Another one of my re-occurring dreams! Here's the full article: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/01/05/3299752/100-ounce-sierra-gold-nugget-to.html
It looks like it's been cleaned. PCGS will only slab it as "Genuine" at best Yes, I have. On the Tanana River near Fairbanks, Alaska. But not panning in the classic sense. There was a large dredge that would scoop up material from the river bottom and process it for gold throwing the waste off to the side in big piles. Apparently it was only about 50% efficient. So you'd take your pan to the top of one of the piles, scrape the dirt off the rocks, then run/slide/fall down the pile to the river and do the traditional panning. (NOTE: The tops of the piles were the last material to be dredged out of the river so it had the most gold.) I found maybe a half dozen flakes from about 2 hours work. Definitely couldn't have made a living that way. This was 1963 and gold was something like $42/oz.
