Claim Jumper

I confess, I am a claim jumper. Not one of my most notable accomplishments, such as Chicken Hypnotizer (I always wanted to put that on a resume'), but something that not everyone can say.

When I was in college I wanted to build a cabin in the woods. A place to get away from everything a la Thoreau. Since I live within driving distance of a lot of National Forest, a couple of friends and I did a little research on the mineral laws of the area.

If you have a working mineral claim on National Forest land, you can build a cabin on it so you can work your claim.

Once it has been established that there are minerals on the claim worth recovering, you can claim the land, build your cabin. To keep the claim active, all you have to do is either do $100.00 worth of improvements on the land, or extract $100.00 worth of minerals. Neither one is very difficult to do.

So how do you establish that there is mineral content on your chosen piece of property?

With a little research, we found an area alongside Blewett pass that has placer gold claims all over the place. Most of the mineral content has been mined out, but the claims are still there.

We went to the Hall of Records, and searched for a claim that had not been filed on for five years, and filed a new claim over the top of the old one (Claim Jumping). Then all we had to do was go out to the claim and put our marker in place, and Voila' we were mine owners.

Our claim was at the confluence of Pipe and Swuak Creeks, was fairly level, and would make a wonderful location for a cabin.

We started making plans for the cabin, water supply, heat.

Then one day as I was reading the paper, I saw a notice that the area on both sides of the road through Blewett Pass had been declared a National Scenic Area, and no new construction would be allowed within 1,000 feet of the hiway.

We had missed our window of opportunity. If we had gone and thrown up a tarpaper and plywood shack, we would have been allowed to improve it, but as things were, we just missed it.

And here I had become a Claim Jumper and gotten nothing out of it. We went over and panned a little gold, just for the fun of it, but let the claim revert to the State.

Thus ended my career as a Prospector/Claim Jumper.