by Al Campbell VANCOUVER, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) -- More than 110 years after the finish of a string of gold rushes in western Canada, there are still those who harbor the dream of getting rich off the land. In the small town of Yale, about two hours drive northeast of Vancouver, 'Yukon Dan' is putting a group of young gold prospectors through their paces Sunday. Under Dan's direction, everyone at the Fraser River Gold Panning Championship got the hang of sloshing around the gravel and river water combination in their pan just enough to unearth any flakes or, if lucky, a gold nugget. The Canadian gold rush started after the California gold fever exhausted in 1859, bringing in a wave of American and Chinese miners in search of riches to the territory of the then Hudson's Bay Company. As the epicenter of the Canadian gold rush, Yale quickly grew to 20,000 strong in population with steamer and paddlewheel ships regularly bringing newcomers up to the boomtown. However, it wasn't to last long as news of a new, bigger strike further north, the Cariboo gold rush, in 1861, spelled the start of Yale's decline. Today, the town has merely 200 people, including William Kinsella, the celebrated author of 'Shoeless Joe' which inspired the film 'Field of Dreams.' Outside of an old church, a museum and a general store, there are little remnants of its former glory. Yukon Dan, a silver medalist at the 1998 World Gold Panning Championship near San Francisco, looks like he would have fit right in 1858 Yale. Wearing suspenders, a large hat and a shaggy, graying beard that flows halfway down his chest, he is a walking historian of Canadian gold rushes. Each year, he teaches the history to about 6,000 schoolchildren and instructs countless others in the fine art of gold panning. At the Yale event, the field includes panners ranging from children to adults to professionals, all working from tubs filled with gravel, dirt and water from the nearby Fraser. 'Come down to the river with me and I can guarantee you will be finding gold within five minutes,' said Yukon Dan confidently. 'It's extremely easy to recover gold being that it is very heavy. You shake your dirt with lots of water and gold immediately will go to the bottom of your pan. The best place to find it is in roots of trees, in moss, behind boulders, gravel bars and on the inside turn on the river.' Yukon Dan caught 'gold fever' in 1992 during a visit to the Yukon Territory north of British Colombia, hence the name. As a professional miner with 45 claims around the world, he admits the sport, or 'hunt' as many like to call it, is potentially lucrative. Another with the 'fever' is Ken Montie. Ranked among the top-10 professional panners in Canada, the 63-year-old is still chasing his dream even after getting crushed by a boulder that paralyzed the left side of his face, blinding him in one eye in the process. He currently has four 'cells,' each comprising about 20 hectares of land that he mines near the town of Revelstoke. He said he visits his cells about three or four times each summer, usually for up to five days. 'It's addictive. When you get that gold fever you get it like they used to show on the TV and the movies, you get the gold fever, it's real. You go out there and you pan, you find a little gold, the next thing you know you find a bigger flake, then you find a nugget and you just get more and more hooked into it. You got gold fever.' With an abundance of gold still to be unearthed, Mark Castagnoli, a part-time Yale resident and president of the Vancouver-based Placer Gold Design, is keen to kick-start a 21st century gold rush. Under B.C. mining laws, essentially the ground in the Fraser River is public domain. Individuals, but not companies, are free to pan in the river and move a minimal amount of material. 'Just about every pan full of gravel in the Fraser past Hope (located 20 km down river) has some gold in it. With a little bit of training and the right pan ... this can be picked up very quickly,' said Castagnoli, holding a flat pan with about a third of an ounce of gold flecks in it. Castagnoli pointed out the contributions of the Chinese to the area during Yale's boom. Despite facing discrimination from the mainly white population, they thrived in the difficult times. 'Essentially they would always follow the gold rushes and come up. They were much more meticulous and skillful miners. They would very carefully clean claims that had been left by other miners when the Cariboo (gold rush) was discovered.' 