Mining Claim Frustration

[n01d3x]

So I have been trying to get my own claim for a few months now, since last summer. I started off having 0 clue as to what to do. I found that the area that my friend taught me how to pan in last summer was open. After help from this forum and mylandmatters I started to get somewhat of an idea as to what needed to be done. I planned to go mark it out in the next few weeks, so I went back to mylandmatters. Sure enough, some company that just stakes claims and sells them, staked not only the area I wanted, but the 60 acres all around it. I found their website and it is now listed for sale for $8500. I get that what they are doing is smart, but that just rubs me the wrong way. Seems a bit shady to stake a claim with 0 intent on doing anything but sell it. I live in gold country so I guess I should've expected this stuff to go on, either way totally bums me out......

 

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[Goldfleks]

It might just be paper staked. Did they put up the claim monuments. Also, when was the claim filed? I believe it's illegal to stake a claim for the sole purpose of selling it. So if they recently staked the claim and it's FOR SALE, you might have a case to fight it.

I dunno. Just food for thought.

 

[n01d3x]

They located it last September, filed the rest of the paper work in October. I'm not for sure when it was put up for sale, but with the winter we've had here in Norcal, and the area it's located in, I highly doubt they have spent much time there if any. I don't know if it's marked or not, I'm going to try and get down there once the weather becomes a little more predictable. I have a feeling they will let it go at the end of the year anyway. I doubt anyone is going to pay $8500 for this claim. The only access is a dirt road, then about a mile or two of switchback single track trail down a steep canyon.

 

[MadMarshall]

Just be persistent. its just the way it is. nothing you can do about it. just be persistent and hold yourself to a higher standard. Plenty of shady people in the mining community. Between people who stake claims just to sell and those who stake them for recreational use; Makes it hard for an individual who actually wishes to make a meager living mining. But anyway just the way it is I suppose. good luck..

 

[Bejay]

It might just be paper staked. Did they put up the claim monuments. Also, when was the claim filed? I believe it's illegal to stake a claim for the sole purpose of selling it. So if they recently staked the claim and it's FOR SALE, you might have a case to fight it.

I dunno. Just food for thought.

BLM Phoenix Az has a dept./ staff that deals with such issues. Locating a claim merely for resale is frowned upon and may void the claim if proven the locator(s) have done so. It might not hurt to send BLM Phoenix a letter raising the question....as BLM Phoenix Az is the (what you might call) the head corporate office for all other regional BLM offices.....dealing with claims of locatables. You say it is a company that stakes claims merely for resale. Justify your statement in a letter. I don't see any harm in raising the question if done so properly avoiding slander etc.

Bejay

Bejay

 

[Goldwasher]

I bought what may be my last ICMJ the other day. I don't like to stand at the Placerville Newstand and just read it.

It had an MMAC article and I was drooling to read the whole thing ....I assure you.

Right in the "ask the experts" section. The "expert" perfectly fine for a person to buy a claim with the thought he/they may sell it one day. I don't know if he worded it that way to relieve guilt or because he doesn't care about integrity. That train of though and the MMAC article is shameful and shameless.

Barry how is Chris R on all this MMAC stuff . I don't expect you to speak for him so, rhetorical question I guess. But, jeez in the mining Journal.

On the face of it I back any ol' boy with a claim that decides to let an association use his claim that he did file because it had a deposit, he intents to keep it in his name, He is " within the law"

There's not much you can do. But, complain or join

Claim flippers should be dealt with it would be nice for now you would have to initiate the civil challenge.

Or if you think you have all the info. Like no monument FOR SURE or if you know say they are recording at the county and not blm to save the maint. fee's
That takes time and timing.
Though if you feel certain that it is an invalid claim you can locate your own and wait to be challenged. Don't do that unless you plan on winning.

RUN RUN RUN away from the names Rienke or Hudec and the "company" Gold Rush Expeditions. Though for the first two watch their claims as the mistakes they make can be in your favor. As long as you haven't given them money that is.

I do wish clubs took the lead on helping their members with land status training. as well as mining law. Seems that true knowledge tends to leave them or never even join.
I know numerous guys that joined clubs and left when they didn't need them anymore. Bummer for clubs. Oh well.

no13dx There is a lot of open ground out there.

Shoot me a pm if you ever need help, info or double checking on anything. I'm in the Mother lode I can help you out. Otherwise good luck out there.

 

[IMAUDIGGER]

It might just be paper staked. Did they put up the claim monuments. Also, when was the claim filed? I believe it's illegal to stake a claim for the sole purpose of selling it. So if they recently staked the claim and it's FOR SALE, you might have a case to fight it.

