Clay Diggins

I've always imagined that's how Steve spends his days detecting.

Hi pax. Thanks for your support of Land Matters. I'm sorry you are having difficulty. I'm sure if you contact the director she will do what it takes to get things working for you. What format for the report would be better for you? We picked the zip format because it's the most common but if you have an alternative you would like we can try to give a choice. What did you find slow about the report? Did you unzip the zip file? If you try to use the reports without unzipping them first it would be very slow. I test the reports on an old windows XP machine before they go out and I've had no problems with them being slow. If others have experienced slow Claims Advantage Reports please let me know here or at the contact above. Barry

Gosh it's that time again. Spring has sprung across all the states and prospecting is going into full swing for the season. Land Matters updated their Mining Claims Maps last Friday morning. We also updated them on the 15th of May and May 1 and April 15 - you get the idea. In any case Land Matters always provides the most up to date claims mapping available at any price. We serve up thousands of these maps every hour and those numbers keep growing so I know folks are getting their prospecting mojo on with the help of Land Matters. That's a good thing! We've got some new tools coming soon to make your research even easier and more productive. Keep an eye out for those updates soon. For those of you who are Claims Advantage Members you may have noticed there has been a significant change to one of the most famous mining districts in California. New ground opening up for the first time since 1890. This is a major opportunity for any serious prospector. Here's the number of claims closed so far this mining year: Land matters has provided maps of all those 27,127 Closed Claims for our Claims Advantage Members.

The Garrett offices are closed today. The work day in Garland Texas ended last night. I doubt that their marketing department does all the work themselves. Garrett is not really such a small company. Their income from government contracts alone last year was nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Their annual gross revenue is between 10 - 20 million dollars. Companies of this size hire advertising companies to handle their advertising campaigns and placement. If you don't see an announcement by the end of the day I imagine Garrett will be looking for a new advertising company. If the ad company they are using now is any good they will probably wait until peak access time. Very few people are watching television or using the internet on a nice spring Saturday.

Google Earth uses Lat/Long in decimal degrees as their base reference. It's a requirement of the KML/KMZ file format created and used by Google. You can convert any Lat/Long or UTM coordinates with a little math. That's what Google is doing when they offer coordinates in any form but the native Decimal Degrees of Lat/Long. The coordinate conversion math is actually accomplished locally by your computer, Google just provides the equation your computer uses to show coordinates other than Decimal Degrees. If UTM is more useful for you please use that metric system. You should be aware that when you near the westernmost portions of a UTM zone the ground accuracy decreases. Also accurate ground measurements are not possible with Mercator projections. Distance calculations are only relative when accomplished on the same true east/west line. Making accurate mapping systems is not an easy task. Often visual appearance must be sacrificed to maintain accuracy. Google took the path of convenience, easy maintenance and better appearance at the expense of accuracy with their mapping system. They have been public about those limitations as you can see from their quote in my previous post. As long as you are aware the accuracy issues that you are seeing are built into the system Google Earth can be useful but you can't rely on the positional accuracy of what you learn. If you are using the Google Earth Terrain "3D" feature turn it off and your accuracy will be much better. Google Earth does not align the 3D terrain to their coordinate reference so it's essentially impossible to get good coordinate data with the 3D feature on.

From Google: Google uses a non standard projection. It doesn't matter which positional tool notation you choose from the options the projection is the same for every Google Earth map. Accuracy is a function of the base data and the projection method. Changing from lat/long to UTM display doesn't change the accuracy of the mapping.

The problem with array backups Mitchell is that when one drive fails you lose all the data. Arrays are built for higher access speed not for data security. Running a second hard drive in the same enclosure works but isn't the best solution either. Although you can arrange for one hard drive to "mirror" the other hard drive they both rack up the same number of run hours and approach their lifetime expectancy at the same rate. Although it's rare for two hard drives to fail at exactly the same time it's not rare for two older hard drives to have the same failure mode when there is a power supply glitch from their common power supply bus. A separate high quality hard drive in it's own enclosure with it own power supply is your best bet. Remember if you delete the original file when you backup you haven't accomplished a backup at all. Without two identical files on two different devices you don't have a back up.

