Canada Goose online citizens but foreign companies to extract

Trump Opened Bears Ears Monument To Mining

buy canada goose jacket cheap SAN JUAN COUNTY, Utah Forty miles as the crow flies west of Blanding, Utah, just up the road from the former uranium boomtown of Fry Canyon and a dirt airstrip, is a parcel of federal land historically valued for its radioactive metal and other hardrock minerals. buy canada goose jacket cheap

The tracks of mule deer and cattle criss cross a maze of canada goose store red rock, cacti and parched looking shrubs. The only signs of human life are the contrails from airlines overhead and the sound of an occasional car buzzing along State Route 95.

canadian goose jacket For a year, this remote and magnificent desert landscape was part of Bears Ears National Monument and off limits to new mining claims. That changed in December when President Donald Trump reduced the 1.35 million acre monument by 85 percent. The more stringent protections the Obama era monument designation afforded officially lifted in early February, leaving sites like this once again open for business. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM)braced for a potential influx of new claims. canadian goose jacket

The process of staking a claim has changed little since the days of Manifest Destiny. It’s still governed by the General Mining Act of 1872, which itself is based on an acquisition system prospectors used around the time of California’s Gold Rush. You read that right: The law our entire federal mining system is based on is almost exactly the same as it was 146 years ago.

Here’s how it works: A prospector goes out on public land, pickax, gold pan or, preferably, some more advanced technology in hand, and locates a valuable mineral. He or she drives a stake in the ground and erects posts or Canada Goose Outlet rock piles at each corner of the parcel they want to call dibs on. The prospector writes a name, address and information about the claim on a piece of paper, stuffs it in a tin can or plastic bag attached to one of the corner markers, and then files a notice with Uncle Sam, for the bargain price of just $212 for a 20 acre parcel.

canada goose store And then, voila! The prospector has the rights to the valuable hard rock minerals contained therein. Canada Goose online citizens but foreign companies to extract minerals from public lands and turn a profit without ever paying a dime in royalties to the federal government. canada goose store

Canada Goose sale My goal in staking my own claim was simple. While I had no intention of launching a new career in the canada goose coats extractive mineral industry, I wanted to see how easy it really was to declare part of an area canada goose clearance sale so recently protected from new mining as my very own, and the implications that might have for an archaeologically rich landscape considered sacred to many Native Americans. Canada Goose sale

Canada Goose Parka In the days after Trump officially lifted protections on more than 2 million acres of Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase Escalante monuments, I found myself scouring the web for mining data. Canada Goose Parka

Using a website called “The Diggings,” a user friendly resource of mining claims that I can only guess was canada goose clearance developed out of a hatred for the Bureau of Land Management’s Y2K era online database, I zeroed in on claims that are now inactive because, for whatever reason, the claimant failed to pay the annual maintenance fee. I figured a parcel where someone had previously made a discovery was as good a place as any for a rookie to start.

canada goose Approximately one third of the acres removed from Bears Ears are wilderness or wilderness study areas and Canada Goose Jackets remain off limits to claims. Finding a parcel that was previously part of Bears Ears, did not have an active claim and was not otherwise restricted to mining proved to canada goose deals be a bit of a challenge. canada goose

Cross referencing information to the BLM’s database, I identified three promising sites: one in Valley of the Gods that uranium miners staked in 1984 and abandoned less than four months later; another, which appeared to be a gold claim, staked in 1984 in the Manti La Sal National Forest and forfeited five years later; and a parcel out near Fry Canyon the one I ultimately settled on where numerous parties, mostly uranium mining companies, had staked dozens of claims between 1948 and 2007.

Canada Goose Outlet www.erinpsalzer.com And then it was off to southern Utah. Canada Goose Outlet

uk canada goose outlet It was a little before noon on a sunny day in late March when I met up with freelance photographer Kim Raff outside Blanding’s quaint little visitor’s center. buy canada goose jacket After a last minute supply run to the local hardware store, we piled gear into a rental SUV. uk canada goose outlet

