Clay Diggins

Perhaps I misunderstood your previous posts. If so I'm open to rebuttal without any discussion of your personality or character. This isn't personal for me Jasong. It's a simple matter of answering reasonable questions with fact supported replies. I do get a bit short with people when they press their point without reading the materials provided in my responses. Perhaps some of that came through in my post? If you find that offensive I'm sorry you felt a need to be offended by that. As I stated before "you won't find any legal support for the concept that minerals are not owned by those who have made a location with a valid discovery." I made no distinction as to the nature or source of those mineral deposits. You could argue that the placer minerals on a lode claim are not owned by the lode claim owner but you will not find a single law or court case that states that principle. Not one. You will find many cases of lode claims being validly located within a valid placer claim with the knowledge and permission of the placer claim owner. The law clearly states that the placer claimant owns all of the valuable minerals within their location unless there has been a valid lode discovery prior to patent. From the 1872 Mining Act Section 11 There is no corollary for lode claims or patents in the law. A Placer location describes the type of deposit, a Lode location describes the type of deposit, neither have any restrictions on what minerals are discovered within the original discovery location. If they did piles of unworked ore could be claimed as placers while the lode mine was operating. That would be contrary to Congressional intent and any concept of equity. If you would like a deeper understanding of why the only exception to valid mineral claimants exclusive ownership of all valuable minerals found within their valid claim is the lode within placer exception read Cole v Ralph (US Supreme Court), Inyo Marble Co. v. Loundagin (California), Puett v Harvey (Nevada) or Mt. Rosa M.M. L. Co. v. Palmer (Colorado). The Supreme Court of Nevada said in Puett v Harvey: So the law says that placer claims with no known lode within the location possess all the valuable minerals AND that if a lode is known to exist within the placer claim before patent that lode must be separately claimed and paid for with the patent application or it is excluded from the patent. At no point does the law, or the court, say that the discovery of a lode by the claim owner excludes the lode minerals from the placer claim owner before patent. The courts have been consistent in ruling that valid lode claims encompass all the valuable minerals within their location without exception. Clipper v Eli stated that an uninvited prospector had no right to a lode location within a valid senior placer location: Your own sources state that locators own all the minerals found within their claim boundaries. There is no change in ownership or mineral rights within that location should placer material be found on a lode location nor if a lode be found on a placer location. If you think you know of such an exception please provide the law or published decision.

You won't find any legal support for the concept that minerals are not owned by those who have made a location with a valid discovery. The key concept is a valid discovery. You could pose several different objections based on claims that have not made a valid discovery but once discovery has been perfected only the claim owner can create a situation that would put the ownership of the minerals in doubt. There are several ways a claim owner could do that through lease, share sales, partnerships or permitting a non owner to prospect their placer discovery. In any case a non owner could not create those situations. The point is that a non invited prospector has no rights to the minerals on either a lode or a placer claim. If it's claimed by someone else it's not within your rights to prospect it. I would be wary of seeking or taking advice on mining claims from the BLM or any land manager. They will not be there to testify for you in court when it's your claim on the line. We are still working on the final figures but it's looking like the BLM loses about half of the mining cases it takes to the IBLA. No skin off their back but a lot of grief for miners. Not great odds for those who would prefer to listen to a BLM employee when they already have Supreme Court cases and Congressional Acts to inform them.

There will be two separate and distinct claims when a valid lode is made over a valid placer. They do not intersect. Yes - club members, or anyone else, with an explicitly granted right to prospect could make a lode discovery and claim it to the exclusion of the placer claim. Your assumption that two claims own the exact same minerals is incorrect. Lode claims cost twice as much per acre to purchase as placer claims. Congress assured that known lodes could not be patented as placer claims. Simple and straightforward - if you have a known lode on your placer the lode is excluded from the placer patent unless you also claim the lode. Yes the lode claim owner could exclude the placer claim owners and their invitees from their lode claim. Why would you continue to speculate? I gave you a link to the law that says just what I wrote here. I gave you a link to the Supreme Court case that explains the situation in detail. Neither one of those sources imply that the lode minerals are distinct from the placer minerals. Clearly according to Congress and the Supreme Court the two types of claim are distinct and separate. From Cole v Ralph and hundreds of other mining cases: Consider why Congress granted minerals to their discoverer. Lode mines have clearly out paced the value of placer claims in enriching this country. Valid Lode claims have this one precedence over placer claims just as valuable mineral discoveries have precedence over agricultural values in the law. I see that as a reasonable balance.

