Terms of Sale and Use
This book is general information, not legal, financial or safety advice. Regulations, agency rules, state law, land status and prices change, and they change without telling you. Every price, specification and regulation in these pages carries the date it was checked and the source you need to check it yourself — and you should, because a figure that was accurate on the day we printed it may not be accurate on the day you read it. Before you use any equipment in any waterway, confirm the current rule with the agency that manages that specific ground and that specific water. Nothing here creates a right to prospect anywhere.
1 · Who you are buying from
The Second Pan is a publication of Mysteries Group LLC. Payment is processed by Stripe; we never see or store your card number. Email delivery and our mailing list run on Brevo. The site is hosted on Netlify.
2 · What you are buying
Everything sold here is a digital file. Nothing is shipped and there is nothing physical to return.
- The Second Pan — 2026 Edition. One PDF, 30 pages, thirteen chapters, with the Receipt Log workbook, Appendix A and Appendix B bound into the same file. $27.
- The Tailgate Ledger. An optional print-at-home pack: one PDF, 30 pages, twelve cards. $11, offered as a checkbox on the order form before you pay, and again on the download page after you buy the book.
- Gold or Not Gold. One PDF, 28 pages, free in exchange for your email address.
Delivery is by email, normally within a minute or two of payment, to the address you paid with. Every file also has a download page that keeps working, so you can come back to it when you change devices. If nothing arrives within an hour, check your promotions and spam folders first and then reply to the receipt email — an undelivered file is our problem to fix, not yours.
Prices are in US dollars. We are a small publisher and files are revised: an edition carries its revision date on the title page, and a figure inside it carries the day it was checked.
3 · The refund
The refund stands for sixty days from your purchase and you keep the PDF. Reply to the receipt email and say so. No forms, no questions.
You keep the file because a PDF cannot be taken back and pretending otherwise would be theater. The same sixty days apply to The Tailgate Ledger, whether you bought it with the book or afterwards. Refunds go back to the card you paid with, through Stripe, and take as long as your bank takes.
4 · What you may do with the file, and what you may not
Buying gives you a personal, non-transferable license to read the file, to keep your own copies of it on your own devices, and to print it — including printing the cards of The Tailgate Ledger as many times as you like, for your own use and for the people who go out with you. That is what a print-at-home pack is for.
What the license does not cover: reselling the file, uploading it to a file-sharing site or a members' area, distributing it to a club or a mailing list, or republishing the tables and sheets as your own work. The text, the sheets, the diagrams and the cover art are copyright Mysteries Group LLC. Quoting a short passage with attribution is fine and always will be.
5 · Prospecting notices — read these before you buy equipment or stand in water
5.1 · This book does not tell you where gold is
This book does not tell you where gold is. It is not a site guide, it contains no coordinates, no districts and no directions, and nobody here claims to have stood in your creek. It is about the equipment you buy, what it costs, what its own manufacturer says it needs in order to work, and how to measure what your own setup is actually doing. Where to dig is a different question and it is not this one.
5.2 · State rules change by state, by water and by year
Prospecting rules in the United States are set by federal agency, by state, by individual waterway and sometimes by county, and they are revised without notice. Washington publishes riffle-area and channel-width limits as numbers you can check with a tape measure. Idaho requires a Letter Permit for mechanised work below the ordinary high water mark, and a separate temporary water-use approval if you pump stream water to a powered sluice or high-banker sitting above that line. Oregon exempts hand panning from its wastewater permit requirement, covers non-motorised in-water equipment under a general permit with no application and no fee, and puts a high-banker under a different permit altogether — one that does not apply below the ordinary high water level. Those three are not a summary of American law; they are three examples of how far apart neighbouring states can be. Check the state you will be standing in, this season, with the agency that would issue you a citation. "It was legal last year in the next state over" is how people get cited.
