Clay Diggins

Every year each claim needs to have a public record made at the County Recorder (mining law) and a filing made at the BLM (FLPMA requirement). The first year your Location Notice suffices for your public record and the first year maintenance fee filing at the BLM suffices for your FLPMA filing. The federal mining claims year ends on August 31 so if you located your claim before September 1st you will still have to pay or submit a small miners certificate. If you submitted a small miner's waiver certificate at the BLM before September 1st you will need to record an Notice of Intent to Hold Mining Claim with the County Recorder before your State mandated deadline.* A copy of that Intent to Hold must be filed along with the $10 fee per claim at the BLM State office on or before December 30 of the same year.** * In Nevada it appears that the State recording deadline is November 1st. ** That's December 30th - December 31st is a fail that will lose your claim.

We tend to concentrate on the things that irritate us about our government. That's a healthy attitude for responsible citizens that wish to keep themselves free and their government in check. Sometimes we forget that our government is powered by it's employees. We slip into resenting the very people we employ due to our concentration on the things we don't like about how the government works (or doesn't work) for us. That attitude can be very counterproductive. Ultimately it's those government employees that we rely on to do the right thing. Reviling the people that work for us creates a bad work environment and chases away the good employees that we need so badly to help run our government with intelligence and caring. We work with a lot of different government agencies and I can tell you that the people that work for us are not all bad by a long shot. We have many good employees that are passionate about their professions and good citizens who also want, and work for, a better government. I believe if we are ever to change our government to better serve us we need to recognize and encourage these good employees. Today I would like to introduce you to just one of these exceptional people. In Arizona we are very lucky to have Lee Allison as our Arizona State Geologist. Lee is an extremely intelligent and thoughtful man that has earned a justified respect among his peers. He has changed the office of State Geologist to better serve all of the people. This transformation has been remarkable to observe. This isn't written just to stroke the ego of a friend or business associate. I've never met Lee nor do I owe him a favor or wish a favor from him. My knowledge of Lee is based entirely on the work he has done as State Geologist. You too can see his ideas and writings for yourself at his very active Arizona Geology blog. Here's an example of some recent blog posts that you might find encouraging. Here is an article Lee wrote about some misleading information that came out after the Animas River spill this past summer. Here is another recent article on a similar subject regarding mineral loads in the waters of the west. Particularly important for those readers in the Eastern states so they can understand the natural differences between waters in different areas of the country. Notice that Lee isn't taking any position on pollution or politics he isn't using angry or inflammatory language in his blog he's just offering the facts and clearly explaining how those facts relate to the subject. He's just doing his job but he's doing it in the spirit and with the fairness that we hired him for. We at Land Matters have a similar philosophy. We believe that if all the facts are available to all the people, from a reliable neutral source, they will be more knowledgeable about the land issues we face today and in the future. A knowledgeable people can choose their own course with confidence. Knowledge is power. Educate yourself and prosper. Lee writes on many different Geology subjects. I've learned quite a bit by reading his writings. Give the Arizona Geology blog a read and you are very likely to become more knowledgeable about Geology. I guarantee it won't hurt your prospecting ambitions and you might just come to think as highly of our employee Lee Allison as I have. If so you might consider sending him a short Thank You email. Lee's not just our employee, he's a fellow human being and I believe he should know that we appreciate how well he's doing his job. I hope there are other posters here who will share their experiences with the best of our employees. Lets let them know we support their real efforts to make our lives a little better and richer each day. Let's help continue the legacy of dedicated people in service to the public. Heavy Pans Barry

I appreciate your desire to help your forum users keep their information private Steve. You run a good forum and keep it on track. I for one appreciate your efforts in sharing this resource and your knowledge so freely. Thank you for all you do. How about the ICMJ show next spring. Have they set the dates yet? Good calendar fodder. Barry

I wish! I could use a relaxing moment. It's been a very long few weeks Paul. It's our busiest time of year and I'm already beat. I hear there's going to be another week more fun than this one before the magic Sept. 1 date. Spent most of the day on the phone explaining to mining execs, that make 10 times what I do, where to sign their name and what the date is. The price goes up the third time they call with the same question that's already covered in detail in writing. Good thing they have plenty of money. I'm thinking there is a correlation between aixelsyd dyslexia and successful mining executives? I saw this post and all the stupid funny bottled up over the past few weeks just bubbled out. No offense intended but I find ferrets and tape almost as funny as monkeys and barrels. Say HEY! to BB next time you talk. Tell him if he's nice I'll loan him my Kangaroo Rat. Barry

