All the talk of gold panning brigs back good memories of panning along the Feather River in NoCA near the town of La Porte. Even if one did not pan much, the scenery was gorgeous!

In post 23 above, I guess I fell into that old pitfall of starting a post, then leaving it on the taskbar while I did something else, and then finishing the post in a hurry without paying attention to what I had written before. In fact, of course, Kernville is on the North Fork of the Kern River, not on the San Joaquin,and is located at the head of Lake Isabella. Although the Kern is actually in the San Joaquin drainage, and its water once flowed (more or less) into the San Joaquin, the San Joaquin itself is much farther north. The North Fork of the Kern is, as far as I know, generally considered to produce more gold than the South Fork.

The gold prospecting area on the San Joaquin which I had intended to describe, is the area around Kaiser Pass, east of Fresno, where some of the small and middle-sized streams produce considerable amounts of gold. Nice scenery in the area, I used to camp there on occasion.