Escaped the bullet with the BLM, Paperwork Options

[leonard]

About 3 weeks ago I received a certified letter from the BLM. It seems they were deeming our 60 acre Arkansas River claim forfeited for "failure to either timely file a maintenance fee waiver or pay the annual assessment". Now we had seen that the claim was not updated on LR2000 but I had gone in to the office in august and they had pulled it up and said it was ok. We now had 30 days to file an appeal. I dug through 15 years of claim paperwork and to my pleasure, I found all of the original paperwork with their notes and date stamps saying we were good to go.

Last thursday I went into Denver with the paperwork and after some head scratching, they found all of their paperwork mis-filed in one of my other claim files. They told me it was a good thing because the day before someone had came in to file on it. They said that the file is pulled a lot by people researching for something to be not proper.

This particular claim is 1 of only 4 that had the paperwork filed and bonds posted to allow dredging on it. We have 3 claims there, about 90 acres worth all permitting us to dredge. Here's a couple of links to 2 of the claims. The first one is the claim that was in dispute.

http://golddredgervideo.com/prospecting/la...10highhopes.wmv
http://golddredgervideo.com/prospecting/laborday2006.wmv

Today I got another certified letter vacating the decision and updating LR2000.

There really aren't any available claims on the Arkansas above Buena Vista and if I were to put a value on the claim, I'd ask around $15,000 and I think it would be easy to get.

Leonard

[swizz]

Wow....
good argument for running an LR2000 report every once in a while. I know that I ran one for my location shortly after I had paid my annual fees last time and it showed up as active. I should run another pretty soon for the heck of it. Need to keep tabs on my neighbors too.
I've heard of there being something like a 30 day grace period from when they notify claim owners of forfeit... not sure if that's true or not.