Ferrets are illegal in California. Like dredges they are everywhere but most folks swear they are just funny looking cats (the ferrets not the dredges). The State goombahs look the other way if you swear it's a funny looking cat but I'm betting if you taped one to your coil the ferret lovers would come out of the ferret closet and try to have you arrested. Here in Arizona ferrets are legal and thus scarce. We usually just tape Kangaroo Rats to our coils but the Minelab junkies make fun if you don't have an official Minelab ferret. I'm not sure there is any difference between the official Minelab ferret and the non-official funny cat looking ferrets. I don't have either a Minelab or a ferrret so I can't give any first hand ferret experience. I use a Bounty Hunter hooked up with litz wire to my dowsing rod and the Kangaroo Rat works just fine. YMMV.

As they do twice each month Land Matters has updated the BLM LR2000 Mining Claims Maps. This is the next to last update before the end of the Federal Mining Claims year. We are working on some graphs and charts to illustrate the number and type of claims made and lost through the year. There is a pattern that changes by state and season that a wise prospector can use to optimize their research efforts. In the meantime enjoy the most up to date mining claims maps available at any price. Barry

Land Matters has offered downloads of all the Historical and current Topographic maps for a while. You can actually pick which year of topo you want for any area as well as the new style layered topos with aerial photo backgrounds. All of that with a few clicks on the Land Matters Topo Search Map. With more than 280,000 topos available from that one interactive map some people have been a little confused on the process for getting any particular Topo map downloaded. We've put together a short video to show you just how easy that can be. There are more informational videos on the Land Matters youtube channel and we have many more planned. Barry

Be careful of the Geocommunicator WMS and REST services. They haven't been updated in a very long time. I don't know how current the hunting maps are but I doubt they reflect the most recent changes either. The Surface Management link you are using above hasn't been updated since 2005. Yep 10 years stale locational information. There have been a lot of changes in those 10 years. At Land Matters we update the Surface Management layers as well as the Mining Claims maps as often as they are updated on the secure BLM back end servers. For the Mining Claims Maps that's on the 1st and 16th of every month. Regular as clockwork. We are working towards a daily update system. For the Surface Management Land Status Maps (and soon Subsurface Management status) it varies. The last update from the BLM on Surface Management boundaries was January of this year. The PLSS (CadNSDI) is being updated approx monthly now. Recently most of those updates are in Oregon and Washington but there are other changes elsewhere fairly regularly. The currency and accuracy of this information is important for anyone visiting the public lands. We do our very best to keep this information up to date. We host and update these constantly changing maps on our own servers rather than relying on stale government presentations. Check out the Land Status maps at Land Matters. There is a lot more there than just mining claims. Barry

The serial register page only locates the claim to the NW quadrant Mitchel. It's a pretty good bet that the small portion of Prichard creek open in the center of the NW quadrant is where that claim is located but we can't know that for sure without getting a copy of the location notice recorded with the county. That's why we provide a link to the County Recorder right on the claims map. There is no way Land Matters, or anyone else, can map claims to their actual boundaries across all those 387,800 active mining claims in the western public land states. We can get you within a half mile and provide the resources for you to get the rest of the answer yourself. Barry

That's all private patented land along the creek except one small portion in the NW of section 28. Not surprisingly that small portion appears to be claimed. The claim name? Gods 20 acres. That took 4 minutes on the Land Matters Idaho Mining Claims map. Turn on the Land Status layer to see what's public land. Turn on the PLSS layer to see what section you are in. Turn on the Aerial Photo layer to see the tailings piles. Click on the map while in "i" mode to get the link to the serial register page for the claim. Bobs yer Uncle. Barry