5.3 · Federal land and casual use
On BLM-managed public land, "casual use" is defined at 43 CFR 3809.5 as activity causing no or negligible disturbance. It generally includes collecting samples with hand tools, hand panning, and non-motorised sluicing, and it generally excludes mechanised earth-moving equipment, chemicals and explosives. Casual use requires no notice to BLM; operations beyond it require a notice or a plan of operations under 43 CFR 3809.11 and 3809.21. Read that definition before you buy anything with a motor on it, because the motor is usually what moves you out of casual use and into paperwork. A valid mining claim on BLM surface is not open ground; the claim check is free and online through the BLM Mineral & Land Records System. (43 CFR 3809.5 and 30 U.S.C. 22 checked 26 August 2026. Verify current text and your specific ground with the managing field office.)
5.4 · Mining claims
An active mining claim on public land gives its holder rights to the locatable minerals of that ground, so public land is not automatically open ground for you. The check costs nothing and takes minutes at the BLM Mineral & Land Records System. If you arrive and find a claimant who disagrees with you about what you are allowed to do there, go somewhere else. You will not win that argument on a dirt road and you should not try.
5.5 · Water, and the machine you can legally buy and cannot legally use
California Fish and Game Code § 5653(a) prohibits the use of vacuum or suction dredge equipment in a river, stream or lake of the state except under a permit issued by the department, and § 5653(e) makes it unlawful to possess such equipment in areas, or within 100 yards of waters, closed to its use. Section 5653(g) defines the regulated activity as the use of a mechanized or motorized system, and states that neither section applies to, prohibits or restricts nonmotorized recreational mining activities, including panning for gold. The statutory prohibition on use in § 5653.1(b) remains in force until the director certifies to the Secretary of State that five listed conditions have been met; the State Water Resources Control Board states that it is not proceeding with a statewide suction dredge permit at this time. Using dredge equipment without a permit is a misdemeanour under § 5653(c), and violations of the code are misdemeanours under § 12000(a). Enforcement is active: in September 2025 the Department of Fish and Wildlife announced citations against five individuals in Siskiyou County and the seizure of equipment. Owning a dredge legally where you bought it does not make it legal to have where you intend to use it. (FGC §§ 5653, 5653.1 and 12000 as amended by Stats. 2023, Ch. 132 (AB 1760), effective 1 January 2024, read at leginfo.legislature.ca.gov; CDFW bulletin of 26 September 2025; State Water Resources Control Board suction dredge mining page. All checked 26 August 2026. Verify with CDFW before you buy, not after.)
5.6 · Mercury
If you work historic placer or hydraulic-mine ground, assume mercury is present in your concentrates. Mercury is denser than almost everything else you are handling, so it concentrates exactly where your gold concentrates — in the bottom of your pan and in your clean-up tray, which makes clean-up the moment of highest exposure. Never heat concentrates. Never amalgamate. Do not handle contaminated sediment with bare hands, do not do it indoors, and do not let children or animals near the tray. If you find liquid mercury in your pan, stop, and contact your state environmental agency about disposal — it does not go in the trash and it does not go back in the creek. (USGS FS 2005-3014 v1.1, revised October 2005; checked 26 August 2026.)
5.7 · Acids
Acid is the one place in this book where the cheap answer is the wrong answer. Nitric acid is corrosive to skin and eyes, and its vapours are hazardous: the federal permissible exposure limit is two parts per million as an eight-hour average, and NIOSH puts the concentration that is immediately dangerous to life or health at twenty-five parts per million. That is why a commercial gold test kit, with prepared concentrations, a testing stone and instructions, is the correct purchase for anyone who genuinely needs to know karat — and why buying bulk concentrated acid to save money is not. If you use one: outdoors or with real ventilation, eye protection and gloves, acid into water and never the reverse, stored locked and away from children and animals, and neutralised and disposed of according to your local rules. If you are not certain you can do all of that, take the piece to a buyer with a testing setup instead. (OSHA PEL from 29 CFR 1910.1000 Table Z-1; NIOSH REL and IDLH from the OSHA Occupational Chemical Database, entry for nitric acid, checked 26 August 2026. Verify current values at the source before relying on them.)
