An environmental group has released a new report on mining claims registered in Arizona since 2002. Says the report:Driven by increased metal prices and aided by outdated federal law, in the last four years mining interests have staked claim to more public land in Arizona than the Saguaro and Petrified Forest national parks combined, according to a three-month Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of millions of federal records.
Between January 2003 and September 2006, mining interests registered claims with the Bureau of Land Management for 208,000 acres of public land in the state. The number of claims increased by 32 percent, from 24,856 to 32,868. (See Fig. 1) Added to existing claims, mining interests now control more than 862,000 acres of public land in Arizona — about 1,350 square miles.
If you want to get a look at who's claiming what where, go to the site of the EWG and click on "Wickenburg", which will bring up the map that covers the Prescott National Forest all the way south past I-10. I was actually surprised by the results I got when I clicked on individual claim marks on the map. Didn't turn up any Phelps-Dodge claims in the PNF. It looks like the Roadrunner Prospectors Club down in Phoenix holds more claims in our area than PD! That's a big change from the old days (1980s) when my husband and I checked the county records to find that the copper mining giant held mining claims on a lot of the PNF on both sides of SR89 south of Prescott. Most of their mining interests in Yavapai right now seem to be confined to the area around Bagdad where PD runs the county's only operating mine.
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Just FYI, one of Walking Prescott's posts (Insects & Arachnids) was listed in the most recent Circus of the Spineless
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