Thanks jasong, I'm sure you know how much work goes into this so your appreciation is particularly gratifying. We are treating the LR2000 mining claims as individual state databases. Updates can be done on the same basis as they are included in the LR2000. The biggest obstacle is the limited cache on the BLM server but we may have that solved soon. We are hoping to run some php currency scripts that will sync our database with the BLM's. Even though the Denver BLM techies have their hands full maintaining their system they are pretty cooperative if we do the heavy lifting from our end. We use postgis for virtually all of our mapping backend. This allows us to attach a three dimensional location to all the items in our library. The difference between maps and library items is negligible when viewed this way so we are able to search library items from a map or show the location of a library item on the map. You will be seeing a lot more of this implemented as we grow but it's already the basis of most of our maps now. Check out the Topo Search Map to see this working with multiple sources between postgis geom, our Library, and sometimes the USGS, Forest Service and NOAA sites. You can already query the map databases with either guided or boolean searches right from the map. This applies to most map layers, not just the claims database. Use the tool that looks like a pair of binoculars and configure your search terms from the interface or type boolean queries directly in the "Generated Query" box. You can add searches together for more complex queries. Use the little magnifying glass next to each item in the search results window to highlight and zoom to that item on the map or click on the yellow magnifying glass at the bottom of the results window to highlight and zoom to all the returned features. You can do some pretty interesting things with the advanced search functions. Try searching for all the claims with an assessment year of 2014 and you will get a list of all the claims that might still be closed in the future. You can of course search for claimant names and see all the claims someone has in a state or just search for a single claim by name or MC number and then zoom directly to the claim location. We already provide a search map that provides direct downloads of all the Master Title Plats and Supplemental MTPs in the GLO database. You will find those as an individual layer on each state's Land Status Map. At present there are only 10 states in the GLO database but we are working on sourcing MTPs for all the states that have them. We will be adding direct downloads of Historical Indexes, Survey Field Notes, Survey Plats, CDIs and several other features to those Land Status maps as we have the time. Alaska is not in the GLO MTP database but the BLM provides a WMS display of all the MTPs. You can view those MTPs displayed right on the Alaska Claims Map. I hope that answers your questions jasong? Feel free to ask more here or you can Contact Land Matters directly with your questions or suggestions. User feedback is really important to guide the development of Land Matters. Barry

By their calculations the gold in a single "load" amounts to 13 dollars. I figure they are going to have some expenses so I sent them a 10 "load" package and billed them 50 dollars. Sure hope they order more.

All modern digital maps are going to decimal degrees. Base 10 math is much easier than an arbitrary base 360/ base 60/ base 60 system. Even so with modern computers it's trivial to change the display to the system you are most comfortable with. If you are using Google Earth you can change the location display to decimal degrees, degrees minutes seconds, or UTM meters in the preferences. I think you will find deep in your GPS unit settings that you have similar choices there. Usually those are named something like ddmmss or dddddd. Between the two of them you should be able to come up with a way to match their displays. If you are using a Google map product you can put in the Latitude & Longitude coordinates in either form and the software will understand no matter how the coordinates are displayed. 5 decimals in Lat/Lon is going to be about three foot precision. Your maps and your GPS unit just don't have that sort of accuracy. GPS accuracy is reliable to about 30 foot which is the same as 4 decimals. We could easily show 20 decimals on the Land Matters maps but that would be greater than millionths of an inch precision. No mapping or GPS system can come close to that. Displaying the coordinates with greater precision does nothing to increase the accuracy of a map. Even though modern handheld commercial grade GPS can often, under the right conditions, give accurate readings within 3 foot that is not an accuracy you can rely on. Add in the errors for orthographic projection, 40 foot accuracy on the best Topos, 3 meter accuracy on aerial photos and the reality is that mapping rarely exceeds 30 foot accuracy no matter what the display precision is. Google Earth is an interesting, and often informative, way to view a location before putting boots on the ground but the accuracy, particularly with the "terrain" feature enabled, is not within any modern mapping standards. Expecting 5 decimal places of locational precision is wildly optimistic. Counties sometimes are very reluctant to give current plat information. The tax assessor often makes good money selling that information to real estate organizations. The platting systems in use by many counties today are some of the most advanced mapping done by government. Many of them see that as a cash cow. On our MinerDiggins FootPrints North and Middle Fork maps we were able to convince those counties to part with that information so we do have that included on those maps. In some areas of California the costs for access can run many thousands of dollars so that expense and the cost of some County Recorder's record copies can lock us out of mapping those areas ownership. This is a rapidly evolving field and many county assessors are beginning to loosen access to those maps. If they aren't freely available online sometimes a friendly call can get you access. Land Matters, as a non profit organization, can do a little arm twisting (they call this partnering in government speak) and get information for free or little cost. It is part of the long term land status program at Land Matters to provide local ownership information but that is a massive project that will require a major grant. Anybody with a few hundred thousand dollars to spare could get us started on that project. Barry

