If you don't care about panning for gold there are also recreational mining areas (definitely in California, probably all over the country) where you can do whatever you want as long as you do it for personal use without explosives or mechanized mining equipment. They're a bit hard to find so I use a GPS app with a bunch of layers like land ownership and park boundaries.
A couple of rock hounds and I found a promising area in Kern County near Lake Isabella where we dug out a 10 foot deep triangle out of the side of a mountain and found about 100 pounds of beautiful mineral specimens of gold embedded in quartz, along with a 2.5 ft long agate weighing almost a ton that we still haven't figured out how to cut and polish.
Great place to go for intense rock hounding, hot springs, and white water rafting on Kern river.
A couple of rock hounds and I found a promising area in Kern County near Lake Isabella where we dug out a 10 foot deep triangle out of the side of a mountain and found about 100 pounds of beautiful mineral specimens of gold embedded in quartz, along with a 2.5 ft long agate weighing almost a ton that we still haven't figured out how to cut and polish.
Great place to go for intense rock hounding, hot springs, and white water rafting on Kern river.