I dunno. Just food for thought.

I'm pretty sure people have been staking claims in hopes of one day getting rich mining or selling them...well - since before 1872!
What has changed? --> Recreational mining.

Most people use mining claims to get out of the city, tailgate picnic and enjoy the outdoors while finding a little color.

Do you suppose that is what Congress envisioned when the mining laws were enacted? It was supposed to generate wealth and make our country prosper. Take nothing and make it into something.

There is an amazing amount of gold bearing public land that is not claimed, especially load claims. Ya the previously rich creeks and rivers are pretty well claimed up...lots and lots of draws/gullys/ridges out there waiting to have gold extracted from them.

 

[Bejay]

Locating and having, and working mining claims and later at some later date selling them is fine. Many miners do it if the miner makes a better discovery and wants to stay under the 10 claim maint waiver rule or the miner decides he can locate a better claim and or he may simply decide he has more to do than he has time or effort to do with another claim he has. Nothing wrong with selling a claim if it is a VALID located claim. Part of that validness is in fact making discovery.

Bejay

 

[Bejay]

Note!

The Supreme Court has ruled that only the "trier of fact" can declare a claim invalid. That would be a judge or magistrate.

The BLM only has Active and Closed case files. They have no legal duty or right to determine if claims are valid if the land status is open to claim at the time of location.

Getting legal advice from the BLM is about as useful as asking your plumber about your medical condition.

You can make an adverse claim and sue the senior locators but the courts are historically very lenient about paperwork mistakes when it comes to mineral claims. You would probably lose if your only complaint is that annual county recordings are missing. If the courts decide against you in an adverse claim it could leave you open to charges of felony mineral trespass by the original locator.

Bejay

 

[Goldwasher]

i know you can sell your claim. My concern was the way the 'expert" worded it in a response to an online claim scam. While warning about people who inflate value with claim info and facts.

He could have mentioned that someone who locates with the "intent" to sell. I.E a claim that is located and posted for sale almost immediately is misusing mining
law. I would expect a good judge would look at such a thing. Though to to common practice and culture in the current mining claim world good luck.

Question. Isn't the "senior" locator the person who actually has the first "valid" location. Not necesarily the first locator?

 

[Bejay]

That is a very good question. The only resolve pertaining to adverse claims is via the courts....as so stated in the 1872 Mining Law. So "valid" is determined (not by BLM.....which is only an agency assigned to see that work/maint fees are done) ....(BLM is not a "record keeping agency", but merely "a file keeping agency"). States actually determine the necessary logistical maneuvers for locations....and the record is kept at the Land Office (County Recorder).

You are correct in "senior position". But adverse claim issues can only be resolved by the courts!

Bejay

 

[Johnnybravo300]

Happens alot here in Colorado. Lots of claim flipping by the same two people usually. A Mr cyros and a Mr Weiss. They don't even look for deposits to file a claim. They just file randomly around known mining areas. All their claims are listed on eBay for the suckers haha. Don't be a sucker.

 

[n01d3x]

Thanks for all of the info. I was just venting. After further investigation this company has a lot of claims and they all go up for sell shortly after they file. I will not be going after them or anything, just sucks is all. As I said, I highly doubt anyone will buy it and it will be available as soon as their fees are due. I'll wait.

 

[Bejay]

While your venting is a means of dealing with frustration it does in fact raise valid questions often confronting miners today. Most often we small scale miners think that: "Oh Well this is not something that I need to address", I have personally fell victim to that line of thinking myself. BUT!........if a person is in the small scale mining game long enough (me almost 40 years now)....sooner or later one is confronted with such issues. So again it is easy to title and copy info provided in such forum talk.

Such frustrations I have often been confronted with and attempted to learn how to resolve them as best I can!

Bejay

 

[deserdog]

In CA there are a lot of claims with able, preferred by a letter. They fall under the category of staked just to sell

 

[Tuolumne]

wait wouldnt he have a standing if the area was just paper claimed and no monument or corners staked and documented?

If the area has no proper survey in past, there needs to be corners marked right?

Cant he bring that to the court? how would that play out?

 

[Clay Diggins]

It's perfectly legal to claim a mineral deposit and sell the rights to the minerals. That could be a lease, rental or sale of the entire claim. It's the basis of modern mining.

