Clay Diggins

This is true of the surface of the land and real estate. The problem comes when dealing with the subsurface estate (minerals). In the western United States it's common for the minerals to be owned by a different entity than the surface owner. Greaterville is a good example. What's known as the 50/50 area in Greaterville are old mining patents where the surface has been reconveyed (given back) to the United States along with half of the subsurface mineral rights retained in private ownership. Since half of the minerals belong to a private party you can't locate a mining claim in those areas even though they are managed and designated as public lands. This situation is very common and it's a major part of the reason your first stop in claims research needs to be the Master Title Plat which is designed to show these "split estate" and mineral ownership status issues.

The first thing to understand is that neither the MLRS nor any of the online claims mapping sites show actual areas under claim. On the Land Matters website we make that clear right on the front of the mining claims maps page. The mining claims represented on these maps are only displayed to the nearest section and DO NOT display the actual claim location. Sections are about one square mile and actual mining claim locations can vary considerably from their mapped location. The only way to determine an actual claim location is to obtain the County Recorder Location Notice and amendments for the claim in question, study the mapped location and then find the location marker on the ground. Members of the public and other prospectors do not have the right to determine whether an existing claim location is valid, only a court of record can make that determination. The next thing to understand is the BLM, Land Matters, Diggings and even the pay services do not rely on mining claim locations to present their information. The information is derived from BLM case files which are not based on current claims information. Besides the normal 90 day + lag in location files and records the BLM itself is years behind on updating these case files in several states. Just last week we ran some rough numbers on what percentage of BLM mining claim case files have never been adjudicated by the BLM beyond acknowledging the receipt of a notice. Adjudication is the simple process the BLM uses to determine if your mining claim location is properly described and located on public lands open to mineral entry. Until a mining claim case is adjudicated the BLM doesn't even know whether there is an actual mining claim associated with the notice they received. Here are state by state those percentages of not yet processed mining claims in a simplified format. 4% - Arizona 53% - California 20% - Colorado 10% - Idaho 1% - Montana and South Dakota* 1% - New Mexico 6% - Nevada 3% - Oregon and Washington* 14% - Utah 9% - Wyoming * These States are administered as a single unit by the BLM. As you can see if you are looking at the MLRS in California the information you are viewing is more than likely years out of date and has a slim chance of being accurate. In fact California is at least 2 years behind on processing claims closures so the numbers you see here just the tip of the administrative backlog iceberg. To varying degrees a similar situation exists in all states. The BLM isn't shy about warning you of this situation. On every file you acquire from the BLM you will find this notice in all capital letters and bold type: NO WARRANTY IS MADE BY BLM FOR USE OF THE DATA FOR PURPOSES NOT INTENDED BY BLM The list above should give you an idea of what purposes the BLM intended. Most County Recorders will update their records within two weeks of receiving location notices or amendments. There are notable exceptions to that standard. In particular in California some of the larger counties are far behind due to being closed to the public for the last year or so. Nonetheless the County Recorder's office is an essential stop on the path to determine public lands open to prospecting. What you are up against here is learning a new set of research skills before you can determine where there is open ground for prospecting. This may seem complex, and it is. Despite what appears to be a modern mess of red tape the fact is that successful professional prospectors in the United States have had to master these skills for more than 150 years. It's actually a lot easier now than it was even 20 years ago. It's just one of the many complex skills prospectors must master to be successful. I do this for a living. I can tell you from experience that there are some basic steps that really need to be accomplished even before you look at the BLM files or the County Public Records. The very first thing you need to do before researching claims in any given area is to study the Master Title Plat (MTP) maintained by the BLM. The Master Title Plat is the definitive map of government interests, ownership and past actions on the public lands. It includes patents, mineral withdrawals and ROWS. It's one of the few government documents you will find that doesn't have the giant BLM disclaimer. You can rely on the MTP to be an official government record. Without viewing and understanding the MTP you will waste a good part of your research and prospecting time investigating lands that you have no right to prospect or claim. Thousands of mining claimants waste their time and money every year staking claims that are invalid and will be classified as CLOSED as soon as your state BLM gets around to adjudicating your location notice. The real message here is that you have a legal duty to determine the status of the land before you put boots on the ground to prospect or locate a mining claim. This is known as due diligence and it's a positive legal duty to avoid trespassing. Not just charges of trespassing against a mining claim but trespass on private property or mineral trespass against the United States is a distinct possibility too if you don't do the research before entering these lands.

I'm pretty sure that was their intent. The MLRS map originally worked that way, sort of, for a little while on the first day it was live. The same information window you see now would pop up but there were links for each claim's serial register page in the map information window. That only lasted about 2-3 hours before the system locked up. When they brought the mapping back several hours later the links were gone and haven't come back since. Hopefully they will eventually bring back a working system. It's not much of an improvement to have a map if you have to switch over to search the database on a different webpage.

