A February thaw is an unusual thing in the Black Hills. We’ve experienced 50+ degrees over the weekend and the mild temperatures are expected to last until Thursday.
Forecasts show us back to the 30 degree range for high temps after that, but us old-timers J know that by mid-February the brunt of the winter cold is behind us!
Now if you’ve ever spent a winter in the Black Hills, you are probably hooting and hollering, “Winter’s not over until April or May!” You’re right about that… I was talking strictly about the days when the thermometer doesn’t reach “0” and Rusty, our prospecting truck, groans to a start even tho nobody wants to get up and go!
We’ve re-scheduled our appointment with the Forest Service because we were all homebound with the flu last week. We’ll blog about our meeting next week and sorry for the inconvenience to both the Forest Service and our readers!
In the meantime, we are seeing a lot of interest in our permitting process… something we expected but maybe not to this extent??? We expected interest in general… after all I work in the public and having been in that position for most of my life, a lot of people know us and are interested in our personal life. Most of this interest is in the vein of wanting to visit and see a small placer mining operation at work. We’re hoping to be able to provide that opportunity yet this season.
The next level of interest would be those who either want in on our operation or want to start one of their own! The permit isn’t even public information (except for you all, of course!) and already we have multiple investors interested. We hadn’t looked on the project as anything but a personal income source, so we’re a little baffled by who, what, when, where and why we would want to open the project to investors?
Small-scale, by our standards, would mean exactly what we are proposing. That would be enough gold mined each year to provide an income and potentially fund the next year’s project. We are middle-income people, living a middle-income life in a middle-income home in a middle-income neighborhood… our expectations are not grand or large-scale! Our ultimate goal is to retire comfortably in a middle-income style.
Can we help others get a permit? No doubt about it! Is their project a good candidate for a small-scale placer mine? If you expect to get a mining permit to support disturbance in a creek… that probably would not happen for the approaching season. Heavily timbered areas; run-off; water right; discharge permit; or designation as special, exceptional, critical or unique land can be a time-extensive permitting process.
These are issues addressed in a small-scale mining permit. Interested? Contact us through http:/blackhillsgoldmines.com for more info! We’re here to help with your permitting process based on our experience with this permit and the extensive help of a mining engineer and mining attorney.
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