Broken Boot Gold Mine — Attraction in Deadwood

Waste of money. Teenagers working the window didn't check my prepaid tickets and ushered us to wait for a guide at the entrance to the mine. Then we were ushered with fairly LARGE group of people into the mine for a tour that we were NOT interested in! Too many people in a small area so unable to really see or hear what was being said by the guide, people asking questions that were trivial in purpose most of the time... no way to leave the mine, had to just tough it out till the end of the boring tour. Then had to ask for our mining pans because it's a totally separate thing than the mine!! This is when they first bothered to look at our prepaid tickets and said we didn't pay for the tour, just the panning... I told her we were never interested in the silly tour but they ushered us into it and we thought we were going to pan inside the mine somewhere! Or else we would not have gone inside!! We just wanted our dang pans! Then we discovered the panning part consisted of prepackaged bags of rocks and a pan that you pour into your pan and dip into their watering trough type set up!! Swirl ot around in the trough water and see if you happened to have any gold from the prepackaged rocks!!! Total joke and waste of...

It would be easy for them to get 5 stars. The mine is awesome! If it wasn't all authentic, I was sure fooled. The tour guide was very knowledgeable but the last tour of the day is at 5:30. Our tour was that, and contained 2 to 3 times more people than it should have. Initially, the guide repeated the information for the 2nd half of the group. As the tour progresses and we got closer to 6:00, it became apparent she wanted to get home. We missed the last 2 information stops because she didn't repeat them and what she did, she spoke very fast. The panning for gold was the real deal. You buy a selection of sand then go to the water trough to seperate out the gold. You do get real bits of gold. Don't expect to find a nugget, though. The children really loved it. Be careful not to get gold fever, it is...

Very frustrating experience trying to get a reservation. Requires you to create an account on their website and prepay in advance to get a reservation. They really shouldn't need my name, address and creating an account just to get my name on a reservation list. I'm looking forward to the tour, but if I knew it would be this painful I would have went to the other gold mine by Mt Rushmore :-/

Edit: The tour was decent, but afterwards I received a spam email from their reservation dept saying that they had spoken to me about hotel reservations (a complete lie) and asked me to give them a call So they could help me purchase more services from them. This is a scam company and I would strongly advise against giving them...