GhostMiner

Sorry - I had a bad morning. Apologies to Steve.

Claim jumper just sounds so "OLD WEST" LOL.

Thanks Clay. I guess that I misused the term as many do but you clarified it. High Grading would be the appropriate term for me to use on what was happening. We have people taking turns watching the claim for now. We also may have identified the suspect. He will get a good talking to.

Very interesting. We have a number of dumps where the old long toms deposited all the rejects. The old timers lost a lot of gold with the wooden boxes. Might be interesting to have a 2 day event. Maybe i'd catch the detecting bug.

It's the yellow bellied mountain frog in northern Cal. If you have them in a creek you have a problem. They must be protected. The BLM will accept any filing. However, it has to go through adjudication which can take a year or more. That's where a top filing should be caught.

I know nothing about detecting for gold LOL. It would be great to get a group of experienced people out there and see what they find. How deep can you detect a picker? I've got many tons of hand stacked rock that are probably full of them.

Come to our claims. I have 520 acres of them. It's mostly leased but I retain prospector rights on the leases. Bring your crew & just give me 25% of what you find.

It's claim jumpers that are high grading gravels.

That's all I meant to do. Thanks. It is all info I learned over many yrs and hoping to help others avoid costly mistakes.

Where we are at they won't let us do anything involving heavy equipment without a POO. They coctantly invent their own rules as well.

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Its the same pan cleaned up. This is near Jed's dig site and very high grade.

Agree. We are commercial & will resolve the issue. My beef is with the Sheriffs Dept. I am supposed to identify and take stolen property from thieves which should be their job. I can see it now - walking up to a claim jumper with a notepad and asking for his name and address and how much gold did he steel LOL.

Just taking time to explain things to those who don't have any info on this subject. I didn't see anyone else doing that.

I never said I thought there were people here who didn't own claims. My post gave insight as to what I think are valid reasons to either own a claim or not. I posted information which is sorely lacking on this topic. I did it to help others, not be a know it all. If my thoughts are not welcome I will leave.

MAY 13 1836 Today I worked the gravels in a U pattern starting at my new hole and going east into the fault and slowly turning south back towards the kettle. Fractured rock is abundant but I haven't seen a sign of country yet. I've panned some of the dig to test and there is a lack of much color. Somehow I have run completely out of the pay area. There were no good gravels to take down to the tom and this is the first day here with no gold. My theory is to go deeper into the fault and lower the excavation to find country. This will require the most effort i've had to put in since I started. I am convinced there must be a vast amount of gold still trapped in the channel in this area near the played out kettle. The old river must have brought more gold near it. If I can find another pot hole or an area of raised country rock it may prove rich in gold and we will be high on the hog once again. John is a bit discouraged but I am keeping his spirits up and saying look at what we have accomplished so far and surely we will find more. TO BE CONTINUED ......................

Thank you Gerry. I never took any offense & welcome the opportunity to post on this issue. I just posted one of the bad stories we ran into. I suppose the mining business is no different than any other, there are good & bad people. I try to treat everyone as I would want to be treated. I remember being green and learning lessons the hard way at times. Cheers.

Here is one story on what can happen when you buy a claim without doing your homework. A few yrs ago our company made a deal with a guy who had purchased a mining claim from a geologist. The person who purchased the claim was as green as green gets and had a bad case of gold fever. He paid top dollar for the claim and then paid top dolar for a person to put in a Plan of Operation for him. He could have done this himself for nothing with just a little help. Anyway, he had bought $300K worth of equipment to mine with. Problem was he had no crew & owned a business and had little time to mine himself except occasional weekends. So we made a deal to use his equipment for a test on one of our claims after we did a test of his claim. We got there and took a look around. It was the remnants of an old hydraulic operation. We did some research. This claim had been mined on multiple occasions. We couldn't find any virgin gravels, just tailings. We asked him if he tested the claim or did any research? He hadn't - just took the person's word who sold him the claim. I asked if he had even walked up the mountain to take a look at all the old workings & what had been done. He said no. The claim was completely mined out. We ran tailings for him which did have a little gold in them but nothing worth mining and paying your costs with. That's one of many horor stories we run into all the time. Be careful out there.

