zinke and trump are trying to downsize Bears Ears and Grand Staircase. This article tells us why........the money grubbing miners. The attempts by trump to downsize are subject to litigation. I’m hoping the lawyers defending the monuments are actively punching whatever they have to punch to halt the actual mining activity. File all the claims you want.......doesn’t mean anything, yet.
Excerpt:
HuffPost reports that at least 20 mining claims have been staked on land unlawfully cut from Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments by the Trump administration.
In the most concrete example of threats now facing the lands where the Trump administration rolled back protections in 2017, a Canadian company is moving forward with plans to mine copper and other minerals in part of Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Glacier Lake Resources Inc. called the site, which is part of an area renowned for its natural beauty and considered a scientifically important source of fossils, “a welcome addition to the company’s ever-growing portfolio of projects.”
The infamous cuts to Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments took effect in February 2018, and per media reports, mining claims were staked out in Grand Staircase-Escalante the following month.
Want to know what a claim is? Can someone start digging based on a claim? No. Here, from Huffington Post (and here’s the link):
A claim is just the first step a prospector must take to mine public land. As HuffPost learned during a recent visit to Bears Ears, the claim only gets you rights to the minerals underground. Permits are required for any significant development.
There’s been less interest in prospecting areas carved from Bears Ears. In fact, the first new claim there came from two public land activists, Morgan Sjogren and Michael Versteeg. It was an experiment, they wrote in a blog post on the website of outdoor retailer REI, to see whether a claim could serve as “an unusual public lands preservation tactic.”
The purpose of a claim is just to establish priority over any other prospectors who might be after what’s in that ground. Any exploration that disturbs more than 5 acres requires a claimant to file a plan of operations with BLM, a move that initiates an environmental review. To date, BLM has not received a plan of operations for any claim staked on land removed from Grand Staircase-Escalante or Bears Ears, including those at the Colt Mesa deposit.