Thanks for the encouragement everybody! There's lots more to come. I just put up several more State Geology Maps and we are working on displaying Motor Vehicle Use Maps for the Forests soon. Win XP can handle the site tvanwho. Some of the very early versions of Internet Explorer fail when using the Library Search but the maps should be fine. Land Matters is entirely internet based so it will always be slower than FootPrint maps which are running locally on your computer. If you have a slow internet connection the difference can be um... frustrating. The Aerial Photos, on Land Matters, are the highest resolution available to the public. About 40% of the U.S. is 1 foot resolution or better, the rest is three foot. Google uses a gaussian blur overlay to smooth their Aerials, it makes them appear to be smoother and higher resolution but the actual resolution is the same in the U.S. Google does not allow other applications to use their Aerials so if you like theirs better you will have to use their platform. If you are having jumpy navigation it's probably because you aren't waiting for the map to load before making a new request. The map remembers all your requests and loads them in the order you made them. If you get too eager and click twice for the same action the map will see that as a different request and start loading again without waiting for you to see the first request. Also If you have a laptop the trackpad will probably try to zoom in and out if you use two fingers so be sure to avoid touching the trackpad between map requests. Land Matters maps don't have all the tools that FootPrints maps have. They do show your cursor position in decimal degrees at the bottom left of the mapping window and if you need degrees, minutes, seconds you can use the X/Y tool button to see the clicked coordinate position in decimal degrees and degrees, minutes, seconds. Barry

All of the Land Matters BLM LR2000 Mining Claims Maps have been updated! Claims displayed are current as of March 18th 2015. We built a completely new database for these claims maps over the last month. They will be much faster to display and query. The huge Nevada Claims map is now displaying more than 5 times faster. Thanks to Chris Ralph for the suggestion! Your mapping should be much faster now Chris. We update these maps once a month. With some sponsorship we could do it daily. If any of the many exploration geologists that are using these maps are viewing here please Contact Land Matters and let us know what you would like to see in the future. We've heard from several of you and we know there is a need for more complete information. Land Matters was formed to provide easy access to land information. If you are already a user please tell us how we can do our job better. Barry

KML is really just XML that's been tweeked very slightly by the Google children. Being text based it doesn't support true rasters. The row limit is 2048 which is going to be unacceptable to the end user. Less than cartoon quality. If you want to try more complex KML you might consider "super overlays" but even that is extremely limiting. Google wants to maintain control over the base maps and neither the KML format nor their restrictive licensing are going to allow you to get around that without your own server and petabytes of raster data. We could hope that the Minelab MLX format is more than a renamed xml text file but I doubt it. I'll look it over when I get a file sample. Barry

I checked out the Xchange2 software. Not much to it. It's all based on open source software. You should be aware it will automatically update your GPZ software as well as downloading your GPS data and notes each time you start the program. If you don't want your detector automatically updated you will need to avoid the program. The map function is just a pretty? shell around Google maps. Really nothing there that you couldn't get from Google maps alone once you have a converted GPZ file. I agree about the invasive software of Google maps. I don't use them at all for security reasons. Of course I have the option of building my own maps so it's not so hard for me to pass over their offer of "free" mapping. Send the file when you have time. I'm busy tomorrow so next week works. I won't be able to modify the Xchange2 program itself due to the usual license restrictions. I'll see what I can share next week. Barry

I do a lot of coding work with GPS file formats. I'd love to try out this new format. Most of this stuff is surprisingly simple when you dig into it. If someone could send an MLX file to me I could try to develop a simple free program to do the transfers. I'm sure the above method works but it's pretty clunky for the average user. I'm not looking for your secret spot so a file with just a simple local record would be fine. Barry

