Alaska gold... Black Hills style!

        These past two weeks have been interesting… as flagrantly portrayed by lack of a blog!

        I had prepared a blog on an interesting situation in the Tinton region, waiting to update it until proper paperwork was filed. We also had an inquiry about a similar claim location situation and did a bunch of research on that area.

        This morning I was checking in with my daughter and she was filling me in on the season opener of “Alaska Gold.” 

        The irony of the show was that it closely paralleled our recent activities; legal technicalities that present problems for claim/lease holders.

        If you haven’t seen “Alaska Gold,” you might have read an earlier blog discussing last year’s season… greenhorns taking on a mining project.  We don’t have cable or satellite here, so my daughter encapsulated the season opener by telling me that the greenhorn group ended up missing a lease payment, proceeded to mine and were informed they no longer have a lease which has been picked up by another party.

        This paralleled so closely with what we have discovered in the Black Hills recently.  Several undisputed claims in the Black Hills have been found to be “inactive,” a term used by the Bureau of Land Management when claimants fail to maintain claims and the paperwork entailed.

        The first instance was a group of highly acclaimed locations well known in the Northern Black Hills, originally staked in the 1900’s by what we are going to refer to as NMF (noted mining family).

        As the generations developed, the claims were pretty well established until the late 1970s, when a lot of claimholders were confused by a dictate from BLM that $100 assessment had to be paid for each claim.  This situation leveled off by declaring a small miner maintenance waiver.

        The NMF, in the meantime, failed to file necessary paperwork and ended up contesting a BLM decision to declare their claims invalid.

        Someone (we’ll call them PS for pretty smart) tuned into this situation and staked a large claim encompassing multiple NMF claims.  The NMFs then re-located their claims over the top of PS.

        Now we don’t know the further detail of this situation, but the NMF technically no longer have their historic claims.

        Oh, and while we were at it we managed to find a gap in the NMF and PS claim blocks that we were happy to stake!



Newly discovered adit.

         A phone call Monday focused on another area with a very similar situation!  What was perceived as an existing claim in the Central Hills, researched out to be a claim post from another claim in another section!  There was no valid claim on a property which has seen extensive placer mining the past few years… all with permission from the non-existant claimholder!

        So the lesson might be… if you have a claim, stay on top of maintaining it.  If you want a claim, do the research and you’ll probably find one!  Better yet, we can research it for you, help you locate it and advise you on procedure!

        Just to give you an idea of what you might find, we realized 60+ acres of prime, unclaimed placer ground with these two sessions of research.

        We’ve been a little negligent with congratulations on acquisition of claims to Wendell for three and Mary two new claims, Jody for three, Glenn on a placer and a lode.  Happy prospecting!