Dreamers searching Hills for precious remaining flakes

More than 130 years after a member of the Custer expedition discovered gold in the Black Hills, the hunt for precious flakes and nuggets goes on at small-scale mining claims.
Only one large gold mine remains in operation in the heart of Black Hills gold mining territory near Lead. But scattered throughout the hills, and concentrated in particular in the northern region, small-scale gold miners toil in search for precious metals that others have missed.
And the pace is picking up along with the market price for gold.
“We’re definitely seeing an increase in the small placer activity,” said Hillarie Jackson, lands minerals specialist with the U.S.
Forest Service district ranger’s office in Spearfish. “It has increased pretty noticeably, to where I’m having two to three meetings with people a week.”
The activity isn’t as great in the Mystic Ranger District of the central and eastern Black Hills. But it remains consistent, said district ranger Bob Thompson.
“We’re getting the same kind of thing,” he said. “People are interested in prospecting those areas that have produced gold in the past.”
Those people are staking claims on federal land in the Black Hills National Forest. And while they actually file their claims with the federal Bureau of Land Management, they turn to Jackson and other Forest Service minerals specialists throughout the Black Hills for guidance on how to take advantage of mining rights dating back in federal law to 1872 mining law.
Jackson’s job is to help them use and enjoy those rights to hunt for gold on a claim they can call their own without undue damage to public land and water.
“We want to minimize the surface disturbance while allowing them to get their minerals extracted,” she said.
That job becomes more complicated when small-scale miners decide to move beyond the pans, buckets and other hand tools and into more mechanized gear. Much of that can be purchased at mining-equipment shops, or general outdoors stores like Cabala’s.
The step up means moving more rocks and water and disturbing more land.
When people make that move, they are often surprised to find more regulation from federal
officials goes with it.
“That’s the equipment people are bringing to public lands to start using, not realizing that once they get to that level we start treating them more like a business,” Jackson said. “Mining is mining.”
There is even interest and inquiries from small-claim miners in using equipment more complex than they would find at an outdoors shops, such as backhoes. But that brings an even greater potential environmental impact, along with even more regulations, Jackson said.
Those regulations include review by the Forest Service, as well as involvement by other federal and state agencies and other permits and environmental reviews. So far, most of those small-scale miners looking to expand to that level have balked at the level of regulations, she said.
“We don’t have anybody currently under that type of activity,” she said. “But I don’t doubt that we will see that.”
The prices of gold and new technology, even on the small-scale level, are likely to drive more prospectors to explore more and closely examine areas that have been hit by miners off and on for more than 100 years.
“Just about anywhere you look — Iron Creek, Rapid Creek, places like that — you can see how turned over they have been historically and how much they have been mined,” Jackson said. “But with today’s technology, they are probably finding some of what has been missed.”