Each person has to determine their tolerance for anxiety related to unenforceable or unenforced laws or regulations. That always comes down to an individual decision. I certainly don't want to be in the position of telling adults how they must act or think. I share what I know with the hope that with knowledge comes power. Each individual must decide based on their own personal situation how they will deal with these types of situations. Far be it from me to be the judge of their decision but I hope I can help give them enough information to make that decision as fact based as possible. I'm pretty fed up with executive agency overreach and I imagine some of that comes through in my writing. Much like you Steve the vast majority of my encounters with public servants is positive. More than once I've had assistance in stemming that agency overreach from the very people who are the most involved in enforcing bad regulations or policies. One Forest Superintendent in particular was instrumental in helping me change public lands laws for the better at the Congressional level. There are some very good and caring people working for us despite the public perception of an ongoing battle with all public land managers. I believe that education of the public land users will eventually overcome the bad intent of a few public land administrators. Making land management agency employees the enemy cuts us off from the many knowledgeable supporters we already have in those agencies. Manufactured fear or uncertainty plays into the hands of the very people who are not serving us well in the land management agencies. Seeing an enemy where there is none is counterproductive. Assuming bad intent when none has been demonstrated is a disservice to those public servants doing their best for a sometimes ungrateful public. I envision a future where knowledgeable public land users are well served by the laws and their proper application by the agency land managers. There was a time in the not too distant past when we were close to obtaining that ideal. I don't know if that is ultimately possible today but I'm sure as ell going to do my best to bring it about. Rumor and fear are an obstruction to that goal so please forgive me if I bring some passion to my efforts to redirect those rumors and fear to something more useful. Barry

In my recollection Mike the restriction on detecting NRAs generally are created with each NRA. Those "restrictions" are not universal, one can detect with the permission of the Superintendent on the NRAs I'm familiar with. Maybe those restrictions are non existent or absolute on other NRAs - I really couldn't tell you without studying the laws regarding any specific NRA. I left NRAs out of the request for the very reason that the use of detectors there and in National Parks and Historic Sites are controlled by different laws than other public lands. Barry

Gosh guys, I give you the benefit of the little book learning I have and you're thinking I'm not talking about real life too? I reread my post and I can see how you might take it that way so I'll be a little more clear. I read books and I study law but that's not all I do - check out the reality I know of and tell me if you have any first hand experience that contradicts mine. The big example that's bantered around every time someone asks about "relics" and the antiquities laws is Greaterville right? Everybody knows the Forest Service in Greaterville has ticketed detectorists for digging nails and trash - heck hardly anyone is foolish enough to detect Greaterville any more. Well... everybody but Paul and Border Boy. Here's my first hand experience with Greaterville. I know Chris, the Forest Archaeologist, and the enforcement down there pretty well. We lived on the grounds as a caretakers for the FS. A few months after the relic hunting tickets started flying in Greaterville Ruby and I hosted a meeting between the FS and BLM. I asked about the detecting tickets at that meeting. At first no one could figure out what I was talking about so I told them what was being said on the forums. Laughter all around once the story was told. When everybody calmed down I was told that they weren't about to waste their time with writing tickets for detectorists collecting the junk from the last century. Chris stated that if any of the enforcement guys ever tried that he would refuse to testify that any of it was over 100 years old - any prosecution would require his cooperation. The joke is that in Greaterville one of the biggest problems is "history saving" visitors hauling mining trash from the last 130 years up to Kentucky Camp. Almost every day some do-gooder drags in a chunk of pipe, sheet metal or a few bolts. Every year this rusted metal pile of old junk has to be gathered and hauled off to the dump or it would overwhelm the site. Nobody at Greaterville would ever complain about someone collecting a pocket full of metal trash from detecting, they might thank you but they sure aren't going to ticket you. I did follow up with the fellow that claimed he was ticketed at Greaterville. I checked with the FS headquarters and the court. Long story short the whole "I got a ticket for detecting junk in Greaterville" story was made up. It never happened. Now here's the deal, I do study land law and I do make a habit of sharing my understanding of what I've read. I also follow up on the various stories I hear. I'm not afraid to make a few phone calls, pull a few strings and ask straight up questions. Been doing that for a lot of years. I never want to be the guy who believes book learning is the basis of any reality. I have a certain passion for finding where and how our land managers are walking outside the lines we have laid down for them. I not only learn where those lines are but how well they are being observed in "real life". Remember how I wrote that it took 68 years before the government tried anyone for a violation of the Antiquities Act? Things haven't changed much in the 40 years since then. Prosecutions under the Antiquities Act are rare. I haven't been able to find one single ticket written for detecting old settler items over 100 years old anywhere. There may be some but the three I've been told about were all tall stories with no basis in fact. If you know of any tickets or arrests of detectorists hunting non native American objects on the public lands I would love to hear the details. I don't have any interest in those about hunting designated Historical Sites, National Parks or NRAs. I would like to hear first or second hand information that will lead to a copy of a ticket, fine or arrest record. So far no one has been able to produce one. It appears that Forest Service and BLM employees are following the letter of the law. I haven't found a single verifiable circumstance where any district manager has tried to make their own rules or regulations. Real life. I'm not suggesting anyone push any limits or any buttons. Detect within your comfort zone whatever that amounts to for you. I just hate to see folks scared of stuff that isn't real. If you are within your rights and no one is ticketing people for detecting within their rights... the choice is yours. Barry