I'd like to respond to this question as someone who actualy owns mining claims. I know this was posted as a response to my claim jumper post. First of all, this is the first time in all the years of owning claims i've had an issue like this and rest assured we will resolve it. Our claims have 2 creeks on them & we allow panning. We also don't care about the people who come in with detectors digging holes all over the place and never asking permission. They may be digging up pickers or artifacts, I have no way of knowing and couldn't care less because that isn't mining. High grading ounces of gold is and that's why I posted my concern. Anyway, asking whether it's worth owning a mining claim depends on what you are planning on doing with it. If you are just doing recreasional prospecting it may not be worth it. If you are serous about getting gold it may be worth it. When you file a legal claim with the county & BLM you are getting the mineral rights transferred to you by the Federal government who owns them. They are now legally yours as long as you do the yearly filings with the county & BLM. The filings with the county are free but you will need to pay their recording fees each year, The BLM filings can get expensive or they can be cheap depending on the acreage of the claim & what you are doing with the claim or claims. The BLM charges an annual maintenance fee of $165 per 20 acres. So if you own a 40 acre claim that will cost you $330. However, if you are active on your claims working them & improving them then you can file a Small Miners Waiver form. All it requires is that you perform $100 worth of work on your claim each yr. You can price that by the value of anything you put in there as well as the value of your labor. That reduces the annual fee to $15. This is the way the government discourages people who just want to own mining claims and have them sit dormant for yrs. You will also need to pay taxes to the county the claims are in. Our taxes run about $1.15 per acre so it's not a big deal. If you don't do your annual filings the mineral rights will go back to the Federal government. However, since you filed at the county they will still hold you responsible for the taxes until you file a simple one page claim abandonment form with them. Then you are done with the claim. Now what would be good reasons to own mining claims? If you were out prospecting and made a significant discovery that could be worth lots of money you may want to lock in those mineral rights. Another reason is if you want to do a commercial operation to make money from the claims. In my case I am the president of a small gold mining exploration & leasing company. I have partners and investors. We go into old placer mine operations and explore them to see what the potential for mining them again might be. We file formal Plans of Operation with the Forest Service & post a reclamation bond. Then we go in with heavy equipment and explore them by running hundreds of cubic yards of gravels & doing valuations. Sometimes we do it by grab samples or bucket samples in more remote locations. It all depends & every situation is unique. I absolutely love what I do. Exploration to me is more fun than mining which gets monotonous. Once we prove the ground we may do some small scale mining ourselves or lease out the claim to someone who wants to mine it with his own Plan of Operation. We always assist the lessee with that. Those can be done at no cost if you are capable of doing them yourself. If you hire someone to do them it gets expensive. We also lease areas of claims for smaller projects to people who want to work ground without heavy equipment. We never ever lease unproven ground. Period. Before you file a claim, lease a claim, or buy a claim, always test it either yourself or find a prospector who knows what he is doing. I could start another thread on green horns who have gold fever and been taken advantage of. It's sad. So there is no simple answer to this question, it depends on your plan for the claim. In our case we have to own the claims and mineral rights. Hopefully this clears up some of the myth about mining claims and why or why not owning one is a good fit for you. Cheers.

I'd like to take a brief pause & dedicate this song to Jed Stevens & John.

If anyone isn't familier with this mine and claim jumpers and worse you might want to check the miners journal from 1936 i'm posting here called "LOST GOLD AT THE DEAD MAN'S MINE ** A MINERS JOURNAL". I haven't got it all up yet but have been posting entries every day.

This is what they're after.

There is no signal out there.

Anyway, life goes on. Just another thing to deal with I gues.

I normally don't worry about that stuff. We have 2 creeks on the mine and I don't care if people pan as long as they keep it contained to certain areas. But highgrading rich ground where they are taking ounces of gold is something completely different. I guess the only way to stop it is to make sure someone is there most of the time. We may have to get tougher on them and protect our ground. I pay taxes and fees and they don't.