Travel Channel 

I live in Northern California. Our football team is the '49ers, the Levi Strauss headquarters are in San Francisco, and I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge. But do I think about the actual veins of gold coursing through the foothills of the nearby Sierra Mountains? Never.

Yet a mere two hours from San Francisco, the Mokulumne River runs down the heart of the fabled mother lode. This exquisite river carves a seam between Amador County and Calaveras County (yes, that Calaveras County of jumping frogs and Mark Twain).

Just outside the town of Pine Grove, Calif., you'll find the entrance to Roaring Camp. It's a private guest lodge owned by the Elton Rodman family.

Our guide, Norman Dillon was a compact and grizzled man with a beard down to his chest, faded jeans and a checkered flannel shirt. It's possible he just walked off the set of Bonanza. His role? Miner, duh. He's the new guy at Roaring Camp; he's only been there for 40 years.

Norman instructed me in the art of panning, and let me tell you - it IS an art, a very difficult art.

First, we got a few shovels of dirt in a pan. The idea is that you dump in your sifting materials, add water and start shaking the pan. The extremely dense gold should drop into the pocket. As you progress you wash out the lighter material from the top of the dirt pile in your pan, all the while protecting your gold in the bottom.

After a minute or so of shaking and swirling, you rotate the pan and wash out the pocket. You then give it a few taps and start swirling the last of the materials into a fine covering on the bottom of the pan. In that moment, you should start to see flakes or nuggets of gold appearing.

This sounds pretty straightforward. IT'S NOT.

As I perfected my panning technique, Norman showed me another way to prescreen the material you pan: use a sluice box. This small water slide traps the heavy gold in speed-bumps and embeds them in the Astroturf that lines the sluice. Once you run water over a bucketful of materials, you pull the Astroturf, rinse it into a pan, and start the panning process.

Another more intense way to do this is to use a whiz-bang. That's a big hose and pump operation that extracts gold from an area of flat cut rock. For this instruction I was handed off to another ancient relic: Jack Neil. Jack is something of a legend at Roaring Camp; he's been mining for years and has a way with the visitors: he yells at them.

After 30 minutes of hard labor, Jack took one look at my panning technique and imagined the fruits of the whiz-bang washing down the drain. Whenever I tipped out too much sediment, I heard an "OOOH NO." Or if I didn't shake the pan right, it was "You're making me nervous when you do it wrong."

In my world as a TV host, almost everybody is nice to me, saccharin sweet and trying to make the best possible impression. I was elated that Jack was yelling at me; I almost didn't want to get the panning right. It was akin to a stern teacher who wanted you to get it right and enjoy the result so much that they hold your feet to the fire in the process of learning. Jack was great!

With his immediate feedback, I focused in on the panning and pulled out a few nice nuggets, a bunch of flakes, and the knowledge that interacting with crotchety old miners is worth more than its weight in gold.

At the end of the day I found about $500 worth of gold, and Mr. Rodman gave me a beautiful nugget worth about $600 to use in a ring. I look forward to taking it all to the goldsmith back in San Francisco: my newly appreciated Gold Rush town.