+1 on Ft. Steele = Wild Horse Creek.
Wild Horse has several active hobby claims, with guys using vacuum dredges to work vertical bedrock seams. There's also is a fairly large commercial operation on the E. side of the creek, reworking 100 year old tailings and using payloaders to move the gravels.
On weekends, Wild Horse is a beautiful quiet place to while away a sunny afternoon doing some recreational streamside panning.
There's a great little historic site above the creek, a signed interpretation trail, a chimney and apple orchard from the 1800s, two graveyards (one for the Chinese who did most of the work and stayed the longest), and a canalization ditch from which water was sold to the miners 'by the inch'.
I'm guessing the pork & beans, water and shovel merchants made most of the money.
Re: panning. What I was told is that placer gold is generally associated with black (hematite) sand deposits. Black sand is heavy. If there's black sand, there likely is gold in the deep crevices, under boulders, etc. Beware the proverbial mica flake shining in the sunlight. lol.
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