There is no circumstance where a valid placer claim can be located over a valid lode claim. A lode claim can be located over a placer claim once a valid lode discovery is made by either the owner of the preexisting placer claim or by another if invited by that placer claim owner to prospect the claim. The lode over placer issue is covered in detail in Section 11 of the General Mining Act of 1872. A very good place to start increasing your knowledge is the above linked text of the mining law as well as the very important mining case Cole v Ralph. The Supreme Court explains just about every claim/adverse claim possibility as well as covering the real implications of allowing others to prospect your claim in Cole v Ralph.

BLM has announced the new inflation adjusted minerals fees for 2017. These only affect mining locations if you want to apply for a Mineral Patent adjudication or file a protest. Many other O&G, mineral leasing, geothermal and coal fees are being raised too. You can read the details and a lot more about new land status changes at the Land Matters NEWS page. Barry

All the State BLM offices will mail you paper copies of the claims filings. The cost varies according to who you know or talk to that day. The average is around 13 cents a page. No need to drive anywhere unless you live down a long road from your mailbox. An email service would be helpful for first look at mining claims. The County Recorders we work with provide online downloads of scans of the Public Recordings of actual location notices and amendments etc. Often, but not always, those Public Record scans require a paid account. We don't map a claim if there is no Public Record. A surprising number of "claims" turn out to be just paper filings at the BLM. Without a Public Record at the County and a BLM filing there can be no claim. There is a long used and very popular GPAA "claim" in California that has never been recorded.

Intent is a difficult road to go down jasong. Although it's obviously illegal to locate a claim, without a verified discovery, for the sole purpose of reselling the location I don't see how the BLM could possibly manage the personal or resources to prove intent. Even if they do I'm not sure how they would pursue such a concept in court. It's been done before but the BLM's role in those cases has been to present evidence of falsifying or hiding claim ownership. As far as fees stopping claims mongers I don't see the connection. The BLM is not able to change base fees themselves - that a function of Congress. Punishing all claim owners for the actions of the criminal minority is foolish and destructive in my opinion. I'm not sure what you mean by "claims adjudicator" that's usually the title for an insurance investigator. There is no such role for mineral claims in the BLM. Are these BLM employees you spoke to? If so perhaps there was another title those individuals held? I hate claims mongers. The two you mentioned are some of the worst. I could add several dozen to that class of sleazebag. All that said about the only effective way to stop those individuals without damaging the claim system as a whole is to educate their potential suckers as to the reality of what they are buying. When they can't find suckers to sell their "claims" to they will lose all interest in "mining" and move on to the next scam. The BLM hasn't proposed any education programs to warn off potential victims of the claims mongers so I'm guessing what you are hearing is grouching and administrative bluster. I hear a lot of that but I've learned to treat it as background noise.

If you have a claim in California the BLM State office doesn't begin processing the small miners until the beginning of August of the following year. In Nevada you will usually see updates by the end of January. In Utah claim filings are processed quickly. The BLM has an administrative mandate to update their case files, including the LR2000, within 5 working days of receiving a filing or change of status. Obviously that isn't happening in any State. Our upcoming reports will address that on a state by state basis. p.s. In California a work affidavit or intent to hold recording is due on or by September 30th. Other States have different deadlines. In all States the BLM filing for small miners is due on or before December 30th at the State BLM office.

All good questions Chris! They will all be answered and a lot more in five reports we are preparing. The first report will be for our Claims Advantage Members and that should be ready soon. That will cover all the basic questions about the years claims activity state by state as well as a national comparison. There will be information about this past year in relation to previous years as well. All the usual charts, graphs as well as a brief movie. Shortly after the first Claims Advantage Report we will be offering a less in depth report for public consumption. That report will cover information to answer most of your questions and a lot more you are probably thinking of already. That report will be freely available to all and will become a permanent part of the Land Matters library collection, all of which is available to the public at no charge. We plan to have that first public report available by the end of September. The second Claims Advantage Special Report will go into the state by state results with deeper analysis and a lot more number crunching results. We expect to have that Special Report ready by mid November or earlier if possible. The third Claims Advantage Special Report will be a BLM "report card". That report will reveal the details of the individual state BLM performance such as processing times, funding, patterns of activity and staffing. There will be a lot of interesting information in that report. Shortly after the BLM report card Special Report goes out to Claims Advantage Members we will be offering a public version of the BLM report card report. To answer the unasked question briefly there are almost exactly the same number of mining claims at the start of this mining year as there were at the start of the last mining year.

The Land Matters Mining Claims Maps were updated to September 15th last Thursday. Sorry it took so long to get around to posting this up here. We also prepare the Claims Advantage reports at the same time as the claims updates and between the two there are about 20 hours put in to the update. With my paying job sometimes I run out of time to do anything but make sure the claims are updated. We have never missed a claims update so you can reasonably expect that claims will be updated on the 1st and the 15th of each month unless those days fall on a weekend. This month I made some changes to the Mining Claims Maps to make them faster and a smaller load for those on limited connections. There is a "Tip" included on the bottom right of the map window to help you get quicker page loads for these maps. Along with that tip remember that the smaller your browser mapping window the less data transferred and the quicker the map will load. Combine that with using the zoom box feature and you will cut your map load times way down. If you want to learn more ways to make your use of the maps faster and discover the hidden tricks to making really effective maps look into the documentation found by clicking the "HELP" button at the top right of each map window. August 31st marked the end of the federal mining year. We are crunching the volumes of claims data we've collected to bring you some usable information. Here's just a teaser of what is still to come: Those are the final figures on closed claims over the last year. I realize some other systems and organizations have come up with some very different numbers but I can assure you these numbers are correct. If you are associated with one of those other mapping systems or organizations and would like to know how to get the correct totals from the data feel free to PM me or contact Land Matters.

Tom, Chuck gave you good information. You will have to pull the patent for any particular piece of private land to know if mineral rights transferred with the grant. You will find those patents at the General Land Office website. If the patent has not been scanned into the system yet you can order a copy on the website. There are more than 5 million on the website so your odds are pretty good you will find what you are looking for. If the original patentee did obtain the mineral rights then you are on a search for who owns the rights now. That becomes a local matter. The use of a Title Company, Landsman or browsing the County Records are your best bet. Or you could approach the current landowner to see if the minerals were specifically included in their purchase. If you are looking for subsurface mineral rights open to location in those states you are out of luck. Those lands were not a subject of the Mining Acts. This is true of most patents granted for homesteads elsewhere also.

Changes in stock price do not make profits. You will have to sell the stock before you can have a profit. Watching numbers change is not the same thing as money in hand. Kitco has all the historical charts and data.

Just a reminder less than 24 hours to go. If you haven't done your annual BLM filing yet you need to get them in to your State BLM office by end of day tomorrow. 2016mcfilings.pdf 2016mcf.pdf

