E-Bay lists 26 mining claims for sale. They are cheap: $3,495 for 160 acres near Jacksonville, Oregon where you can “hunt, fish, hike, ride horses, dredge, or invest”. With 20 hours left to bid, and 19 bids in already, you are going to have to hustle to get this prime piece of property.
For a mere $260 you can own five acres near Prescott, Arizona where you can “ATV and Hike.” With only a day left to bid against the other 21 bidders, you really will have to hurry.
If you don’t care to bid, just contact The Claim Post. They have some beautiful places for sale.
I must be stupid. I thought mining claims were for mining! But to judge from E-Bay, you don’t actually mine on the claim; you recreate. How does this work? Have I been missing a golden opportunity to get my own piece of perfection by kind favor of the 1872 mining law?
There is no end of sites on the web that tell you how to stake a claim, but none that I could find telling you how to get an E-Bay bonanza simply for recreational purposes. I think I will have to consult with my friendly Landmen in Laguna Beach, California. She will know how to do it, including getting around these restrictions as described on eSSORTMENT:
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Once you identify a site, you must literally stake your claim by erecting corner posts or monuments and posting a notice of location on a post or monument in a conspicuous place, normally the site of discovery. Claims must be recorded with the Bureau of Land Management state office. There are no official forms and the claim must simply describe the parcel of ground, indicate ownership, identify the location and type of claim and be dated. There is a $10 filing fee and a $25 location fee. Also due at the time of the claim is the first annual $100 maintenance fee, the calendar year of which runs from September 1 to September 1. The total due per claim is $135. Once a mining claim has been approved the claimant gains the right to develop and extract minerals. No other use of the land is permissible. In the pursuit of minerals the claimant can construct fences, build houses for full-time employees, and use as much timber as is necessary for the mining operation. Mining claims are considered real property and as such can be bought, sold, transferred, leased, rented, willed or inherited.
My local colleague told me all I have to do is pan for gold in the creek occassionally. With a good beer, I can do that. Afterall, as long as I am in pursuit of minerals, I can construct fences and cabins.
Seems though as though I am not the only one looking to get a cheap bit of the countryside for the cost of an occasional dip in the river with a pan. The Canadian Press reports today that claims on U.S. Western federal lands have jumped by 80 percent in the past four and half years. There were 376,493 claims in July of this year. 1,053 claims are near national parks, including: Grand Canyon; Canyonlands; Capitol Reef; and Yellowstone. Those claimants know beautiful country when they see it.
I mean with all those uranium deposits in Canada and Australia, it is difficult to believe that the U.S. really will need to mine uranium from even one of the 32,000 uranium claims made in 2006 in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. No way; it must surely be people with SUVs looking to get in on a cheap country-get-away scheme via e-Bay and the 1872 law before somebody notices and changes the law.
If you have recently won an e-Bay bid for a claim over a lovely property and are now enjoyng the fruits of your bid, let me know how it works. I will be in California only in November to see my lady Landman, and by then all the best places will be gone, or worse they will have changed the law.
The good news is that I don’t think that all the new claims portend new mines near national parks. I believe all those claims near national parks simply reflect the desire of every red-blooded SUV to have land in a nice part of the country. At most they will “mine” with a pan or a prayer.
