Location Certificates, Claim Jumper Options

[Gold Hill Miner]

I have a mess. BLM did a meets and bounds survey in my area and changed my property lines after 150 years. I have been on the same claims for over 26 years. In the last year I have uncovered every original property marker according to my deeds from the 1800's. Someone intentionally obliterated all of them. Now that same person is trying to prevent me from getting any corrections with violence. BLM recorded no evidence of almost all of them in their survey in 2003. They reset markers. After a year and a half of trying to figure out what happened I realized I just had to prove my shafts and tunnels to the mines have not moved. I own 3 seperate pieces of property. On 2 of those properties I own the mineral rights and the surface rights. On one I own all the mineral rights and only some of the surface rights. If I fix the one with the partial surface rights all the rest will fall back into place. My question is, do I just need the location certificates to get BLM to make the correction. Surveyors say" BLM changed your property lines now live with it." No one will pay any attention to the mine shafts and tunnels which I do not understand. The claim jumping started around 2001. I would not have noticed but the whole area burned in the Fourmile Fire including my home and all my land. When I came home to rebuild my lines had moved. In Boulder County you can encroach on someones land for 18 years and then it is yours. The fire happened only 10 years after the encroachment started. The claim jumper figured I would never know. I still have time to fix this. Boulder County had the location certificates and everything measures correctly according to the certificates and plats according to my property description. Do I need new ones? BLM has now given the claim jumper our property without verifying the shafts, tunnels and location certificates. The claim jumper had 4 structures in trespass on one claim and moved his property lines so he would not have to purchase his trespass issues. No one at Boulder county will help and BLM wants me to file a protest against their 2003 meets and bounds survey. BLM also pinned my horseshoe pit pins almost 100' away from the real line. Help! Even lawyers want me to file quiet title actions in federal court. BLM says they have no money to fix anything and I am just getting a run around.

[Gene Kooper]

Hi Gold Hill Miner,

I've read through this thread and have some ideas that may be of help in resolving your problem. I found the BLM's dependent resurvey field notes that I believe includes your mining properties. They are available online at www.glorecords.blm.gov and can be downloaded as a PDF file for no fee. If you don't want to disclose the actual claims for privacy reasons, we can discuss some options in general terms. As you mentioned above, the BLM conducted this dependent resurvey in order to delineate the gaps and gores between patented mineral surveys that are still part of the Public Lands. Through the statutory authority given to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, the Colorado BLM is delegated the task of determining the boundaries of the Public Lands within the State of Colorado.

In this case, your options to correct the 2003 dependent resurvey are restricted. An affected party may file a protest with the BLM, challenging the results of a dependent resurvey that they believe has failed to retrace and reestablish the original surveyed lines. If you had protested the survey prior to the filing of the plat, your burden of proof would have been to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the dependent resurvey was not an accurate retracement and reestablishment of the original survey. Since the survey has long ago been approved and filed, your protest will need to meet the burden of proof by a preponderance of the evidence that the resurvey was either fraudulent or grossly in error.

I realize that this doesn't seem fair, but if you can demonstrate that the boundaries of your claims do not match the mining improvements on your properties by 100 feet, the BLM may regard the lines that they reestablished in the 2003 dependent resurvey meet the "gross error" threshold.

I am a licensed land surveyor and worked on a project near Eldora where a 1943 dependent resurvey of the township had established brass caps for numerous corners that were regarded as lost. In one instance the brass cap was over 700 feet from the original stone section corner. In the late 1990s, the Boulder County Surveyor found the original stone corner and its bearing trees (which established that the stone had not been disturbed or moved). The BLM then conducted a Corrective Dependent Resurvey in the area in which they held the original stone corners and destroyed the 1943 brass cap monuments.

Gene Kooper, PLS