Green could be good. Pictures don't tell much about whether the material has appeal when cut. That in the end is really all that matters. Jade isn't an element like gold that has a set definable market and value. Unlike gold you may have to create and control your own market. If the material is relatively clear, has no dark inclusions or included veins, cuts and polishes well without orange peel, has character and an appealing color you have a winner but still need to package and market. With the Bagby deposit the owners stockpiled the vast majority that was mined. To this day I see jade being marketed as Asian or Russian origin that is almost certainly being sold from that stockpile. I don't think any of the Bagby material was ever marketed in the rough in the United States. Beautiful material for the most part but the best profit was made by controlling the supply. You won't have much luck with pin and feather when working with jade. Did I mention it's the toughest natural substance known to man? For that reason you will need to use abrasives to cut it whether it's diamond saws or mud and an iron blade. Pin/feather/wedge does work on most rock and isn't much slower than dexpan when you are experienced. Different story when it comes to jade. We hauled the larger boulder float out with winches, sleds and bars. Lots of manual labor. If the boulder was too big it got left in place. For us the objective was to get workable material with the least effort. Moving big boulders means cutting big boulders so ultimate size was dictated by weight and the size saw we were willing to run. I did most of my boulder cutting with a mud saw and a 1 hp gas drive motor. A single cut could take a month. I can still hear the constant putting of that little Briggs and Stratton in my memories. It might still be running today. The float was chosen by the quality of the "ring" that was heard when struck with a rock hammer. Identifying the float by sight wasn't always easy because there was a lot of albite and serpentine in the area. It's just a matter of hard earned experience. Not all float or in situ jade is of good quality. You put in the work and you take your chances. Jade deposits need to be judged by the overall profitability. Just like gold deposits not all days are profitable but if you don't put in the effort no days are profitable. I'm sure with time you will come to understand the float in your deposit too. I don't have much experience with core drilling in the field. Drilling a hole all the way through a jade block will give you the start of your back cut for a wire saw once you have cleared the sides. The 40 inch blades were used in the off site warehouse with an overhead chain drive and X/Y table to position the jade block. Wire saws and smaller continuous circular blades were used in the mine. The best profit I had with jade float was gathering smaller pieces, slicing an edge to judge quality and high grading the resulting material to find marketable pieces. That's a lot of work but I combined that with gold mining and semi precious stone collecting to feed my jewelry business and made a good living. I ended up with piles of lesser material behind the barn but the neighborhood kids loved digging through it for treasures and traders and other jewelers would pay by the pound for what they could find. It was fairly simple to stop by my collecting area when I was out dredging or looking for specimens and cutting material. Loading up a two hundred pounds could keep me busy for a month. Occasionally I would spot a promising larger boulder and mark it for a later expedition with some labor help and winches, sleds and a home rigged crane. Often those larger pieces of float were a waste of time but once I found a really nice piece and made some good money from the slabs and cabs. That's my experience. More modern and reliable tools are available today. You might want to contact the operators of the Polar Jade mine in B.C. They have quite a bit of experience with mining and cutting nephrite jade.

You have chosen literally the toughest material on earth to mine in situ. Jade isn't susceptible to feather/pin/wedge work although the surrounding albite/country rock may be friable enough to start by traditional quarry methods. Blasting won't help you at all but the problem is more about the inability to shock break good jade than it is about fracturing the stone. Try breaking your piece of float with a 16 pound mallet and a backing wedge and you will see what I mean. You and your hammer will break before the jade does. Quality in situ jade deposits are rarer than hens teeth. The one I am familiar with is the Bagby, California occurrence. You will find that mining block jade requires incredible patience and more belief in the ultimate quality of the, as yet unseen, material than a Forest Fenn treasure hunter. The brief answer is diamond continuous circular wet saws for the small stuff and starting a cut and diamond wire saws for block sawing. In the old days we used mud saws and the type of patience that's happy to see a little progress on a monthly basis. Jade is really tough material, as you are discovering. In Bagby the answer was to pull the biggest block you could and then spend the next year slicing the block with custom large chain driven traveling circular diamond saws. Making a large saw blade isn't easy but with practice and patience it is possible to make blades exceeding 40 inches. I'm sure modern blades will be more effective but large size blades are still a custom job and probably still more cost effective when done in house. If you find quantities of semiprecious quality jade the issue of overwhelming the market (cutting your own throat) raises it's ugly head. Good jade is more marketable if you limit the amounts sent to market. The jewelry industry is fickle and too much of one type of material at once will move the market away from your product. Stockpiling and limiting the number of buyers is the only long term solution. Gem quality jade is a different story altogether but the odds of finding gem quality nephrite in situ is incredibly slim. As far as I know the Bagby occurrence is the only gem quality jade in place and the gem quality material was only several ounces total over many years and many tons of salable mined material. Jade being a carving/jewelry material you might find working the float to be more profitable than mining the seam. From what I can tell from the picture your jade seems to be somewhat blue and semi opaque? That's generally carving material. If I'm right about the color you may already be pushing into a crowded market with the blue Colombian, Chinese and Motagua Valley, Guatemala Jadeite. Pictures can be deceiving but you might do well to show the material to a knowledgeable jeweler who knows the market. I believe you might find one of those on this forum. The beryls are obviously weathered and eroded. If the crystals appear to be salable as gems or you think you might find good specimen vugs in the country rock start by sledging some barren material to see if it can be broken easily. If so work your way closer to the exposed crystals and see if they don't pop free on their own. If not you will need to use smaller hammers, chisels and picks to break the material away from them. The portable diamond saw is the next option but the rock will inform you which is more destructive to value. Final cleanup is done on the bench. A foredom and impact hand piece with bits can be very useful but your most valuable tool in recovering gems or specimens is experience and patience. Congratulations on your discoveries. Good Luck! Barry

He was beaten and killed by people known to him whom he owed money to. No gold was stolen. Datta D. Phuge was beaten to death by his son's friends after luring him to a fake birthday party because Phuge reportedly owed them Rs.150,000. http://www.khaleejtimes.com/international/india/9-people-arrested-for-indian-gold-shirt-mans-murder Rs.150,000 is about $2,236 By all accounts this was a guy who loved his gold more than his friends, Sometimes friends are more valuable than all the gold in the world.

