Someone on Jeepforum asked the same question. Here is my post from over there.
My wife and I started panning back in 94. It was a reason to go into the backwoods. I wanted to wheel every weekend and panning for gold was a reason to go out in to the middle of nowhere.
We started out with a classifier set over a 5 gallon bucket with 1/2 inch mesh. We would shovel the dirt and rock over it and smash the dirt clods to get them through and the rocks we would dump. Continue that until you get a bucket full. You can then dump it into a second bucket with a classifier on top with a 1/8th inch mesh but we didn't buy 2 classifiers so all we had was the 1/2 inch minus screen. We would then dump the bucket into a sluice with water running over it. We would then clean the sluice off into a 5 gallon bucket. When we had a bucket full of sluiced dirt we would sit down and pan. You can run through a lot of material that way.
When you are using the sluice you want to put it in a pretty decent flowing part of the stream. Not a heavy high flow spot because it will just blow everything off of the sluice leaving nothing behind. But you want to find a spot that will flow a food amount of water over the riffles to move the debris but keep the gold.
We bought a Keene brand mini sluice like this
Keene Super Mini Sluice Box A-51A
We bought a panning kit for our pans similar to what is offered at miner's creek in the Garrett kit
Gold Panning Kit - Garrett Gold Pans
We would go out wheeling and find a stream that looked promising and pan for a while then move on, sometimes if we were lucky and found something we may camp the entire weekend at that spot. it was hard to leave sometimes when you find a piece of gold. We found enough that if we would have turned it in we would have payed for our equipment and our wheeling trips so it worked out good for us.
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