canada goose uk shop The one hour drive to the claim site, which I’d scoped out the day before, took us up and over Comb Ridge, an ancient sandstone monocline that runs for some 80 miles, and past the pair of towering buttes for which Bears Ears is named. After dipping south of Natural Bridges National Monument and winding between several towering mesas, Route 95 swings past the shuttered Fry Canyon Lodge, once a remote backcountry inn, gas station and RV park. A sign out front reads: “Closed. Private Property.” Somewhere over the ridge behind the dilapidated structure is the idle Daneros uranium mine, located just outside the former Canada Goose sale monument boundary. canada goose uk shop

cheap canada goose uk Near mile marker 69, I parked along the shoulder, careful not to crush delicate cacti. There were no other cars in sight. I threw some jerky, water and other supplies in a backpack, hauled two 4 foot long wooden posts over my shoulder, grabbed a shovel and headed toward the rocky cliff that zigzags parallel to the road. In a small clearing not far from the highway, I dug a shallow hole and dropped canada goose outlet in the first post, stacking stones around the base so it wouldn’t topple over, as the BLM recommends. cheap canada goose uk

Using a range finder and handy GPS phone application, Raff and I carefully plotted the distance between each corner as we erected the three other posts. The two southern markers were placed a few hundred feet up the rocky hillside and the climb provided sweeping views of White Canyon, Found Mesa and far off Cheese Box Butte.

Canada Goose Coats On Sale I was fairly confident we’d staked a near perfect 20 acre rectangle. I still had to name it though. We settled on “Cheese Box Vista Mine,” a tribute to a distinctive rock formation that had recently been cut from the protected site. Canada Goose Coats On Sale

canada goose uk black friday I scrawled my information on the back of a page from a mining packet I’d been given earlier in the week at the BLM office in Monticello, Utah, and attached the notice to the northeast corner post. Fearing my tape job might not hold up in inclement weather, I put a second note inside a plastic container I attached to the marker. canada goose uk black friday

Canada Goose Jackets I had no gold nuggets or uranium ore to show for the effort. Nonetheless, it felt like successful prospecting. I ultimately decided against filling out the paperwork with BLM to actually move forward on a claim, since the story was less about mining than the archaic process that allows pretty much anyone to do it. Besides, as easy as it is to obtain one, a claim on its own gets you very little. Canada Goose Jackets

The claim doesn’t mean you own the land, nor does it canada goose grant you permission to develop a mine. The purpose, rather, is to establish priority over any other prospectors who might be after what’s in that ground. But anything beyond panning in a creek or poking around in the dirt with a pickax requires time and money that only serious miners those convinced they can turn a profit are likely to spend.

“It’s easy to get mineral rights; it’s hard to do any kind of mining,” said Tyler Hall, a jewelry store owner in Monticello who has a mining claim just east of Blanding. “And it’s extremely hard to use any kind of equipment.”

When I spoke with him, Hall said he had been trying for the better part of a year to obtain a permit that would allow him to take tourists panning for gold. The hoops he’s had to jump through are “ginormous,” Hall said.

canada goose black friday sale Hall argues that mining too often gets a bad rap. While the mining law hasn’t changed, canadian goose jacket there’s been a shift in mentality, from simply encouraging people to make a living to focusing on environmental protection cheap Canada Goose and wildlife resources. canada goose black friday sale

“This idea that mining is going to destroy this heritage and land is just not true,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing. I don’t want any of that to be lost.”

The General Mining Canada Goose Parka Act of 1872, which President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law, sought to incentivize prospecting and spur economic development in the West. The West is now thoroughly developed, but the law remains on the books, with only minor amendments.

Unlike the coal, oil and gas industries, which pay a 12.5 percent royalty on fossil fuels they extract from federal land, hardrock miners pay nothing to produce gold, silver, buy canada goose jacket cheap platinum or uranium. Several attempts to overhaul the law in recent years have failed, in part thanks to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D Nev.), a fierce ally of the mining industry who fought to block establishing royalty rates.

uk canada goose Jim Allen, a natural resources lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, who represents numerous mining companies, told HuffPost that the mining law is “written backwards from how things are done today.” Historically, claims were staked after a discovery was made. But, as Allen put it, “the days of locating an ore deposit by finding a vein of ore on the surface, and following it into the earth, are gone.” Prospectors with pickaxes have been replaced by geophysicists with technology that can identify potential deposits thousands of feet deep. Today, the discovery of a valuable mineral necessary for a claim to be valid often comes after a miner stakes the ground and files a location notice uk canada goose.