"Sand dollars"

        We are reassured of our followers daily, with emails and phone calls regarding prospecting, claims, historic information and where to spend this summer’s vacation!

        Just a few of the states represented are Missouri, North Carolina, Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota and multiple followers in Minnesota and Wisconsin. We get a lot of local inquiries and have developed some great friendships with fellow prospectors.

        Internationally, we see blog visitors from nearby Canda, European countries, Australia… just about every country in the world.

        Who would have thought that a little piece of real estate called The Black Hills would generate so much interest? But then, how many little pieces of real estate contain so much of interest!

        We made the local headlines this week, so we thought we’d talk about our most recent item of interest.

        Last summer we became aware that the Black Hills was a good prospect for a different commodity.

        It’s been called Wisconsin gold, sand dollars and a lot of other catchy names. We spent days which turned into weeks, then months and now about one year prospecting, sampling, staking claims.

        Test results came back exceeding our expectations… the silica sand we sampled met preliminary specs for fracking sand.

        The news broke in our local newspaper, where you can read more about it:
http://www.bhpioneer.com/local_news/article_f46ecafa-90ad-11e2-9219-0019bb2963f4.html

And another article: http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_7d2126f9-a5cc-56bd-bd76-1b0d40a1ce0e.html     

        Simply put, frac sand is crush-resistant sand of a specific particle size that is used by the petroleum industry in the hydraulic fracturing process. The general opinion was that it does not exist in our area.

        We’ve put a lot of time into this by traveling throughout the Black Hills and surrounding regions, sampling, analyzing, choosing locations. We’re here to say it does exist and we have secured, through the process of elimination, the areas with the best potential!

        I do have to say that proving discovery of silica sand isn’t anything like prospecting for gold. Where there’s sandstone, there’s discovery!  Proving frac sand, however, is a more complicated issue. The majority of sand grains are angular, diluted with natural impurities and break up under compaction.

        I never thought looking at a piece of sand under a high-powered microscope could be quite so interesting!