We maintain current redundant incremental backups of dozens of terabytes of data. This is a daily thing for us. Those backups are on quality hard drives in quality self powered firewire cases and the drives are only powered up to accomplish a backup. All quality hard drives today have SMART technology. The drive monitors it's own health and reports use hours, on off cycles, size of disk, size of data on disk, remaining empty space format type and other goodies. If there is a potential failure point for the drive it will report that as a problem, usually before any data is lost. The software to get these SMART readings is free for every operating system. Hard drives and their enclosures are not created equal. If you see a bargain in a plastic case at Wally World you are probably best off to move on over to the cheap metal detector section. There is a large amount of future grief built into those "bargain" drives. If the drive case comes with a bunch of free software or automatic features try the stationary section for some disappearing ink and composting paper, your "data" will last longer. Avoid "green" technology in hard drives. The "green" is just an excuse for building a slow cheap hard drive to 1980's construction standards. Hard drives use very little electricity so consider the promise of a few cents less electricity use as a come on to help the bottom line of a drive manufacturer in Thailand. There are other options besides hard drives. Unfortunately virtually all those options are incredibly slow and unreliable. USB storage sticks work until they don't. If you haven't had a USB stick fail you probably haven't used many. They are great for sharing a little bit of data between devices or people but they really aren't a long term storage option. The "cloud" is a joke when it comes to security or reliability. Amazon cloud (the biggest) was recently hacked as many other cloud providers have been. All of the "cloud" providers copy portions of your data to whichever server is the cheapest this week. Essentially your data is being constantly fragmented and copied to the lowest bidder in a game of data arbitrage. That's the "cloud". If there is some data loss just reread your contract before you complain to your cloud reseller. Some data loss is to be expected and they suggest you keep a secure local backup to ensure your data integrity. Of course the minute you have a weak or non existent internet connection your data just becomes an abstract concept somewhere "out there". Much like gold if your data isn't in your possession you don't really "own" it. We maintain our own internet server that serves up several gigabytes of data every day. Besides the copies of that data we keep in our office we also have a second backup server located on a different network in a different city. If the main server loses data (which has never happened yet) the backup server has an exact copy of the original and has permission to install that backup copy and reboot our main server. The backup server is never accessed by the public. It is possible to backup your data in such a way that short of a global nuclear war your data is secure and available when you need it. It's just a matter of deciding just how secure and available you need your data to be. The basic rule is that if you don't actually back up your data to an independent storage system no backup scheme can work. The most common failure in backup systems is the users failure to actually backup the data they want saved. No body can fix that type of data loss.

Sorry we missed you and your Dad Chris. Leigh and I were doing the flu thing and thought it might impolite and even a little uncomfortable to be spreading the joy last week. Hopefully we will make the next round and meet up with you and your Dad. Maybe Rob will buy. Barry

Is Kinross cutting back too Chris? A lot of those claims were theirs. It's hard to get the big picture from a two week report but this is big volume for a single report period. It could be an interesting year.

The Nevada BLM closed 8,195 claims between January 15th and February 1st. That's nearly 194,000 acres opened to location in two weeks. Most of those claims were held by the big mining companies - Kinross, Barrick. Some of these claims go back to 1893. Of course you would already know that and have an individual map of each of those 8,195 claims section areas if you are a Claims Advantage Member. This is an unusual number of closures in such a short period of time even for Nevada, the biggest mining State by far. Annual turnover in Nevada mining claims is about 20,000 claims so this could be just an unusually productive period for the Nevada BLM in updating their case files. Why the big mining companies are dumping so many claims is a matter of speculation since I don't sit in on their board or management meetings. This may just be a blip in reporting. In any case I'll leave the speculation to others. Probably more important is where these closed claims are. That answer will probably produce a flurry of prospecting as soon as the weather permits. Go get u sum

