The American Hunter Old Road unit 1 was drilled to test multiple, stacked sandstones in lower Tertiary and Upper Cretaceous sandstones but was completed in 1981 as a water well producing from a shallow aquifer. Poor fluid recoveries from a drillstem test in the middle Lance Formation indicated a low-permeability reservoir with probable formation damage. Two cores, totaling 106 ft (32 m), were cut in the middle and lower Lance Formation. The cored intervals consist of thin- to medium-bedded, fine- to medium-grained sandstone and chert pebble conglomerate interbedded with silty mudstone and shale. Conglomeratic beds are cross-bedded and massive to normally and inverse graded. Sandstones are trough cross-bedded, massive and ripple laminated, and locally root mottled. Mudstones are rooted and burrowed. Conglomerate and sandstone were deposited in fining-upward genetic units by small meandering rivers. Mudstones were deposited in flood plain, swamp, lacustrine, and brackish to normal marine environments.

Sandstones consist of sublithic to lithic arenite and are cemented by moderate amounts of mixed-layer illite-smectite and quartz, sparse siderite, pyrite, ferroan calcite, and kaolinite. Feldspars are very sparse. Rock fragments are dominated by chert, with sparse limestone, dolomite, shaly and silty mudstone, reworked glauconite, and phosphate grains. Porosity consists of moderate to sparse, modified primary intergranular, clay-lined and clay-filled intergranular, secondary intergranular and grain-moldic pores, and natural fractures. Most natural fractures are filled by kaolinite but retain some permeability. Core-measured in-situ porosities range from 4 to 13%. In-situ Klinkenberg permeabilities range from 0.001 to 2.66 md. Irreducible water saturations, representing water saturations at gas column heights of approximately 750 ft (230 m), range from 21 to 72%, in close agreement with log-derived data, indicating that most of the potential reservoir sandstones are at or near irreducible water saturation. Relative gas permeability at irreducible water saturation ranges from 46 to 99% of the absolute permeability. Common clay-filled microporosity is responsible for low measured permeability, relatively high values of irreducible water saturation, and moderate susceptibility to formation damage.