Men have killed and died for it, fortunes have been won and lost - for thousands of years gold has held us in its power. But, while the days of the gold rush may be long gone, Nick Morrison meets a prospector who still has a glint in his eye.

THERE'S an establishment in Dawson City goes by the name of Diamond Tooth Gertie's. It has a name for itself as Canada's only legal gambling hall, bar and cancan show, but it also happens to be one of the few joints where you can pay for your drinks - and your gambling - with what you have just dug out of the river bed.

Dawson City lies on the junction of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, on Canada's western edge, just a short hop from the border with Alaska. It used to be a camp for native American fishermen but in the space of two years its population swelled to 40,000. Four years after that, it was down to 5,000. Now it is just over 2,000.

What brought all those people to Dawson just over 100 years ago was gold. The Klondike Gold Rush turned a summer camp for fishermen into the "Paris of the North", but as quickly as its fame arrived, it had gone, and Dawson slipped back into obscurity.

But there is a group of people who will always have a place in their hearts for Dawson City and about 60,000 of them visit each year. Some of them hope to make their fortune, others are unable to escape the lure of the most powerful metal known to man.

One of these - and a regular in Diamond Tooth Gertie's - is Mick Gossage. It was just outside Dawson that he made his greatest discovery - a nugget, about an inch long, weighing about a third of an ounce and worth about £600. It's lumpy and uneven and looks as though it has been folded over, but to Mick it is beautiful.

"When it turned up in the pan, I looked left and right and made sure nobody was watching, and then I slipped it into my pocket," he says. "When you look at it under a microscope it is like looking at the moon, you see all the craters, all the ripples and the hills."

Mick put a loop on his nugget so he could wear it as a chain, but otherwise it is just as it was when it turned up in the bottom of his plastic pan. "When it came out, I was the first person ever to set eyes on it. Nobody else had seen that. It was a wonderful feeling."

But just as gold excites feelings of awe, so does it also inspire fear and jealousy. These are feelings Mick knows very well.

"If you find something, you don't want anyone moving in on your patch, and if people approach I stop panning. I always have a little bottle in my pocket, with three or four bits of gold in, and if somebody asks what I have got I say 'I have been working here for hours and that is all I've got'.

"You get a buzz when you find your first bit of gold but you also become fiercely protective. It has a power over you - it is an inert metal, but it has this power. It is gold fever but you can't explain it. Even now you hear stories of people brandishing weapons and telling other prospectors to clear off. I can understand why people actually kill for it," he says.

Mick, 57, who lives in Richmond, North Yorkshire and is site services manager at Darlington College, is one of Britain's leading gold prospectors. Ever since a relative of his late first wife left him to sift through an old washing tub of mud 16 years ago, he has been hooked. He spent the next day moving four tonnes of river gravel, found nothing, but by then it was too late and he was launched on a quest for gold.

He now represents Britain on the World Council of Gold Panning Associations, is chairman of the committee that draws out the rules for competitions, and for the last 12 years, he has been president of the British Gold Panning Association. He is the reigning panning champion for Wales and South Africa, and later this month flies off to Japan to take part in the World Gold Panning Championships.

But while Mick reckons himself to be a pretty good prospector, he says his best panning days are behind him. For the uninitiated, prospecting is finding the gold in the first place, panning is getting it out of the river, separating the gold from the mud, stones and whatever else is in there.

WEIGHING 20 times more by volume than anything else in the river, as the pan, usually a plastic bowl with ridges along one arc, is gently rocked in circles, the gold works its way to the bottom. The panner then washes the contents of the pan in water, removing the top layers of worthless debris, with the heavier material caught in the ridges each time. This is repeated until most of the soil has gone and the gold is visible.

To demonstrate how it works, Mick takes me to the banks of the Skerne in Darlington and empties a bottle containing ten tiny flakes of gold into a pan before covering it with mud and stones. It seems a little risky to me, but within minutes the gold has been separated and is back in the bottle.

For competitions, between five and 12 pieces of gold, each no bigger than a full stop, are put in a bucket with 45 pounds of river gravel. The competitors have to pan their bucket down and bottle whatever gold they find, without knowing how many bits they are looking for. The winner is the one who does it in the fastest time, but a five minute penalty is added for each piece of gold they miss.

Despite his demonstration, the Skerne is not a fruitful river for prospectors. Although his hobby has taken him all over the world, Mick says one of the best rivers is the Mennock in south-west Scotland. Gold from the Mennock is high quality, about 22.7 carats compared with the 18.9-21.5 commonly found in Canada and Alaska.

It was in the Mennock that Mick found the gold to make a wedding ring for his second wife, Lin, when they married two years ago. Borrowing the workshop of a silversmith friend, he fashioned the ring himself, turning nine grammes of gold into a seven gramme ring.

But it's not a very lucrative pastime, and the gold he finds doesn't cover the cost of getting to it. "People think there is money in this, but there isn't," he says. "It costs me money to find gold. If I were to do it for the money I would be a pauper, but it is so relaxing and so peaceful sitting on the banks of a river and feeling at one with nature."

He says it's difficult to put a value on all the gold he has found over the years, but he knows each individual piece intimately. Sometimes, on a quiet evening, he will get out his collection and his microscope, and pore over the little bumps and craters on each one. He knows it may be a sign that he is gripped by obsession, but he doesn't care. "I spend hours looking at my gold. I have been through every piece," he says. "It's sad, isn't it?" But as my eyes are drawn to the flakes at the bottom of the bowl, it doesn't seem sad at all.