I'm blushing. Thanks for the support everyone. You each have contributed in your own way and that is appreciated more than you know. Land Matters is now growing faster than we could have imagined. We just finished up a coding marathon to make the Library useful. Give it a try - there's lots of useful research materials there and there is more being added every day We had hoped when the Library upgrade was finished we could get out and dig a few bullets and boot tacks. That's not going to happen now. The BLM killed what little was left of the geocommunicator a few weeks ago and our traffic more than doubled immediately afterwards. We just quadrupled the server space and memory to handle the increased load. This has the advantage of giving us more room to build in some of the bigger projects we have planned but the disadvantage of quadrupling our bills. Success can be a little rough at times. poddar66 welcome to the forum. Land Matters is not an advocacy group as Steve pointed out. Land Matters was formed to provide easy public access to public information about land in one place. We hope all sides on any issue will feel comfortable using Land Matters to get the facts associated with their area of interest. Facts can go a long way in reaching consensus on divisive issues. We are however very interested in any land status changes. It's not thrilling reading but we check the Federal Register every day for any land status changes. I haven't seen anything new about the plan you speak of since 1976. Please direct us to the information so we can update our Library and Maps. I'm just a volunteer at Land Matters but I do have strong opinions about how the feds deal with land status. I sometimes make announcements for Land Matters or respond to posts like this one. When I do act for Land Matters I try to keep my opinions to myself in respect for Land Matters neutrality policy. If you are interested in what I think keep your eyes peeled and you will see me pop up from time to time with my personal opinions when I'm not writing for my favorite non-profit. Barry

I've made an interactive 3D map of the Hoffman mining lease in Fairplay Colorado. There are two versions of the map A very LARGE one that runs about 30 Mb download and a much smaller one that's about 3.5 Mb. LARGE 3D Map small 3D Map The Hoffman lease is called the Katuska pit. It's about 8 acres of private property. It has been permitted as a sand and gravel operation by the State of Colorado since 1991 While you are viewing the map click on the "mine" area outlined in red. A window will pop up with links to information about the geology of the placers from the Land Matters Library and a link to the sand and gravel permit report from the State of Colorado. Use your mouse to move around the map. Scroll to move in and out or get dizzy by typing an "r" to make the map spin.

There is better geologic mapping available Tom. The maps and kmz available on the mrdata site are very low resolution generalized maps. You will find on those maps that the accuracy is only so so and the precision is very dependent on the mapping system being used. They can only give you a general idea of where faults and other features are located. We present that same mrdata mapping on the Land Matters State Geology Maps with the ability to see them in combination with aerial imagery or topos. A land status map layer is available as well as the PLSS grid to help you find your way around. The fault layers when available are displayed separately for ease of use. Many of the Land Matters maps have additional features as well. For example the Arizona map has Arizona rock chemistry location sample data and a mineral potential map layer as well. Each State geology map will be added to as data, time and funds become available. If you are looking for better geologic mapping you can get the best free geologic maps available for any given location with just a few clicks. Those State Geology Maps I mentioned above have the ability to direct you to more and better information than you will find in those google kmz or even the Land Matters map layers. Here's how: 1. Start up the appropriate State Geology map. 2. Zoom in to your area of interest. 3. Click on the information tool. 4. Click on the map in your area of interest and a new information window will pop up on the upper left of your map. 5 Look for the item in the information list titled Layer: National Geologic Map Database Query and click on the link Click for Map List. A new window will open with a list of all the geology maps in the USGS National Geologic Map Database for that quadrant. A quadrant is the same area as a 7.5 minute topo map - the quadrant name in the information window is virtually always the same name and area as the 7.5 minute topo . Many if not all of those maps are available for free download on that same web page. Typically anywhere from 15 to 30 maps are available for each quad area. The 1:24,000 scale is the most detailed map and as the 1: numbers get bigger the map covers a larger area and generally has less detail. Most of those National Geologic Map Database maps aren't in a form that you could easily display on another map but they have much more detailed information than web maps like google or Land Matters. They can be very useful as is for studying a specific area. At our MinerDiggins business we do digitize these higher detail maps but that is truly a major effort. Essentially each map is reproduced by hand and the map information is hand entered in a database for each feature. A 200 square mile area usually takes an experienced cartographer about four to six weeks full time to digitize a single map. That really does pay off in the ability to use the geology information in combination with other mapped features as FootPrints software users know. Unfortunately the time involved pretty much guarantees most of the more detailed geology maps won't be made available in modern mapping form anytime soon. Faults can be found from aerial images, 3D models and inferred from local geology. Contact zones can be associated with faults and even more important with localized enrichment. As jasong pointed out the real facts will only be found on the ground. Maps and aerial views can help you focus your search for enriched areas but in the end only feet on the ground can bring you a real knowledge of where fault features are located. Illinois is a tough nut to crack geologically speaking. As a good portion of the State is buried under hundreds (or thousands) of feet of glacial fill and loess much of the basement geology is inferred. Follow those links on the Illinois State Map and I think you will find more information is available about Illinois geology than you imagined.

