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How Do You Deal With Claim Jumpers?


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Yes, Chris, you are right.  YOU (the detectorist, prospector) have the responsibility to know if there is an active claim where you are going.  Especially if there are markers all over the place.

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Agreed, LipCa.

 

Dick took exception with my post saying that he felt that miners were already under attack from various agencies and  "greenies"  and so we shouldn't be critical of each other. One of the greatest dangers we and other organizations face are problems from within. I'm very familiar with the idiosyncrasies of our fellow miners/claim holders and it frustrates/angers ME, a  prospector, when I see some of the stuff that they do. IMAGINE how WE (yes "WE") look to someone not familiar with mining/prospecting! Imagine non-prospectors returning to their regular camping,hunting,fishing,hiking spot and finding a bunch of (illegal) signs that say "Private Claim- No Trespassing!" every 100 feet! Or, the road is illegally blocked! Or, worse yet, some gun toting claim owner orders them (illegally) off of their traditional camping spot!  If we piss off the non prospecting public our rights to make claims will go away so fast that we won't know what happened and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

 

So, should we not "police" or call out our own? Do we let the idiots that take their claim rights too far screw it up for all of us? 

 

I agree with Dick. We are under fire from many different fronts. Let's not be the ones that give them the ammo.

 

Dean

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i pulled in my claim 2 days ago i spotted someone who never seen me untill i walked up to him strapping on my 357 i startled him and the reason for the gun was the SOB was cooking meth hid out 50 feet from where i work on load claim. I ran him off and took a good picture of his beat up dodge charger with a rack on top. Maybe he wasnt cooking meth but whats the Big pots all over his car used for. Winnemucca area watch for him.

 

Ok, I'm probably about to offend people here, but I have to say something:

 

If you spotted him and he didn't see you and you suspected he was cooking meth then why didn't you call the sheriff to come arrest him? Or at least try to determine what he was actually doing first while he didn't notice you if you were in doubt.

 

Why is your first thought to "strap on a 357" and go confront a guy who didn't even know you were there? Is this 1872?

 

I mean you actually said yourself you didn't know if he really was even cooking meth, what if he was just cooking dinner? Even if he was cooking meth, now instead of the sheriff arresting a potential meth cooker now the guy just drove away...your photo of his plate means nothing when you can't even say wether he was cooking dinner or meth in the police report. Sorry if it sounds like this is picking on you....but I can't do anything but shake my head as I read this. We aren't police, it's not our job, and you might have just ran someone completely inncocent away from a place they had every right to be on, and that makes all miners look bad.

 

Also...I have a lot of respect for your geology knowledge Reno Chris, but suggesting spike strips on a public road in public land...seriously? That is illegal. Also, how is blocking off public roads with boulders (or spikes) any better than when the USFS/BLM closes off roads? I drive onto deadends all the time wether I'm just exploring for fun, fishing, prospecting, or looking for a place to set up a telescope, it just don't matter if it's only his claim up there, it's still public land.

 

I gave a perfectly reasonable and legal method to prevent claimjumpers and trespassers...file for a plan to mine your mining claim. But everyone here knows just as well as I do that few ever actually do that. And I think most people understand exactly why without me having to go into the dirty truth.

 

You can't have it both ways IMO. Buy private land if you want to ninja mine. If you take public minerals and want to requisition public surface rights for yourself as an individual then you need to pay the piper so to speak, and by that I mean paying all the proper fees including bonds, permitting, and taxes on the minerals you produce or people you employ, otherwise it's theft from all of us as US citizens.

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I have followed this forum for a long time and this is my first post but I consider the subject to be of great importance to all users of public land. For all of my 70 yearsIi have lived in the desert gold country of New Mexico. I hunt, fish, rock hound, metal detect and placer mine the area. The area is National Forest, BLM, State Land, State School Board Land and private ranch land. I do not have any claims but do have permission to prospect on 11 claims. 

 

I hunt on all these lands and claims as well as target shoot and plink at times and I carry my targets and trash out. But leave lead shot from bird hunting and lead bullets behind to be found by detectorists like myself.

 

But let me say that this public  land is multi use by law. If I had someone come up to me with a gun and order me  off of public land  he should consider the  fact that I am armed also. It would be a terrible nightmare if I had to defend myself but would if it became necessary.

 

So lets forget this foolishness because PUBLIC LAND is MULTI USE LAND and what is being discussed in this thread is probably being read and cataloged buy our government agencys to be used to take the land away from us all.

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So lets forget this foolishness because PUBLIC LAND is MULTI USE LAND

 

 Wow...

  "Foolishness" .... really! I have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in my mining claims and equipment. It is my life and my livelihood !

I know my rights and will continue to fight to hang on to those precious rights I have under the Mining Law.

 

 Yes, since 1955 we have had a" Multiple Use" policy on public lands. Let me remind you that my right to stake a claim and have exclusive right to work that claim is back by LAW!