Well so much for open mineral lands on the Seward peninsula. The new administration has put a 60 day hold on the opening "for orderly management of the public lands". I guess they were afraid of a big gold rush this month north of the Arctic circle? 😏 I suspect this reopening of mineral lands is headed for cancellation by executive order. Time will tell.

Lands that were patented under the Mining Acts are private lands in all senses of the word. If your county/municipality allows fencing, signs or buildings in your zoning designations you would follow the same process, rules and laws as any other property owner. Virtually all the private land in the western states were acquired by patent from the U.S. Just as a side note the Supreme Court in Iron Silver Mining Co. v. Campbell, 135 U.S. 286 (1890) has ruled that there is no such thing in law as a "patented mining claim". The land ceases to be a mining claim when the patent is granted.

I'll show my stuff Steve. It's anecdotal but true. Leigh and I were ranch managers in the Dragoon mountains. The ranch well didn't produce enough water for the livestock and house so we had to haul about 1,000 gal a week from a neighbor's well. I studied the geology and well logs for the area and determined there probably wasn't enough water under the ranch property to support a good flowing well. Sometimes it's like that. I did find that a 120 acre parcel that was for sale across the road had good access to the aquifer. I suggested the owner consider buying the property for the well and some additional needed grazing land. The owners were into alternative stuff so they decided to try a local dowser to prove the geology was wrong. They ended up using 7 different dowsers from three different states. One from California was "famous". They drilled 6 wells based on the various dowsers different locations. The locations the different dowsers picked were pretty well distributed across the ranch. Long (and expensive) story short. Only three of the wells produced any water at all and the best of them only flowed 1.7 ounces per minute. After a bunch of burned up pumps and a lot of money to the local driller the owner purchased the nearby 120 acres and drilled a well that flowed over 115 gallons per minute when tested. They didn't dowse that well but instead took the advice of the local driller.

The only PDFs of locations and maps will be the new claims that are entered into the online system. It will be awhile before you see any of those new claims on the MLRS. Existing claims won't be included. To make a gulch placer claim your friend will have to locate by metes and bounds and include a statement and topo to the effect that there are no valuable minerals outside of the gulch. He will also have to meet the "Snowflake Fraction Placer" length rule. This isn't new to the MLRS it's been in effect for more than 100 years but with the new system the BLM can block improperly located placers. It's a rare occurrence when the banks and benches of a gulch have no minerals so your friend should do some serious and documented mineral surveying of the banks and benches outside the gulch to support his gulch claim before he stakes, records and files. If there are valuable minerals in the banks and benches he will have to locate by aliquot part like a regular placer,

Anybody notice they renumbered the mining claims?

So true Steve. Even if the most beautiful and comfortable spot is right next to a major highway there is no guarantee it's worth mining. I'm guessing with 9.7 million acres being opened there are a few sweet spots. Those are almost by default going to be claimed by knowledgeable locals. Nothing wrong with that. 👍 As far as "frontier" even modern California is mostly unsurveyed. That's really more about politics than surveying as it is in Alaska.

The Secretary of the Interior is releasing 9.7 million acres of previously closed federally administered Alaskan land to prospecting and claiming. The land rush begins February 18th. Read all about it. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/19/2021-01111/public-land-order-no-7899-partial-revocation-of-public-land-orders-no-5169-5170-5171-5173-5179-5180 Is it cold in Seward in February? 😶

Saddle Mountain has an interesting greenstone exposure on it's southeast slope. Might be worth a look see.

To determine land status in Arizona you will want to use the Land Matters Arizona Land Status map - not the mining claims map. The Arizona Land Status map will provide you with every land status issue with a single click on the map in your area of interest. Not just mining claims and wilderness areas but all land status is presented. It includes withdrawals of all kinds, leases, permits, grazing, ACECs, Surveys, CDIs, mining plans and notices, patents and more than a dozen other status categories. It even presents mineral and surface ownership on forest and state lands which you won't find on the BLM. It truly is all inclusive. The mining claims maps are very popular, many thousands of maps an hour are provided to Land Matters users, but they only feature mining claims. There is a lot more to land status than mining claims and management agencies. For the particular area you are interested in you should probably be aware that the State of Arizona believes some of the minerals on the BLM managed land are owned by them. You can see those areas on the map by turning on the "Arizona State Mineral Ownership" map layer.