Made another 3D map, this time it's Barringer (Meteor) Crater in Northern Arizona. This is a small map, if you would like better resolution I have it but it will be a slow load on most connections. You can move around in the 3D environment with your mouse. Pan, Zoom and get Information from the features. Try typing in an "r" and watch the mountain spin in 3D. Type an "L" to turn on or off the labels. The "I" in the lower left corner will show you more options.

Thanks for the great feedback everyone! This has been really helpful. As some of you discovered this is based on WebGL technology so older browsers and older video cards will probably fail. The "trick" I'm using to making this run so smoothly in your browser is to have your browser download the data files and process them locally. That's a lot faster and cleaner than sending each different view individually like with older web technology like Google Earth. Using this method I can produce very high resolution and much more accurate 3D models. The drawback is the size of the data that needs to be downloaded by the user. I made a full resolution version of the test map and it was beautiful but it was 1.7 Gb and took nearly 20 minutes to load in my browser from my local folder. Once it did load it was very fast and responsive. If you had to download the file across the internet on a slow connection it might take hours before you would see any results in your browser. That's not a good option. Obviously these maps need to be either low resolution or only cover small areas at high resolution. Part of my reasoning for developing this type of mapping is so I can display subsurface features. As you can imagine interactive 3D maps of mineralization or mine workings can be very useful. East Texas Chris I see what you are talking about with the drag issue. I tried to track user input directly but it doesn't work well perceptually. In other words I got dizzy because once you drag over the horizon the map tends to flip. I did fix the flipping to underground and I'll employ that in future maps but as you can see from my comments above that underground problem might also be seen as a feature depending on use. Mitchel you might check to see if you have javascript turned on. The symptoms you describe sound like a javascript failure. It could be an incomplete load also or you have webgl turned off in your browser. Here are some instructions that might help you see the map. Jasong I did manage to reproduce the loss of key focus on the smaller map. I'm going to have to dig deeper to fix that. It might be the way different browsers are parsing the html content or the javascript might have some bad loops. Thanks for updating me on the problem. It looks like most forum users can access the map and get some use from it. Due to your input I will continue to work on this system. So the question is - given the limitations what would you like to see mapped in 3D?

Thanks for the input guys. Overall this experiment is working out pretty well. Rick this is closer to being something you can do than you probably imagined. Once I've built the whole system I'll give you the lowdown on how it works. If you're interested I'll hook you up with the new tools. jasong I doubt the Adblock would make a difference. This is strictly javascript and html and there are no third party connections needed to display and run the map. I'm guessing the reason you are losing key commands is because the smaller map is in an embed within the page. Once you click away from the embed space the map doesn't get anymore input until you click on it again. Try the bigger map and I'll bet you don't lose key commands as long as you are on the page. There is no embed on the bigger map. I'll put a frame around the embedded map so that issue is clearer to the user. Jasong your input makes it clear there needs to be some interface improvements. Thanks again.

I've been working on a 3D mapping system. I've put together a sample map of Rich Hill, Arizona with some mine information. There is a bunch of stuff these maps can do but I'm not sure if they will work on enough peoples browsers to make it worthwhile to pursue development of this system. Please give it a try and tell me what you think. (Caution - this is about a 7 megabyte map and may take a while to load if you are on a slow connection) 3D map HERE. You can move around in the 3D environment with your mouse. Pan, Zoom and get Information from the mines. Try typing in an "r" and watch the mountain spin in 3D. Type an "l" to turn on or off the mine labels. It's a lot of fun and could be a cool feature for researchers if it works for enough people. This map is smoking fast on my development machine using the latest Firefox browser but doesn't work at all on my Safari browser. It works in Edge, Internet Explorer and Firefox on my Windows 10 computer but it's clunky. It doesn't work very well on my Windows XP machine in the latest Firefox. Give it a try and let me know if you like it or hate it. If it's working well for you might consider going to a bigger map version for more fun.

There are some pretty big players in this withdrawal area Dick. I see a big battle behind the scenes. The upper area is somewhat suited to recreation but the area around the Vulture mine is just offensive with no real reason to include it. That's where the big players are so there is some pretty stiff resistance already.

