I’d metal detect the likely drop out zones between high water mark and present water level first. Then I’d dredge or high bank the stream or river. Name of the game is to move material. Dredging, the method of sucking material up a hose with a specialized pump into your sluice box. Depending on hose size they will move a lot of material quickly. You’ll freeze your ass off this time of year though because you need to be in the stream or river. Many times the water being over your head. Dangerous in the spring runoff period. They come in the form of floating dredges or high banker/ dredge combos. One, if in the right spot can do very well with a dredge. Next would be high banking, where you set up on the bank a sluice having a hopper above. The hopper gets water pulled from the stream by a pump into spray bars along the sides of the hopper. Inside at the bottom at a downward angle towards the back is what is called your grizzly bars, they keep the bigger material from running down the sluice and it falls off the back side making your tailings. As you feed material into the hopper it gets washed down, the big stuff goes into the tailings and the finer more gold bearing material drops through the grizzly bars into the sluice where gold is captured in your riffles and matting of which there are many different styles. So basically you shovel into it from the stream or feed using buckets. Labor intensive with much less material being run than with a dredge system. Therefore less gold at the end of the day. Next up a simple sluice set up directly in the water whereby again you feed it material by shovel or bucket. Now even less material gets run than the high banker resulting in even more gold missed. Finally the lowly pan. You get the picture. In the situations mentioned above the pan is often used to sample an area to see if it would be worth a dredge or high banker set up. The pan is also used to separate your gold from the “concentrates” that you clean from your sluice box at the end of the day. Then there is panning for the fun of panning. It’s a lot like fishing in many ways. Because of the economy and the right weather created circumstances I’d say there’s gonna be another California gold rush this year. It’s already being talked about in the trade magazines.