I have a bunch of ideas about what to do in the near term and then other thoughts about what things might look like a few months from now when I hope the situation will look a lot better.

I could see lots of quartz, both loose on the hillsides and in the numerous small prospect diggings. There was a small gold rush here more than a century ago.

Even though they have put down thousands of dollars, the buyers often stop paying on their claims part way through the process after they realize they’ve been duped, but the company just sells it again to another buyer.

If you are interested in researching mining claims for any purpose, you will first have to decipher the BLM’s LR2000, a Rube Goldberg database seemingly designed by a 1980s Soviet-era computer hacker.

I had some success following this premise this summer, finding a few nuggets in places I think I overlooked in the past.