South Dakota Trip - Third Day, Part 1

 

 

Today's adventure had a few exciting things on the list, with the Big Thunder Gold Mine tour up first!  This mine is located in the town of Keystone which is about 30 minutes away from Rapid City.  The mine is no longer active, but they now give tours daily.  Here is Tara--with the classic Dad pose-- heading into this famous mine.

 

We joined about 6 other people on this tour.  It turned out to be a fairly relaxed tour, as you can see by the pics we had time to snap.  Our tour guide was quite interesting for this one.  This was her second week of giving tours, and I don't believe she could have been a day over 15.  She was trying her best to remember all of the history and bullet points of what to cover.

 

After heading approximately 250 feet into the mine, we ended up at this circular room in the end where they eventually quit digging.  Here the guys are, standing in one of the old rail ore cars.  All the long while we had thought we were touring some amazing mine, and it turns out that the mine had produced a total of about 8 ounces of gold over some 25 years.  It was cool to us, nonetheless, and we proceeded to head back out to pan for some gold with some gravel brought in from a nearby river.

This turned out to be one of the major highlights of the whole trip.  I can hardly imagine finding something that fits our boys (especially Gavin) better then setting them down and telling them they can keep any gold they can pan for out of some troughs of dirt.  We probably spent two to three hours hunched over our pans collecting real gold flakes and dirty garnet stones.  We had several almost accidents as our vials of jewels went missing under the water, but all was eventually recovered.

Here is Gage, intently scouring his pan for any sign of wealth.  It was a bit harder for Gage to work the pan, so I helped him out quite a bit.  After a while, he was more focused on the garnets as they were a bit easier to separate out.