"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!

 

Chasing the lode...

        Sometimes it feels like we’re there, in the heart of the 1876 Gold Rush.

        We’ve talked about how the true gold rushers who knew anything about mining weren’t here to placer mine. They panned with a purpose, and that was to find indications of gold that would lead them to a lode (hard rock) discovery.

        We ran across such a prospect this weekend, or so we think.

        I say we think because we left home in pleasant though cloudy weather. As we progressed into the Central Hills, rain developed into snow. The main roads remained pretty clear, a bit slushy in places.

        We neared out destination, but there was an inch of new snow on the roads and two inches covered the ground.

        We were persistent though. What we had researched were some claims staked in the 1950s and held until around 1990. It was obvious that someone had worked and held those claims for 40 years.

        We pulled off on a side trail that showed on the map as leading to private property. We found the gate to private property, but off to our right was another trail where some logging activity had occurred in the last few years.

        It was still pretty pleasant, just snowing a bit. We could see even with the snow cover that placer mining had taken place. Mother Nature doesn’t leave things that untidy!

        As we walked up the trail further, obvious diggings were blanketed with snow. The digging got more intense as we went, some deep trenches and tailings piles underfoot.

        Now you’ve got to be careful in these situations, especially with snow cover. At least we could still see slightly clear areas on banks and weeds sticking up through the snow in the depressions.

        Bob ventured further than I and found that the placer diggings lead to what appeared to be some small quartz veining that the prospectors had developed!

        They call it “chasing the lode” and it was pretty priceless seeing how the old-timers had followed the placer to that quartz veining. We felt at one with those miners, following their historic footsteps from discovery in the spring run-off, working up the gulch toward the source. Our expectations would be that we might be able to chip away at some quartz and find gold also!

        We’ll return another day and report what we discover.  Meanwhile, we’re expecting about a week of cooler weather with chances of rain and snow.

        I firmly believe that some of our best prospects are found “just in time” to justify another trip!

 

Spring fever...

We should be armchair prospecting but we’ve got a lot going on and weather has turned nice! That usually means, at least for us, getting out in the forest and doing some tromping around.

We’re still not at liberty to discuss our current mission, but it does include prospecting of a slightly different nature.

We’ve had a recent rush of emails. Spring fever in prospecting also means people planning their vacations, looking to secure their little piece of the Black Hills. In some instances they want a claim of their own; others are looking to rent or lease for a few days at a time. They all have a story and our common interest in prospecting binds us into a nice little community.

Other emails regard those who have, or almost have, invested in claims sold over the internet.

I’ve discussed this multiple times and won’t get into all the detail, but warn you to check with us at hillshistory1876@gmail.com or the Montana-Dakota Bureau of Land Management to make sure they are valid claims before you buy. We have three recent examples of those being dupped:  1) claim was staked in an area with a Public Land Order withdrawing minerals, 2) claim was staked in an area unlikely to produce gold, and 3) paperwork at BLM was not maintained and selling parties cannot quit claim an expired claim.

 

We are still watching the lode claims being staked in the Rochford area and have noticed that although they put stakes on the ground across both private property and placer claims (mineral trespass), those conflicting claims are not being filed at BLM.  We’ll give them to benefit of doubt and say they are diligently researching infringement on other’s rights.

This brings up another subject! Do not, and we repeat… do not remove location certificates, corner posts, or any claim marker on the ground. Even those markers on private property should be left alone. If it makes you feel better, maintaining those markers is evidence of mineral trespass! We don’t remove another parties paperwork or monument even when we KNOW they have fraudulently overstaked us.

So with temps in the 50s today, we’re off to look for outcrops!