• An exploration geologist (prospector) puts in the work to find a promising deposit and claims it.
• They show the results of their prospecting discovery and a junior mining company comes along and pays them lease money or buys the deposit rights.
• The junior mining company risks investors money to develop a paying mine.
• If the deposit proves itself profitable a major mining company might buy and develop the deposit and mine it for years.

That's modern mining in a nutshell. It's all about business, you know - making money. If you study the above described system you will see there is lots of money to be made for everyone when things go right. There is also a good chance that most prospects will never play out. High risk = high reward. It's a risky business for everyone involved. The more you know and the better you are at your job the less the risk.

In this system, developed over thousands of years, the risk (and reward) is distributed across several groups of people with different skills. Prospectors aren't good at running world class mines and major mining companies suck at prospecting. Everyone applies their skills where they are most effective and sell or lease their mineral rights to the next step up in the process.

Risk management is the name of the game when mining. The United States recognized early on that if they could help lower the risk for the mining process miners would be more successful, there would be more money in the system and everyone could benefit even if they weren't involved in mining. The way they lowered the mining risk was to give the miners the valuable minerals they discovered. That's a heck of an incentive to go find a good mineral deposit. That plan worked and because of the lowered risk the United States went from being one of the poorest nations on earth to being the richest and most powerful. Even today the United States is the third largest mining nation on earth and it's still considered to be the lowest risk nation to mine in.

There is no requirement that the original prospector prove the mineral deposit before they can sell rights to the minerals. The less work the prospector has to do to sell the minerals the more profit they can make. As long as the prospector follows the rather simple procedures to locate, claim and maintain their rights to the minerals they may do as they wish with the deposit. There is no requirement to mine or develop their mineral rights whatsoever.

Notice that what I'm writing about here is the right to sell, develop, lease or rent mineral deposits. That's because a mining claim is all about ownership of the minerals. It's not about land or titles to land it's about the minerals. I started this by writing "It's perfectly legal to claim a mineral deposit and sell the rights to the minerals". Notice I didn't write it's legal to make a claim just to sell the claim. The whole intent behid the right to make a mining claim is to encourage the development of the mineral wealth held by the public. The claim is the minerals. You can sell a claim to transfer the mineral rights but you don't have a right to make claims just to sell the claim right.

This goes directly to intent. If you intend to make a claim so you can turn around and sell the claim you are violating the law. If you make a claim so you can turn around and sell the mineral rights you are well within the legal purposes for a mining claim. Any bar room lawyer can tell you the hardest thing to prove is intent. The United States has prosecuted many people through the last 140 years for flipping claims but only when the flippers were so blatant that they essentially admitted they were flipping claims with no interest in the minerals. They made it clear in public that they were filipping claims for the single purpose of fleecing suckers with a "mining" scam.

So what the heck does all this have to do with n01d3x having someone else claim the spot he wanted? I don't know who claimed his spot. It sounds like they might be claims mongers but they could also be a small mining group trying to get enough minerals to have a salable project. The fact of the matter is we can't know, much less prove, the senior claimants intent. Even if we did think we could prove their intent there is the simple matter that n01d3x seems to have found the area to have valuable minerals. That alone is enough for the senior claimants to justify claiming the area. It's a catch 22 situation for n01d3x, he can't assume the locators made that claim just to flip it because he has already established that they might be making the claim for the valuable minerals he found there.

I know some of you are thinking that since this company is known for flipping claims that should be enough to show that is why they made this claim. That assumption goes to the heart of one of the biggest misunderstandings about mineral rights:

Legally each claim and each claimant by law must stand on their own right to the minerals. While one claim might be found to be made for illegal purposes another claim right next to it made by the same person at the same time might be perfectly valid. This happens all the time. In one of the best known claim challenges of this type 100s of claims in Kern County were challenged by the BLM because the claimant was a known flipper running a mining scam. The end result is that most, but not all, of the claims were found invalid by the court. Those claims that could be proven to have mineral potential were spared even though the same sales tactics were used to sell rights to those claims.

Remember - in the end it's all about the minerals. The right to a location and it's validity all revolves on whether there is a valuable mineral deposit. By his own reckoning n01d3x has established that the claim in question could have been made for the valuable minerals. Although the intent of the locator is suspicious you will find that suspicion and the price of a drink for a bar room lawyer will get you a big NO for any chance of the BLM voiding the senior locators claim because he has it for sale.

There is a lot of land open to location with a good potential to find a valuable mineral deposit. Keep prospecting those lands and if you work smart and stick to it you will find a good location - or three or four. It's still out there go get u sum!

