Clay Diggins

When you encounter a "paper claim" you have the option of making a valid location over it and suing the paper filer in civil court to remove the cloud on your title. You are not guaranteed success because there is a long history of the courts allowing miners a large leeway in the legal process. Essentially it comes down to the senior claimant's intent when you are the junior claimant attempting to remove their title claim. Intent is a very hard thing to prove if the paper filer actually shows up in court. The BLM overstepped their bounds if they told you the claim was void due to a lack of a public record. The Federal government is specifically excluded from making determinations about the validity of the public record or acting, or even commenting, about the strength of one location over another. That's because the very first Mining Act that enabled mining of the public lands did so by declaring that the fact that the land was owned by the U.S. had no part in determining the validity of any claim. The entire mining claims system rests on the foundation of this one simple 1865 law. Here is the entire text of that first mining law: All BLM employees in the minerals and records divisions are instructed in this. (BLM Manual 3833.74) The fact that some weren't paying attention that day or decided Congress didn't mean them is just one more indication of the lax administration of some BLM offices. There is a catch 22 to the process of overfiling and suing. The courts hate claim jumping. Trying to use the courts to eject a senior claimant with paperwork is claim jumping. If you don't prove your case the question arises of your self admitted trespass on a known claim. You certified you made a valuable mineral discovery when you made your location. To make that discovery you had to prospect the senior claim. If you lose the overclaim you are on record admitting to mineral trespass. There can be court sanctions and/or a countersuit awaiting you should you fail in proving the senior claimants lack of intent. That's bad juju and can be very expensive. Think carefully before you attempt an overclaim.

I'm not sure I understand the question LipCa? I'll make an assumption and hope covering some of the facts will help clarify. The law requires either a "Notice of Intent to Hold" or a an "Affidavit of Assessment Work" be Recorded prior to December 31st of each year for every mining claim you intend to hold It is also required that a copy of that Public Record be filed with the State office of the BLM by the same date. Those dates may vary by State but the Federal date can not be exceeded. You will find that and more at 43 U.S. Code § 1744. Recordation of mining claims. This is in addition to any fee requirements. The BLM does not determine the validity of mining claims based on your public record. They do have the right to declare claims "abandoned" should the filing requirements not be met or "void" if the claim was filed on land not open to location. The Public Record you make as required by law is not something the BLM has the power to adjudicate. Only a court of law can do that. The distinction is not subtle. A Public Record (usually made at the County Recorder's office) has a chain of custody, can be Certified and is accepted as evidence without question by a Court of Law. A BLM filing has no chain of custody, can not be Certified and is only an unauthenticated copy of a transaction. As you can see it is entirely possible to have a valid claim that is considered abandoned by the BLM. It happens a lot each year. The BLM changes the status of a mining claim case file to "CLOSED", the decision is challenged, the claim is found to be administratively current and the BLM changes it's case file status back to "ACTIVE". Nothing changed with the actual public record of the claim, only the BLM case file status was affected. It's also possible to have an "ACTIVE" claims case file status with the BLM where no public record has ever been made or the public record is not complete. We see this quite a bit. There is a well known and frequently visited national club claim in California that has been ACTIVE status at the BLM for many years yet there is no public record of the claim. No location notice, no annuals nothing. It's certainly not the only one it just sticks out in my mind at the moment. Mining claim validity is a matter for a court of law - always. There is no federal administrative process that can adjudicate the actual validity of a mining claim. Administrative process can only determine the status with which a claim is to be treated within the administrative system. This two part system of claim validity and administrative status came about because of the BLM's insistence that they didn't have the resources to look up the Public Record for mining claims before making administrative decisions about the Public Lands. They got the right to be notified annually of the status of mining claims in the 1976 Federal Lands Public Management Act (FLPMA). For the 110 years prior to that they and their predecessor had to look in the public record like everyone else. The annual BLM filings are informational only but the BLM is allowed to treat a mining claim as if it doesn't exist if they don't receive the annual notice. It's strictly an administrative requirement but it can, and does, affect your claim's status if you don't comply. The annual Public Record still has to be made under the law. This is a separate matter from the required BLM filing. This isn't hidden - the law I linked to contains both requirements together in the same section. Lack of a public record can not directly be acted on by the BLM but a mining claim is not valid under the law if the annual recording requirement is not met. This may seem like a point with no purpose until you are sued by an adverse claimant, seek investors, claim a right to compensation in court or apply for a patent. At that point you will come to understand why a Certifiable, complete, current public record must still be maintained. I hope that helps?

Minertarian? I never knew... I'll second the motion to nominate Klunker. Great job!

It's that time again. The August 31 deadline to make your required annual mining claims filings is only a month away. As she does every year Ruby has compiled general guidelines and a graphic flow chart to help claim owners understand their annual obligations. If you are confused about the process or just want a refresher review these could help make the process clearer. These are a free PDF download. Feel free to share, distribute or print these out as long as you retain the attribution. General Guidelines Flow Chart Whatever you do don't be late. You will lose your claim if your filings aren't on time.

We see a lot of these situations. It seems the root cause is the ignorance of both the miner and the surface management agency. Put two entities together that don't know what they are doing and are at cross purposes in their agendas and extreme silliness can result. Not so silly once the miner gets the bill but the view from the outside can be incomprehension at how messed up these situations can become. Overreach by surface management agencies has become extreme in many areas. Sometimes these become as disconnected as a Forest Supervisor attempting to ban all mining in "their" forest (can't be done legally). There seems no limit to the arrogance or ignorance of some of these agency actions. But the agencies are not alone in creating these situations. We've seen miners submit plans of operation for stream sluicing by one man with a shovel and in one case a large prospecting club applying for, and receiving , a single blanket plan of operations on all their wet claims across an entire forest. It takes two to tango no matter how clumsy the dancers. I encourage miners to read and understand the laws and follow them, even to the extent of insisting that the surface management agencies comply as well. The law applies to all, it's not really a situation of "just do what the regulator says". Knowing the laws and your rights and responsibilities is just as important of a mining skill as panning or modifying your recovery equipment for best results. In this case the miner was rightly concerned because of the monetary penalty. We often see miners bullied off their claims when there is no penalty but the effort to say no! If you are a claim owner or operator I encourage you to push back when you know you are in the right. Be polite, respectful, business like and calm. Cooperate but educate at the same time. Avoid the phone and email and insist on a paper trail. Ask for explanations at every stage of your dealings and if you get a firm no ask whether the "decision is final". If you don't know what a "final decision" is you need to get more educated before you engage with a surface management agency. This may sound daunting but keep in mind that the odds of you winning a challenge to a surface management agency on a mining decision are right around 80%. Yep the agencies are really that bad at interpreting their duties in managing the surface effects of mining on the public lands. By knowing your rights and responsibilities and helping these agencies to understand their job in relation to mining you are not only keeping your mining plans right but you are paving the way for every responsible miner that deals with these agencies. Sometimes the enemy are us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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