On 6/23/20 4:45 PM, Mike Thompson wrote: > Interesting. I had always assumed that the land that a mining claim > covered continued to be owned by the Federal Government, but that the > claim holder had the right to extract minerals and hopefully an > obligation to pay the Federal Government some royalties if they were > successful.
What happened is some mining claims were mostly exploratory, and often didn't find anything worth extracting. There was a process to convert public land to private land. My documents are from 1903, and signed by President William Harrison. I also have to pay annual rent for my access road from the Forest Service, and do all the road maintainance. This is very common around here in the Rockies. I totally agree about camping issue, but I make personal data files from the USFS landowner data, or County parcel data. I've been climbing in Wyoming, where people greet you with guns if you're in the wrong place... > I know exactly what you are talking about, but apparently it is some > international standard that national forest like areas are called > protected areas and assigned a certain level of protection, even if in > reality they are less protected than if they were privately owned. Something I learned many years ago when I was caretaker of a very large cattle ranch is that unless your no trespassing signs are every 430ft, you can't enforce anything. A jeep club once had a rally in our summer pasture, and destroyed a wetland at 10,000ft in the process, and there was nothing we could do about it. It was on land leased from the Forest Service for grazing. The only protected areas around here are the wilderness areas. - rob - _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging