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!
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