Your assumption about "What constitutes an archaeological resource is also open to broad interpretation" is incorrect Steve. The Antiquities Act clearly states that only "uniform regulation" can be relied on as a standard for interpretation and enforcement. Congress was very clear about that - they repeated that restriction 7 times in the Act. From the Act itself: Each proposed regulation has to be submitted to both houses of Congress on the same day. From the Antiquities Act: When I refer to the "Antiquities Act" I do include all the amendments including the "Archaelogical Resources Protection Act" as well as the "Galisteo Basin Archaeological Sites Protection Act". The reason why all the regulations are the same everywhere is because the original 1906 Act was declared unenforceable by the Supreme Court the only time a prosecution was attempted (which was in 1974 - 68 years after the law was passed). The reason it was shot down by the Supreme Court was because it was "void for vagueness". Congress fixed that error in the "Archaelogical Resources Protection Act of 1979" by insisting on "uniform regulations" that were not vague nor variable in their application. Same regulations and enforcement everywhere is the law no matter what your local land manager may think. Barry

The Antiquities Act applies to evidence of past human life which are of archaeological interest, as determined under uniform regulations. Even then they must be 100 years or older. Not all objects older than 100 years old are of archaeological interest. The "uniform regulation" part means the local ranger or archies can't make up their own rules. The same regulations apply whether you are in a Forest, National Park, BLM managed land or Wildlife Preserve. Bullets and coins are excepted from the law as well as arrowheads found on the surface. Mining is exempt from enforcement under the Antiquities Act. Real life - The Forest Archaeologists I've spoken to say the stuff near to 100 years is so hard to positively identify as to age that only a fool would testify in court that they were older than 100 years. Rose head and cut nails are still being made and used today. Rusted steel or iron is not an indication of age etc. They all said it's about native American stuff for them. Government bullies and posers may push the issue but most archies just want to be left alone to discover and dig really old sites. Realistically it's a good idea to notify a claim owner before detecting a claimed area. Sure it's legal to beep for relics there but a lot of claim owners believe their claim rights are much greater than they really are. Best to beep without the thought that you might be accosted - justified or not. Rhetorical question arises. How many here would rebury a 12 ounce gold nugget should one be uncovered while searching for "relics"? Barry

Nice looking set Steve! Are these pre tuned or do you need to polish and align the fields yourself?

You may well be right to lack confidence about the continued existence of the small miners Steve. Congress doesn't pay much attention to the detail when budget deals are being made. Something as seemingly small as the few million dollars brought in by eliminating the small miners could be wagered in a larger deal. Luckily this BLM budget wish list has not, and probably never will, make it into the budget deliberations. This is just the the BLM submission to the DOI pile of proposals that, if they survive, are then passed on to the President for consideration as part of the executive budget proposal that is then passed to the congressional budget committee for consideration for inclusion in the actual budget that is then negotiated and voted on by the two houses of Congress. By my count that's five steps to get to a vote. The first step is what we are discussing here. The DOI might pass the proposal to the President if it's not going to PO someone in the party looking to be elected as President. The President might pass it on to Congress if it hasn't already been negotiated away as part of another deal. The budget committee might consider the proposal (or whats left of it) but usually everyone ignores the budget proposals of a lame duck President. And that is why this proposal never makes it to the budget vote. This year might be different but with jockeying for position for the elections and a lame duck executive the odds are slim. I don't doubt that there are many factions that think changing the mining law would give them an advantage. I doubt that could come directly from the BLM wish list. Any change is going to come from another direction, this is just the red herring thrown out there for decades. I do wish miners were more educated about the law making process. Concentrating on the executive is looking 180 degrees the wrong direction. Congress makes law - not the President. A good example is the Defense Appropriations Bill. This is where the annual mining claims fees were raised two years ago. Those Defense Appropriations only have a two year lifetime. Miners could have been lobbying Congress to make sure the fees were not renewed in this past years bill. Instead they are concentrating on a BLM wish list that historically isn't given serious consideration. Just one man's opinion. Barry