The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is a federal office under the US Department of Interior. The BLM manages and conserves public land. Along with managing national monuments / trails / etc, defending against fires on public land and protecting wild horses, the BLM manages a variety of claim types for developing public land such as energy, grazing, and recreation.
We receive lots of emails from people who find their name or a relative’s name on our site and want to know if this means they have some right to the land listed under that name. The short answer is “probably not” but the complete answer deserves the time and attention that is best served…
We have added a new way to browse and explore claims: by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Administrative Area. To give context to this new feature, we wrote this handy explanation. Summary Nearly a quarter of a billion acres – about one-eighth of the landmass of the USA – is administered by the BLM. These…
This entry focuses on a part of our earlier discussion, Understanding Location Data. For greater context on what we will be addressing, please read that post first. One of the more confusing aspects of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) is the concept of “townships.” A “township” can refer to two different things. Both are part of…
New challenges could be in the works for prospectors on Bureau of Land Management claims. Yesterday, February 2, 2015, The BLM posted the Obama Administration’s proposed 2016 budget for the Bureau of Land Management. While the press release highlights conservation and renewable energy priorities, nestled deep in the budget are some unpleasant surprises for miners…
Claims handled by the Bureau of Land Management are not mapped by latitude and longitude, as many maps now use. Instead, many of these claims harken back to an older form of surveying called the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), a measurement system that may seem confusing to the uninitiated, but was a great step forward…