    There is no hikers law, no river rafters law and no berry pickers law. Just how far up do you think Mining would be on that  "Multiple Use" ladder if we did not have a LAW granting us the right to do so ?

  It would be the bottom rung my friend !!

 

 Let's not forget our government, in all its wisdom, has taken away the opportunity for us to patent Federal mining claims. Therefore we have no  

choice but to mine on "public land".

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  Let's not forget our government, in all its wisdom, has taken away the opportunity for us to patent Federal mining claims. Therefore we have no  

choice but to mine on "public land".

 

I disagree here. Every day I wake up and prospect I am thankful for whoever got rid of the ability to patent federal mining claims. It'd be impossible to prospect at all in the lower 48 with all the private land by now in 2015, it'd be more like the East Coast. What an absolute nightmare to me. And once it's all gone what about our great great grandchildren? They no longer have any ability to mine and chase the same dreams we are chasing.

 

The thing everyone forgets is land and minerals are finite and non renewable. Doesn't matter to the first few generations, but the guys who have the unfortunate luck to be born later  has none of the chances that their parents or grandparents did and that is an unsustainable paradigm. Especially when everything is just inherited down the line. You create an environment where the grand children who inherit the land don't care about mining and never will, and people who are born to mine will never have the opportunity because everything was gone generations ago.

 

This is also the same problem we have with people who stake claims and sit on them for 30 years and do nothing, then die and pass them to their kids who don't mine, or into trusts that don't do anything with them for infinity.

 

The other thing that a lot of people forget or just don't know is that once minerals get conveyed to the private domain, they are forever immune from mineral location in the future under mining law, even if they are given, traded, or sold back to the government and become public minerals again. Gone forever. All those patented properties that were patented and then abandoned 10 years later? They are all out of the reach of mining law forever now. I know few people understand this because I've ran into angry claim holders with guns on a handful of occasions trying to run me off their completely invalid claim on federally withdrawn minerals.

 

Also, lets be semantically clear here, mining is not a "right". It's not constitutionally granted. Congress is free to make laws and regulations regarding mining as they see fit, including banning it altogether (which would be phenominally stupid of them of course). It may sound nitpicky but I don't think it is because talking about rights means something subtly but fundamentally different.

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Dick,

Nobody said anything about taking mining "rights" (privileges granted by current law) away on this entire thread. What has been expressed is that claimants believe that they have "rights"/privileges that were never granted them and then over step and do foolish things that they have no "right" to do. So, yes, these claimants that are infringing upon the public's "rights" need to stop doing foolish things-or your very livelihood (our hobby) will be threatened.

 

When laws are made and privileges granted for one group, privileges are instantly taken from another group. Therefore, as this thread demonstrates, people get upset when the laws made don't go their way. Which is why the people that were granted the privileges, by law, must be careful not to abuse them....there is always somebody looking to take them away.

 

Actually, Dick, there are laws that protect the public and allow them to hike,raft, pick berries,etc. on public lands. What do you think happens when a claimant, at gun point,  orders a berry picker,hiker,camper off of their claim and the sheriff is called? The berry picker aint going to jail! That's for sure, especially, in today's "green" social environment. So, if you believe that it's acceptable for a claim owner to do the "foolish things" previously described in this thread, things that his claim does not grant him the "right" to do then, respectfully, you don't know your mining claim "rights".

 

Dean

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Dick never claimed doing illegal things was a right. He no doubt knows claims law better than any of you. There is a culture clash here. Dick Hammond is the real deal, a miner making a living off his mining claims for decades. The complaint here is not real miners mining real claims. It is people staking ground that would never pass a validity test and other people being excluded from ground. It is especially galling when they sit on it and do nothing. There are lots of things going on with mining claims now that were never part of the original intent of the law.

If you have a legal mining claim you own the mineral rights. If a person detects on a mining claim and removes a single tiny gold nugget they are guilty of mineral trespass. They are the one breaking the law, not the claim owner. Pretending claims are not valid because they do not fit some personal definition of what does or does not constitute a valid claim is ridiculous. The government decides what claims are valid or are not, end of story. If they want to collect claim fees for decades from people sitting on ground and doing nothing with it then that is the way it is. I personally would like to see improvements in the system but that is just wishful thinking these days.

You can hunt, berry pick, or camp on a mining claim. It is public land and it is multiple use. However, the claim owner has a right and duty to keep his dangerous areas off limits and to protect his camp and equipment. And they have the sole legal right to extract the claimed minerals from the ground, period.

The best way to protect claims from high graders is to be physically present and active on your claims. Lacking that, trying to capture images of them "in the act" might help. The reality is most people can't find gold to save their lives and so worrying about it much just leads to sleepless nights.

I was worried about this thread and it is now at a tipping point. You guys want to discuss this then simply state your opinion but do not cast stones at each other.

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