Windows 10 still runs on Internet Explorer 11. Edge is just a new interface to Internet Explorer - not a new browser. If you don't like Edge browser on Windows 10 you can just switch to Internet Explorer 11. You don't need to download and install Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 10 because it's already installed. To open Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 10, in the search box on the taskbar, type Internet Explorer, and then select Internet Explorer in the list of results. Legacy equipment might be a little slower than more modern computers but the real problem is the bulk and complexity of Windows 10. Your computer didn't slow down when you installed Windows 10, it's the same speed as it always was. It's just that Windows 10 requires a lot more resources than earlier Windows versions. Forum compatibility is all about which browser you use. The operating system doesn't matter. Older browsers don't handle complex javascript as well. A lot of websites now run on HTML 5 code and some older (and newer) browsers designed for HTML 1.1 don't do well with pure HTML 5 websites. It's up to the website designer to make sure their code will run on older browsers. Backwards compatibility is not that hard to build in but it is extra work.

Under U.S. Copyright law anything created after 1925 is still copyright with very few exceptions. The fact that you can't find the current copyright owner doesn't provide an excuse for using their work. Fair use is in brief pretty well covered by jasong except it's not legal to create a compilation of pictures/videos etc from other peoples work without their permission. The exceptions to copyright include small portions of a copyright work to illustrate a point for educational purposes. Also a work of satire based on an original copyright work is permitted. Small excerpts as a part of a critical review of the whole copyright work is also permitted. There are no exceptions to copyright in a for profit endeavor. If you intend to make money from your work and you use someone else's creation you must get a written rights release from the copyright holder. Copyright is created when the original work is produced. It used to be that a work had to be "published" (seen by someone besides the creator) first but that is no longer true. The law now boils down to "when it's created it's copyright". If the original work is registered with the copyright office an infraction is three times value plus expenses, profits and lawyer and court fees. Always pricey. There is no longer a requirement to label your original work as copyright. It's a very good idea to include a copyright notice and date as well as "all rights reserved" but it's still theft to use someone else's creation without permission outside of the educational/satire/review exceptions. Copyright is a lot more complex than any discussion on a forum can cover. The pre 1964 renewal, pre 1979 notice and a whole bunch of other quirks are built in to a system that has changed a lot over the years. Here's a brief outline that covers more of the subject of fair use (but not all). Written by a guy with thousands of copyrights to enforce. Barry

As Land Matters does every new mining year we are offering for download our annual mining claims flow diagrams and written explanations of the annual BLM mining claim filing requirements. These filing aids have helped many claim owners wade through the BLM filing requirements. These popular PDF handouts are updated for the upcoming 2021 mining year (beginning September 1, 2020). Feel free to share and post these wherever you wish as long as you don't modify them and keep them intact with their copyright notices. Reminder The federal filing deadline this year for all mining claims is Monday August 31, 2020. Download the Free 2020 Annual Federal Mining Claims Filing Requirements

The ICMJ classifieds are free to the public. I don't have a recommendation for a small batch refiner. Several of the gold buyers will pay you for your raw gold in refined bullion but there is little chance that bullion would contain the gold you sent to be refined.

Somebody is still filing and paying on the claim. As far as the federal government is concerned that's adequate to maintain the claim in good standing no matter what the status of the LLC. Whether the claim is valid against subsequent location or not is a matter for the local court of record to decide once there is a dispute over an adverse claim. The BLM and Federal courts can not legally resolve claim ownership disputes between locators. A dispute would require an overclaim and a civil lawsuit being filed by either adverse claimant in county court. As far as determining who presently owns the claim you will need to search the County Recorder records to determine if it has actually been sold. The BLM only tracks claims transfers to obtain current contact information. The failure of a claim owner to inform the BLM of a claim transfer, in and of itself, does not affect the claim case file status or a claim's validity. The very first mining law is still in effect and basically says the federal government can have no role in determining claim rights or ownership as among adverse claimants. Since 1865 it's been up to claim owners to settle their disputes among themselves with their only recourse to an inability to resolve their differences being the local courts.

