Research...

      We’ve talked before about how we go about researching an area… past experience, historical reference, LR2000 and BLM Glo, just to mention a few steps we take.

         Conversations invariably turn to, “but how do you find a claim!”

         Bob knows the history, the geology, and we’ve prospected just about every gold-bearing stream in the Black Hills.

         But… there’s a lot of terrain out there!  That was reinforced recently by a geologist who knows the Hills, but doesn’t have the time to pull information on each area he is interested in!

The "perfect" placer... even
conveniently marked boundaries as indicated
by Forest Service marker upper right!

         One prime claim we recently obtained is credited solely to Bob’s research.  The Keets Mine incident, if I properly recall, prompted him to look again at areas surrounding Lead and Deadwood.

         Bob reads me a “someone in that upper Deadwood Creek area finally found a good gravel bench and cleaned up a large amount of gold… considered ‘hitting it big’.”

         Then he recalls some U.S. Forest Service “gaps” among the private property.  The search is on!

        By the way, we staked a lode claim on this property and are contemplating sale to rights for a placer.  Fair warning… this will not be cheap and we may resort to a bidding-type situation.  We could search our lifetime and possibly not find a comparable placer claim.

        That is one way to find a claim, but unless we stab a finger at the map and start research, it would be a 24/7 job to research just the gold-bearing streams!

        That’s why we encourage those contacting us to procure a claim to isolate the area they are interested in.  We let them do the map stabbing and we go from there.

         We’ll use a recent experience to let you know how it works.  We were contacted by someone who likes to do a little fishing and told us about some recent expeditions, wondering if any claims were available in the area.

        In the past, we’ve been contacted for like information “where I hunted,” or “where I hiked”.  That’s the map stabbing that gets us researching.

        Each time, without fail, something shows up!  This time it was some claims that are about to be declared invalid by the Bureau of Land Management.

         So if you want a claim, it’s probably out there.  The one area we eliminate from most requests right off the bat is Iron Creek.  We have a claim there, why shouldn’t others?  Our claim pre-dates huge blocks of lode claims.  Contrary to how this appears, you can’t stake a placer over existing lodes… even though they staked lodes over our existing placers!

        On the agenda this week is further exploration of the upper Deadwood Creek claim.  I’ve already panned out flour gold my first test pan; we’ve identified lode deposits; now we want to spend some real time exploring!  Sounds kindof silly, but we don’t have that many claims with good quantities of flour gold and find it just as exciting to see a “rim” of gold when we pan as to find flakes, pickers and nuggets!