The Supreme Court has ruled twice in the last 15 years that instream sediment is neither a point source or pollution under the Clean Water Act. Instream sediments are not a subject of the Clean Water Act. Those who would lead you to believe otherwise, including the EPA, are pulling the wool over your eyes. Anyone who applies for a permit for instream dredging, sluicing or panning based on the Clean Water Act is throwing their money away on a fantasy. States do, in some circumstances, have a right to control water quality. That's not a bad thing. But when they attempt to classify instream sediments as pollution or a point source based on the Clean Water Act they are basing their actions on non existent federal law.

This is not a solid gold nugget. It's a specimen and my best guess is it's about 20% gold. A kilo of gold is virtually the same size as an iPhone. Width: 40mm (1.58 inches) Length: 80mm (3.15 inches) Depth/Thickness: 18mm (0.71 inches) 16 kilos is less than 7 inches square. Unless the person holding the nugget is a baby there is no way that's 16 kilos of gold. All that being said I'm thinking the finder just about lost it when they found it. I'd sure like to see some better pictures and maybe hear how it was found.

These are much better satellite images. It's a nice improvement. Satellite is only medium and low resolution imagery so when you zoom in closer you will still find the same aerial imagery that's been there all along. Satellites only do high resolution ground imagery on television, in real life close ground imagery is still done with aerial photography from airplanes.

Not Jade. Nephrite jade is Actinolite an Inosilicate amphibole. Not related to Californite. Californite is massive Vesuvainite, a Sorosilicate. The more gemmy varieties are commonly known as Idocrase outside of Northern California. I've cut some of the better material from Happy Camp and it tends to undercut adjacent to the color changes. I had luck finishing with cerium oxide but my material was darker green and translucent, your material will probably cut different. It's often a pretty stone with sometimes unusual colors. Interesting to note that free gold is sometimes seen in specimens from Happy Camp. You might want to journey across that river next time you stop by. A Californite deposit with gold would be worth claiming.

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. _____________________________ 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. _____________________________ 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.

Nobody showed you the secret handshake Paul?

Meadview is in Lost Basin, Gold Basin is to the south and west of Lost Basin. They both have gold but different geology. In Gold Basin look for the older fanglomerate underneath the newer gravels. That old fanglomerate is poorly consolidated. The old gravels have gold, the new ones don't. The gold distribution in Gold Basin can seem pretty confusing if you don't know that fact. The areas where these older gravels are exposed and then concentrated through erosion are where you will find the nuggets. The bigger washes are mostly filled with new gravels but the older gravels are exposed in some of the smaller side washes. Follow the old gravels. White Elephant Wash has several areas with exposed gold bearing gravel but there are other areas scattered throughout the upper basin. Taking a good look at the geology before you prospect there will give you a leg up. Combine flood modelling with the geology and you have a good chance of walking right to your first find. There is good information available on the Gold Basin deposits in USGS Professional Paper 1361. You can download a searchable copy of that paper at this Land Matters LINK. 74 Mb PDF A similar situation with placer gravels is going on in Lost Basin but the gravels are entirely different from the gold bearing gravels in Gold Basin.

I'm with Chris on this. These people have as much of a moral right to mine their land as the Californians and the Spanish did in the Motherlode. The gold from the California mines and the silver from the Nevada mines made this country rich. What's so different about Brazilians trying to make a better life with their labor? I've posted this elsewhere in regards to this popular story. There is a lot more to this story than "illegal" mining. Read about how Brazil sold permits to these miners and then made it illegal to mine their permitted areas. Include some nonsense about how small miners use thousands of dollars of mercury on their hobbled together dredges to mine hundreds of dollars of gold and you've got a new fantasy evil story for the green press.

Does the new pan technology have a Z in it's name?