I prefer dancing girls to operate my pick. So far they prefer round magnets and Hermit picks. If they change their minds (their prerogative from what I've been told) then it will be square or rectangular possibly triangular or asymmetric - I make it a habit not to argue with dancing girls with picks. YMMV

That won't work for the Vulture area - there never was a district formed. That whole concept isn't going to work in Arizona because the original districts were exclusive - as in they excluded new miners, all Mexicans (new or already owning claims) and usually Chinese for good measure. I know the current miners there and I seriously doubt you could ever get a majority of claim owners to vote to form a district. In some states it's illegal to reform mining districts. Sometimes it's just better to do the thing yourself.

What you can and can not do on public lands subject to a mineral withdrawal is dependent on the terms of the withdrawal order. Often not all mineral rights are withdrawn. A typical withdrawal will specify that location (claims) and entry (patent) rights are withdrawn, that leaves open prospecting and exploration. In a few cases I've seen withdrawals that specify no prospecting although those are rare. Sometimes all mineral rights are withdrawn, usually within National Parks and National Seashores but even then not in every instance. There are National Parks where prospecting is exempted from the withdrawal. All wilderness areas are open to non mechanized prospecting. You will need to read the withdrawal order itself to see what prospecting rights you have in a mineral withdrawal. In this particular instance the actual mineral withdrawal language is not included in the official Federal Register notice! That's been common since the election while the BLM scrambles to publish as many land orders as possible before the new President takes charge of their agency. There have been quite a few sloppy or incomplete notices published in the last few weeks. I'm not sure leaving out the details is legal and that might be a good point to make if you are going to leave a comment on the withdrawal. How could you possibly make an informed comment if the details of the proposed action are not published? I doubt a request for the specific wording of the proposed mineral withdrawal is truly available but you can try calling the Arizona BLM number published for that request in the Federal Register. I have the feeling this was rushed into publication and the Arizona State BLM office is well known for acting without completing the required administrative work first. Unless the withdrawal order covers all aspects of the Mining Acts the order itself controls - not the opinion of local BLM management. If the withdrawal is for all rights (doubtful) then it's up to the management whether you can "recreate" with your metal detector.

Land Matters has posted an explanation and map of the proposed BLM Vulture Mountains Rec Area lease in Arizona. The lease would involve withdrawing the area from claim location. This is a popular and productive gold prospecting area just Northwest of Phoenix Arizona. It's adjacent to the active Vulture Mine one of the oldest and most productive gold mines in Arizona. There are a lot of claims there at present. If you have claims in the area or just enjoy prospecting the Vulture region this might be a good time to let the BLM know your thoughts on their proposal. Comments need to be submitted by December 23, 2016. You can see the withdrawal proposal and interactive map on the News and Views front page. This is part of Land Matters ongoing effort to track and map all proposed mineral withdrawals. This is a very ambitious project but one that several Land Matters users have requested. If you know of any current withdrawal proposals that you would like to see featured please contact Land Matters at support@mylandmatters.org.

I won't address the wisdom of which form of claim those deposits are best located as. I will point out that the opal deposits there have been patented as both lode (Royal Peacock patent - 6 lode claims) and placer (Rainbow Ridge patent - 5 placer claims). Obviously the DOI Secretary is as confused about the issue as others may be. The "CFR" you are quoting Chris is not the actual CFR but the eCFR. The CFR does not work on a question/answer format and it's the only official compilation of agency regulations. The eCFR is cute but it's the readers digest version of the CFR. Here's the explanation from the introduction to the eCFR: The edit and emphasis are mine. You can usually find these types of definitions by going to the top level of the government website you are viewing. Being an unofficial version and rewritten as a dialogue it is useful but as indicated by the eCFR itself it's not a reliable source for the actual regulations. Bringing those eCFR quotes to a court or relying on the editors interpretation of the meaning of the regulations is generally inadvisable.

Ignoring the placer/lode question I feel compelled to point out that a valid placer claim can not be prospected nor claimed by anyone without the consent of the placer claim owner. Although it's true that invalid claims are subject to prospecting and claim you would need to establish that the claim was invalid before entering it to prospect. Without the cooperation of the claim owner I can't imagine how you could legally do that without a court order declaring the claim invalid. That Catch 22 protects claim owners from everything but their own folly and a mineral challenge by the Federal government.