Gulch Claim

[WesD]

Thanks Jason and Paul!!! That's good  to know you can calculate and approximate the quarters yourself.  Ive seen something similar to Jason's  description, of a 1/2 mile long claim, taken up with 5 acre lots, by one claimant. But I'm now wondering on the legality of filing that  way myself,  since  wouldn't you be  going through two 40 acre squares to achieve that?

In all instances, a claim must also meet the following requirements: A location by 1 or 2 persons must fit within the boundaries of a square 40 acre parcel

 

[jasong]

I wonder, can you add a third (or fourth, eighth, etc) claimaint without claiming more land in order to stake a claim like that? Like a 20 acre claim but with 4 claimaints? Or if you do then must you pay the extra fee even if you aren't claiming the extra land?

No clue, interesting thread though. You might want to take some of these grey area questions to one of the claims adjudicators, I find that they are the only ones that will spend the time to give answers with backing sources, other BLM employees there will often just give opinion which can often be wrong and they can't cite sources for when it's less common questions like these.

Do you know what CFR states that 1 or 2 person normal placer (non-gulch) claims must fit in a 40 acre square? With 2 people you can claim 40 acres, so that rule you quoted above is basically saying a 2 person 40 acre claim can only be square. Which doesn't sound right...or that means a ton of existing claims are not valid. Actually, outside of the realm of the desert or prairies, I'd say the majority of placer claims I encounter don't meet this criteria.

[WesD]

Ya J, I found that stated here:  So the way they are describing it, for example, you can't put two 20 acre 1320" claims end to end, unless you have more than 2 signers, since that would be fitting into the boundaries of two  40 acre squares.  But I dont know, maybe I'm misunderstanding that.

http://www.blm.gov/or/programs/minerals/files/guide-locating-claims.pdf

[Clay Diggins]

Gulch claims can only be made where the area surrounding the gulch claim has no mineral values. Unless you are prepared to prove there are no mineral values outside of your gulch claim you can expect the BLM to challenge and close any gulch claim.

All gulch claims are placers Paul. This has nothing to do with lodes or the nonexistent secret handshake.

If you want to know more about gulch claims and BLM policy look up the "Snowflake Fraction Placer" administrative decision.

Personally I think the BLM uses Snowflake to make their jobs easier and to harass small miners. Snowflake Placer was an administrative decision in 1908 that lead to the BLM making up the 40 acres per 2 claimants rules and the gulch placer rules. Snowflake was not a court case and has never been a law. Gulch placer owners that have proof and fight for their claims win against the BLM in court. If you aren't prepared to go there don't bother making a gulch placer claim.

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Jasong makes a good point about irregular Section parts. Regular portions of the Public Land Survey are known as aliquot parts.  About half of the Sections have irregular portions (not 40 acres square) in the mountainous west.

Regular portions that encompass 160 acres are known as quarter sections. Quarter Sections are designated by compass direction from the section center. NE, NW, SE, SW.

Regular portions that encompass the standard 40 acres are known as quarter quarters. Quarter quarters are designated by the Quarter section direction plus an added compass direction from the center of the quarter section. Land descriptions are read from the smallest portion to the largest portion left to right. Quarter quarter sections in the NE quarter section are designated NENE, NWNE, SENE, SWNE.

Irregular quarter quarter parts are designated as "government lots" - they are neither true quarter quarters nor are they aliquots. Government lots are typical shortened to "Lot" or even just "L" with a number designation. Government Lot 1, Lot 1, L1.

These designations can be mixed within a section. A single quarter section can have both quarter quarters as well as Lots. Not all sections have a full compliment of portions. Some Sections are considerably taller or wider than the standard mile square. Even more sections are short on one side. Assuming the southwest corner of a section will have a legal land description of the SWSW of Section XX will be wrong nearly half the time in the mountainous portions of the west.

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We deal a lot with BLM challenges to claims. It's important to understand that claims made in areas that have not been surveyed for the PLSS are exempt from the aliquot part rule for placer claims. About 1/3 of California has never been surveyed. Other states more or less. Assuming a survey has been performed is a potentially big mistake for the locator. Locating a claim in relation to a survey pin that doesn't exist yet is only the most obvious of those potential problems.

Locating a claim by what you see on a map can be a problem too. The old PLSS division grid used on most maps was abandoned in 2008. It was very inaccurate. Today the new standard is the CadNSDI. This is not a new survey but a more accurate mapping of where the survey pins are actually located. It changes nothing on the ground but it does make mapping much more accurate.

Sadly the CadNSDI files are pretty screwed up. Basically the government hasn't been able to get them to work in a reliable way. These new survey mappings are not shown on any public mapping because of those problems. At Land Matters we tackled these corrupted files and managed to fix them with a few months work. Land Matters is now the only online mapping site that displays the new CadNSDI to the public. You will see the descrepencies between the old PLSS and the new CadNSDI by turning on a topo map (old PLSS) and displaying it with the PLSS map layer (new PLSS). Some places are nearly a match and in other places you will see how very far off the old system was. Here is an example in California.