Two rushes built this province. The Fraser Canyon in 1858 brought tens of thousands up the river and turned a fur-trade coast into a colony; the Cariboo that followed made Barkerville, which still stands as a preserved gold-rush town you can walk through. The creeks are still there and so is the gold, and British Columbia is one of the few places that sets aside ground specifically so anybody can pan it, no licence and no claim.
| Layer | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Legends and real places | 4 mapped for British Columbia |
| Show caves | 1 in British Columbia · see them all |
| Gem sites | 2 in British Columbia · see them all |
| Fossil sites | 3 in British Columbia · see them all |
| World features | Caves, springs, waterfalls, old mines and historic sites, live from OpenStreetMap |
You do not need a Free Miner Certificate to hand pan for recreation in British Columbia. What you may use is a hand pan and a hand shovel, and nothing else: no sluice or shaker box, no suction dredge, no other mechanical device, and no metal detector, because searching with a detector counts as prospecting under section 11(1) of the Mineral Tenure Act and that needs a free miner. Pan in one of the province’s recreational panning reserves, or with permission, which means the recorded holder of a mineral or placer title on a claim or lease, and the owner on private property. Hand panning is prohibited on a provincial heritage site, and nobody has the right to explore on federal land, treaty settlement lands, Indian reservations, parks, conservancies, ecological reserves or protected areas. Fill your holes in before the end of the day, with the material you took out of them: an open hole traps fish as the water rises and falls, and the fine sediment you wash loose is what does the damage downstream.
British Columbia is the custodian of its fossils and you are a CARETAKER of anything you pick up, not its owner. Recreational collecting means common fossils, from the surface, in small amounts, with hand tools. Significant material, vertebrate fossils above all, is not yours to take. What you keep is for personal use: it may not be sold, and it may not leave the province. If you turn up something unusual or rare, or a site with only a few specimens on it, report it to the Royal BC Museum, a local museum or the BC Fossil Management Office.
A marker is a public record, not permission. Check who owns the ground and what the local rules are first. Mining claims and land status on the map are United States records and stop at the border, so in Alberta that check is yours to make.
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