How to stake a mining claim.

I bet you’re one of the many folks who think “Mining claim?” and picture expensive land deals, property deeds, and so forth. What I bet you didn’t know is that a 20-acre mining claim will cost you a mere $155/yr to own. The General Mining Act of 1872 set the price at $2.50–$5 per acre and hasn’t changed since.

This claim does not give you ownership of the land. It gives you ownership of the mineral rights to that land, courtesy of an annual lease between yourself and the People of the United States of America. What land? Any public domain land that is owned by the federal government that hasn’t been set aside for a specific purpose- you can’t stake a claim on the White House lawn, National Parks or designated wilderness areas. Moreso, there are very few parcels of land in the eastern half of the US that are public domain lands, whereas there are MANY parcels of land in the western half that are public domain.

How do you go about acquiring a mining claim? I’ll give the tl;dr version below:

1. Locate it: Find an area of public land that is not currently claimed. Using a website like thediggings.com can help you with that, and you can confirm with a local BLM field office. Be certain it is not private property.
2. Prospect it: Visit the area of land, dig up some material, pan it and find at least one piece of gold.
3. Stake it: Place a monument in each corner of the claim, labeling the name of the claim. Make sure you are following state regulations on the monument size and material used (Some places don’t let you use PVC pipe, for example).
4. Claim it: File the paperwork with the BLM, describing the area you’re claiming, and enclose the fee of $212 (See breakdown here)

There’s gotta be a trick here…

Nope. It’s really that simple. And it’s also really not that simple. I’ll break down each step a little more in detail below.

Locate it

Public lands are located using the old PLSS, or Public Land Survey System. This pre-dates GPS by quite a bit, as it the groundwork for it was created in 1785 by the Land Ordinance of 1785. What it did was divide up the country into a series of grids. While the PLSS isn’t extremely relevant or necessary to understand during the location phase, it will be incredibly important during the staking and claiming portion.

First, you’ll need to figure out where you can and can’t claim. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to simply find a chunk of land that is either no longer an active claim (closed), or is unclaimed and between a bunch of active claims. The BLM has a tool called LR2000 to help locate active claims. As I mentioned earlier, you can also use websites with better interfaces such as thediggings.com

There’s also a Google Earth plugin called PLSS in Google Earth that can help translate things to GPS coordinates, which are a tad more precise than the PLSS, if you’re not an expert surveyor.

Of course none of this really helps you find gold. That, in itself, is a much deeper question. The easiest way to locate land that will probably have at least some gold is to read the history of gold mining in your area and figure out where gold mining took place before. Gold comes loose from the mountains, washes downstream and is deposited along the way- so it’s not typically a finite resource in a given area- at least not for a small scale miner.

So, you’ve found a spot to claim near a creek or a stream in a nice mountainous area, and you’ve got your map and GPS coordinates. Let’s go prospecting.

Prospect it

Prospecting won’t require much. I’m really serious here. There’s really only one key thing to remember- the rest is honestly just details. Here’s the secret.

Gold is basically the heaviest thing you’re going to find in the ground.

Aside from that one key thing, you’re going to need two basic tools- a gold pan and a shovel or trowel of some kind. Anything outside of that is really just about either maximizing the amount of material you can gather or that you can process in a given period of time.

There’s also a million different types of gold pans out there- most of them are gimmicks, and the only real type of gold pan you need is a basic plastic gold pan with a small set of riffles (ridges) on one end. Green is a good color, as it’ll let you easily distinguish by sight both gold and black sands that typically accompany gold. Black is okay as well.

For a shovel, a simple hand trowel will be fine. Plastic ones are great because they tend to be both tough and cheap to replace.

Okay, you’ve got your tools, you have the single most important piece of knowledge you need- Gold is the heaviest thing you’re going to find in the ground- and you’ve arrived at the area you want to claim. Let’s go find some gold, using that one piece of knowledge. I’m going to assume there’s a creek running through your spot, because it’s easier to explain.

Your creek has a nice curve in it. This is great. Look at the curve. Look at the inside of the curve. See how there’s a nice little gravel bar on the inside of that curve? That’s a good sign. As the water flows around the curve, the heaviest stuff tends to run out of steam and stop flowing, and just kind of drop to the ground. Why? Because on the inside of the curve, the flow decreases, and the deposits of gravel inside the curve help trap those heavy things falling out of the water flow. That’s good news, because gold is the heaviest thing you’re going to find in the ground.