Heavy Pans

 

[n01d3x]

Great info as always Clay, that makes a lot of sense. However that pretty much makes every river or stream in gold country open to claim flipping. At some point there has been some amount of gold found all over the place here. You can pretty much take a pan, spend a day on any drainage here and you'll find something and I'm pretty sure everyone knows that. It seems to win a case like this one would have to prove a negative. One would have to prove that there are no valuable minerals on the land in question. That would make it seem like it could only protect people getting scammed into buying claims that have nothing on them. I thought I read somewhere though that simply knowing there is gold there or finding a little in a pan does not amount to a discovery. And I thought there had to be a discovery made in order to stake a claim. Also, how do old claims play into that. I am sure this area has been claimed at some point in time in history. Would that automatically mean that a discovery was at least implied?

 

[Clay Diggins]

Great info as always Clay, that makes a lot of sense. However that pretty much makes every river or stream in gold country open to claim flipping. At some point there has been some amount of gold found all over the place here. You can pretty much take a pan, spend a day on any drainage here and you'll find something and I'm pretty sure everyone knows that. It seems to win a case like this one would have to prove a negative. One would have to prove that there are no valuable minerals on the land in question. That would make it seem like it could only protect people getting scammed into buying claims that have nothing on them. I thought I read somewhere though that simply knowing there is gold there or finding a little in a pan does not amount to a discovery. And I thought there had to be a discovery made in order to stake a claim. Also, how do old claims play into that. I am sure this area has been claimed at some point in time in history. Would that automatically mean that a discovery was at least implied?

Sounds like you understand the issues now.

The simple fact is you can't sue another claim owner over the validity of his discovery. In the United States that would be a civil case and since you can not establish you have been harmed by a senior locator making a claim you have no valid cause of action in any civil court. Your suit would be thrown out for lack of standing.

The United States (BLM) can challenge the validity of the discovery but in your own post you admit that just about everywhere around there has at least some valuable minerals. Even if the United States did sue the result if they won would be non-mineral lands that you couldn't claim.

You could initiate a private contest with the BLM but then you would be paying your own hard earned money in unlimited amounts to have the BLM prove that you can't make a claim there.
The BLM isn't required to pursue a private contest but you could apply. Private contests can take years, millions of dollars and rarely work to the advantage of the one paying for the challenge. Here's an ongoing example (PDF) that will probably go badly for the person footing the bills. It's been 7 years now and the bill is getting bigger every year.

A mining claim is a claim of right for valuable minerals. It's virtually impossible for either the government or a private individual to remove a valid claim once it has been located. Barring fraud or hard evidence of no minerals it's really up to the claimant when they will relinquish the claim. Short of wishing the senior claimant would either abandon the claim or miss a required filing your best bet is to move on to new ground and keep doing what a prospector does - prospect for paying ground open to location.

Mining claims are a self initiated grant to discovered valuable minerals. Each claim and each case is unique by law. It is the last of the self initiated grants - the rest of the grants for public lands, waters, roads etc. were eliminated with the passage of the FLPMA in 1976. Being a self initiated grant it is unique in law, forget everything you thought you knew about law and justice. The mining grants are more powerful and supersede most other laws and agency regulations. That's powerful stuff and one of the last bastions of the American flavor of freedom.

If you can understand the essence of that power you will then understand why the most onery, cantankerous and smelly prospector becomes the master of his own mineral domain when he makes a claim. By law, tradition and honor challenging another man's mineral domain is a big no no. There is a lot of suspicious and downright dirty dealings with mining claims but ultimately your objective as a prospector is to find paying mineral ground of your own. That could be a thing of the past if even miners can't honor the law and tradition of the mineral grant.

Respect your fellow prospector's claims and we all come out ahead. Disrespect or challenge those claims and you justify the public view that those mineral claims are no more secure than the next lawsuit or regulation. If we can't support one another's right to claim valuable minerals for ourselves we certainly can't expect the public to respect that grant either.

There is plenty of good paying ground to claim. As a nation we are blessed with abundant mineral resources. In a huge study done in the 1960's the State of California determined that approximately 60% of the Tertiary gravels gold was still in the ground. It's still out there and there is more than enough for everyone willing to dig for it.

Heavy Pans

 

[mytimetoshine]

Well I'm sure that ground has been claimed and unclaimed for 160 years.. I don't worry about it. The people that claimed it will either not be able to sell it for a profit or the person that buys it won't mine it and then let the claim go. I know they won't mine it beacuse it made know sense to buy it in the first place. Buying a claim is easy mining is not.. they quit everytime 😃

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