatever you have in there with out too much prodding on your part.

So, now we’ve hit on the “bottom line” so to speak, and the magic secret of panning for gold.  Remember, gold is ten times “heavier” (actually more dense) than most of the stuff in the river and over twice as “heavy” as the next most common metal in the river, Iron. Plop a handful of river gravel and sand into your pan, submerse it in water, stir it around a bit, give it a couple shakes and you can almost guarantee that if there’s gold in there, it’s now at the bottom of the pan. In fact, using techniques we’ll go into in the next episode, once you wash away the majority of gravel and sand, you’re likely to be left tiny fraction of the original volume of material, and it will likely look like pure black sand. The first few times you try, you’ll probably say to your self “Rats! No Gold!”. But wait… that black sand is mostly if not all Iron. And what did we say about the density of gold compared to iron… that’s right, if we’ve done our job right, and if there was gold in the pan to beginning, then it’s probably still there now, just hiding underneath the black iron sand.

It’s a big thrill the first time you separate out the black sand and find the flake of gold clinging to the bottom of the pan. Even though most finds are just flakes, and not the thumb size nugget that make national headlines, it’s still a lot of fun to find them.

Next episode we’ll be taking a look at common equipment used for recreational gold panning, where to get it, and how to use it.