So, cross the water and get to that gravel bar. Now go up to the edge of the water and dig up some material. Dump it in your pan. Now you’re going to pan!

There’s a ton of tutorials on YouTube on how to pan, so I won’t get too detailed outside of the basic description here. I encourage you to watch this guy’s video, because he’s entertaining to watch, and he’s great at explaining the basics.

First, you need to remember: Gold is the heaviest thing you’re going to find in the ground. You’re going to put the pan in some slow or still water, muck around the material with your hand so it washes out the lightest material out into the water and leaves you with “clean” material.

Once you do that, you’ll want to agitate the pan to create liquefaction. Because the gold is the heaviest thing you’re going to find, liquefaction will allow the gold to settle to the bottom of the pan.

Then you’ll angle the pan, so that the bottom corner of the pan is at the lowest point, because gold is the heaviest thing you’re going to find, and gently dip the pan into the water, pulling back and out to let the natural action of the water wash material off of the top of the pan.

You’ll continue this washing action, interspersed with light agitation to settle the gold to the bottom, because gold is the heaviest thing you’re going to find, and eventually you’ll be left with all the heavy things, generally black sand (primarily magnetite), and gold. Do you see a single speck of gold in there? Congratulations, you now have a reason to stake a claim.

Stake it

Alright, so now you’ve gone to the local hardware store and bought four 5-foot stakes to drive into the ground, a sharpie, and a hammer. Go to the northwest corner of your claim. (Note: It doesn’t have to be a rectangular-shaped claim, but this is easier, and the most common claim type). Put a stake in it, and write the name of your claim. Be creative. Call it something like “BIG CHEETO #1”. You’ll have to come back later and attach some documents to that stake.

Drive it a foot into the ground, so four feet are sticking up in the air (CA requires a 4' tall monument; not sure on other states). Now, go due east to the northeast corner, and repeat. Then due south. Then due west. Remember that the general limit on a placer claim is 20 acres for a single individual. I won’t bother describing a placer claim since Wikipedia does it well enough.

That’s it! You’ve staked the claim. Now you’ll have to make this official with the BLM, and pay the government some money.

Claim it

Here’s where you learn that the PLSS is shit, it’s used by basically everything in the US to describe land and property (with a few exceptions, like the land purchased from the French that’s described even more archaically), and you’ll need to use these archaic terms to describe your claim.

The BLM has claim packets for many states, but not all, and the only one I can reliably find with Google is the Colorado packet. Most of it is applicable, so I’ll reference it here.

Basically you’re going to fill out a form in which you describe the area that you’re claiming the mineral rights for, using PLSS terminology, in text. It turns out that it’s actually difficult to do this, or at least it’s somewhat difficult. It’s archaic, like Shakespeare, but not nearly as beautiful to read.

The PLSS terms you’ll need to know are:

1. Meridians
2. Townships
3. Ranges
4. Aliquot Parts
5. Cardinal Directions

The PLSS divides the country into primary sections using meridians running North-South that are given a name. For example, the Mt. Diablo Meridian. Inside of that area defined by a meridian are townships. These are giant squares that contain many acres of land, and don’t relate necessarily to a specific town, especially since towns are dictated by geography and size, not by arbitrary straight lines drawn on a curved globe. (Sorry, flat-earthers).

Inside a township, things are further broken down into a smaller grid of ranges that run East-West, then aliquot parts described by cardinal directions. Everything is numbered. Here’s an example of a real form filled out for Arizona. Here’s an empty form for California- note the differences, but similarities.

So, you’ll describe your claim on the form like this:

4.Placer mining claim IS IN an area where there is a U.S. Public Land Survey and the description of the claim by legal subdivision including aliquot part (A.P.) of section (such as E1/2NE1/4NE1/4), Section (Sec.), Township (T.), Range (R.) and Meridian (Mer.),is as follows:

A.P. E 1/2 of the SE 1/4 of the NE 1/4 Sec. 3 T. 34 R. 6 Mer. Mt. Diablo

But what the hell does that mean?

What this means is, in Township 34, Range 6 crossing the Mt. Diablo Meridian, you’re claiming mineral rights to the eastern half of the southeast quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 3. Since a section is 320 acres, and you can only claim 20 acres, you’re identifying the northeast quarter (160 acres), and further identifying that you’re talking about the southeast quarter of that quarter of a section (40 acres), and further clarifying it’s the eastern half of that (20 acres).

File with the county recorder for the land you’re claiming mineral rights on, and file with the BLM. Pay your filing fees and you’re done.

Go get some gold.