5.8 · Cold water, and working alone
The phase that kills in cold water is the first one, and it is involuntary. Sudden immersion triggers a large gasp followed by hyperventilation that can run many times normal breathing, and that response causes a significant share of immersion deaths that have nothing to do with hypothermia. It happens whether or not you are a strong swimmer, and it happens before you have decided anything. You should know that the commonly repeated timing rule for cold-water immersion is disputed between serious sources, so treat any tidy number you have heard with suspicion — including from us, which is why there is no number in this paragraph. What is not disputed: do not wade alone in fast or cold water, do not wade in water you cannot see the bottom of, tell someone where you are and when you will be back, wear something that floats if you are working from or near deep water, and if you go in, get your breathing under control before you try to do anything else. (The commonly repeated timing rule is promoted by the Canadian Safe Boating Council and disputed by the National Center for Cold Water Safety, which documents that it conflicts with what its originator published in 2006. Both checked 26 August 2026.)
Much of this work happens in remote drainages, out of phone coverage, in summer, alone. Tell someone your route and your return time. Assume no signal. A breakdown or a fall a long way from a road is a serious situation rather than an inconvenience, and it becomes serious faster in heat. If you take medication that affects hydration, blood pressure or heat tolerance, ask your doctor what a full day in the sun means for you before you plan one.
5.9 · No valuation, no investment advice
This book prices gold as metal — at a stated spot quote on a stated date, with the correction that placer gold is not pure — so that you can compare what you paid against what you got. It does not appraise specimens, it does not tell you what a nugget is worth to a collector, and it is not advice about buying or holding gold as an investment. If you want a specimen valued, take it to a qualified buyer or appraiser.
6 · How products are compared, and what we do not claim
How products are compared in this book. Every comparison here rests on one of four things and nothing else: a price the seller published, with the day we checked it; a specification the manufacturer published about their own product; physics or arithmetic you can reproduce yourself, with the method printed; or an action documented by an official agency, cited by section and date. This book does not accuse any company of anything, does not rank brands, and does not claim that one commercial model recovers more gold than another — because no independent comparative test of these products exists that we could find, and inventing one would make this book exactly what it was written against. Where a product is named, it is named because its published price or its published specification is the evidence. Prices move. Check them.
Every manufacturer, retailer and agency named in these files is named for identification only. We are not affiliated with any of them, we sell no equipment, we carry no affiliate links and no sponsor, and nothing here is endorsed by anyone we name. Trademarks belong to their owners.
7 · No results are promised
There is no sentence in these files that says you will find more gold, recover more gold or make money. What they hand you is arithmetic and procedures you run yourself. What those produce depends on your ground, your water, your equipment and your hours, none of which we have seen. Nothing here is a prediction of any outcome.
8 · Liability, to the extent the law allows it
The files are provided as they are. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Mysteries Group LLC is not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of them, and our total liability to you is limited to what you paid us. Nothing in these terms limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited — and if any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest still stands.
You are responsible for what you do on the ground: for the permits and permissions that apply to you, for the equipment you switch on, and for your own safety and that of anyone with you.
9 · These terms, and the law that applies
These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and of the state in which Mysteries Group LLC is organized, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If we change them, the "last updated" date at the top changes with them, and the version in force for your purchase is the one published on the day you paid.
10 · How to reach a person
Reply to any email from us and a person reads it — for a refund, a file that never arrived, a correction to a figure, or a question about any of the above. A correction is genuinely welcome: if you find something in a file that is wrong or out of date, tell us and it gets fixed in the next dated edition, and Appendix A already prints the list of what we could not verify at all.
This book was researched and written with the assistance of AI tools. Every price, specification, mineral constant and regulation in it was checked against the source named beside it on the date printed beside it, and Appendix A lists every one of those sources along with what we were unable to verify.