Land Matters updates claims mapping twice a month when the master public lands database is updated in Denver. The date of the most recent claims update is part of the information returned on any mining claim query so you can always know how current the information is. With two minor exceptions over the last 7 years Land Matters has updated the claims mapping twice each month and within 24 hours of the data becoming available. The Land Matters claims maps do have a link for each claim's serial register page so you can view the most current information available for any particular claim. This feature is unique to Land Matters, other public reports just provide the static claim status at the last bi monthly update. Claims data overall changes little between the twice monthly reports but if there is a change it will be reflected on the linked serial register page. There is no better, more current or more accurate public claims mapping than Land Matters. If that were possible Land Matters would already have changed their update methods. I don't track their updates but it appears the Diggings site is just about as current as Land Matters most of the time. Others, including the pay services, don't generally update as often or as timely. We have good contacts in the BLM and have worked with them to get access to the daily interim database changes. That appears to be logistically (and perhaps politically?) a no go at this time but we do continue to raise this issue along with other projects we coordinate with them. At this point the claims figures for this mining year show these BLM databases are just about as current as in past years. Land Matters will be doing a special report comparing this years claims activity to the last 7 years this fall. That will give us a better idea whether there has been any greater time lag in BLM claims data reporting than in past years as well as a bunch of other interesting metrics. My gut feeling at this point is that there has been very little change in BLM reporting in most states this year with the notable exception of California. The BLM is fully staffed and appears to be keeping up as well as in past years. County Recorders on the other hand are cutting services drastically in some areas. This is puzzling because all of the County Recorders I have dealt with are fully funded and fully staffed with full time employees. There seems to be a new resistance in some counties to providing the public record to the public. In general I've found County Recorders in the past to be very accommodating and helpful. They are elected officials and could easily lose their jobs in the next election should their job performance appear to be lacking. Mining claims information is never "up to date". The locator has 90 days to inform the BLM of their new location and anywhere from 30 to 90 days to make their public record at the County Recorder's. To that you need to add the processing and reporting delay. For most County Recorder's the processing and reporting delay has averaged about two weeks in past years. The BLM on the other hand is slower to update their case files with lag times varying between 15 days and several months (in some cases years) depending on which BLM state office is reporting. Some state BLM offices like Utah and Nevada are pretty good at timely updates. In other states the BLM files are often years out of date, particularly in reporting mining claim case file closures. California BLM is still working on 2018 claim case file closures for example. Generally the most current mining claims information you can expect will be about 100 - 120 days behind the actual monument on the ground of a new claim. That's for the county records only. BLM delay time as noted varies but is almost always longer. There are two public 3rd parties reporting BLM claims update information and about 6 paid services. We all use the same databases but present the information with different lag times, frequency (most paid services update monthly) and context. The vast majority of the twice monthly BLM database update users are securities ratings companies (think S&P), mining companies, oil companies, investment companies and fund managers. A lot of businesses rely on this information for their planning and SEC compliance.

More than 70% of spam comes from the good ol United States. There are many online books and courses in spamming. I can see how a natural slacker down on their luck would hope to make a buck by spamming. Of course in the long run the only one making a buck is the guy you paid to teach you how to spam. There is truly a sucker born every minute. Even though the spamming percentage of return is really low theoretically that can be offset by massive volume. These spam instructional materials put an emphasis on the skills and knowledge needed to pretend to be from Nigeria or Romania to cover your tracks. It's pretty easy to spoof your origination address so this isn't a high tech thing. It wouldn't be very difficult to change the internet protocols to stop this waste of bandwidth and time. Unfortunately sovereign actors use these same loopholes to hack and infect each other so it's impossible to get any consensus on change. I won't make a guess in public about what percentage of internet traffic is generated this way but this side of the internet is really big and much more difficult to track and defend against. Forum spam is a very minor part of the world of spam. Most spam is email advertising and scams. About 45% of all email is spam. About 14.5 billion spam emails are sent every single day. The average return for spammers is about 1 reply for every 12.5 million emails sent. That is a lot of emails but the spammers cost is nothing but their time. They hijack other peoples servers and spam through them. That's a big danger for server operators because they can get blacklisted and shut down for being the "source" of spam. Luckily this forum's software prevents takeovers without the forum owner even being aware of the thousands of server hack attacks per day. Since I run my own servers I see every attempt to hack and takeover those servers. It's not a pretty picture out there.

The Notice of Intent to Hold is a Federal requirement Jim. The Notice of Intent to Hold is not unique or required by any state laws but each state sets out the due date and process for recording this Federal requirement in their state. Federal and state laws require an annual public record be made every year you intend to keep a mining claim. The Notice of Intent to Hold is just one of the several different ways to meet that annual requirement. Which notice is required for your annual record is determined by your circumstances. Even if you pay the BLM maintenance fee a public record still has to be made at the county recorder's office. nvchris outlined when one is required under federal law. Here the scoop for the NOITH process from the BLM Federal regulations. This is different than an NOITO (Notice of Intent to Operate) submitted to the land management agency when you require clarity as to whether your mining operation requires a plan of operation. Two very different Notice of Intents.

Prospecting for gold isn't a new profession. Thousands of years of experience passed down from miner to miner is how we got where we are today. Prospectors were far from ignorant in the time period you stated. Part of the reason is past success had been built on. Part is because beginning more than 400 years ago you could read a book before getting your hands dirty. De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola, published in 1556. Still one of the best. Translated to English by Herbert Hoover our geologist President. 👍 The first school of mining was established in 1765. The Freiberg University of Mining and Technology is still teaching today. Today we have Fists full of Gold. 😉 The beat goes on.

Merry Christmas to All

For miners.

I think "estate" is a legal term/concept lipca. Here's some information from California.