Grizz12
Sr. Member
- #1
Thread Owner
My buddy and I picked up 4 placer claims last year (we live in Alaska), all on one creek, 100 acres total and run the length of the creek which is about 1.25 miles. We all have full time jobs, medical appointments (yeah getting old sucks!!), gardens, its a 2.5 hour drive (one way) and other personal stuff going on which prevents us from being anything more than recreational, hobbyist prospectors.
The land is BLM/National Forest. The NF regs state no one can camp on "their" land for more than 14 days and no motorized vehicles without a notice of intent. The only area that is drivable is about 100' at the very beginning of the claims. Last year we were busy staking and didnt have much free time to work any of the claims so it wasnt an issue we thought about.
So we met up with the forest service people with a letter stating that our needs are to set up tents onsite so we dont need to spend half day setting up and another half day tearing down when we only have a few free days in our busy schedules. We also mentioned we would like to drive about 100' into the area to make loading/unloading easier and have a place to park or turnaround.
She handed us the Notice of Intent form which, in our eyes, was based around a full scale mining operation. We tried to explain that were are recreational prospector guys running up there in our free time, NOT big scale miners tearing everything up to pay our bills. Her tone of voice was as if were were criminals, asking about our equipment, how many holes we will dig while detecting, where we would we digging, if we plan on reacclimating the holes we dredge out in the creek, etc...
So my question to you guys/gals is have any of you gone through this before? Did we miss something? is this normal?
The land is BLM/National Forest. The NF regs state no one can camp on "their" land for more than 14 days and no motorized vehicles without a notice of intent. The only area that is drivable is about 100' at the very beginning of the claims. Last year we were busy staking and didnt have much free time to work any of the claims so it wasnt an issue we thought about.
So we met up with the forest service people with a letter stating that our needs are to set up tents onsite so we dont need to spend half day setting up and another half day tearing down when we only have a few free days in our busy schedules. We also mentioned we would like to drive about 100' into the area to make loading/unloading easier and have a place to park or turnaround.
She handed us the Notice of Intent form which, in our eyes, was based around a full scale mining operation. We tried to explain that were are recreational prospector guys running up there in our free time, NOT big scale miners tearing everything up to pay our bills. Her tone of voice was as if were were criminals, asking about our equipment, how many holes we will dig while detecting, where we would we digging, if we plan on reacclimating the holes we dredge out in the creek, etc...
So my question to you guys/gals is have any of you gone through this before? Did we miss something? is this normal?
