In the Silver World Newspaper dated September 11, 2015, there is an article with regard to the “dramatic drop in the local fire rating classification from 6 to 4 effective July 1, 2015.”

Hall Realty would like to encourage all home and business owners in the Lake City and immediate area to contact your insurance company and inquire as to a possible reduction in your current policy premium.

We hope this Thanksgiving finds you and your families well.  As always, Hall Realty appreciates your continued business support.

The award-winning Lake City Community School is rated as one of the top public schools in the State of Colorado, by the Colorado Department of Education.  There are 178 school districts in the state.

The Lake City Community School has consistently scored very highly in the areas of academic achiemvement on state exams, academic growth on state exams, and post-secondary and workforce readiness, as determined by performance on the Colorado ACT, dropout rate, and graduation rate.

The Lake City Community School has been recognized as a John Irwin School of Excellence (https://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeawards/johnirwin) several times, and is a District Accredited With Distinction  (https://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeawards/districtsaccreditedwithdistinction) by the Colorado Department of Education.

In addition, the school has a low student to teacher ratio, a modern building with new additions, and broad community support for the students, teachers, and administration.  There are approximately 100 students in pre-school through grade 12 enrolled in school.

Please visit www.lakecityschool.org for more information about the school’s mission, values, educator effectiveness, special education and more.  We invite you to contact us with your questions, and discuss enrolling your child or children in the Lake City Community School.

(This information was taken from www.lakecityschool.org)

PATENTED MINING CLAIM:

A patented mining claim is one for which the Federal Government has passed its title to the claimant, making it private land.  A person may mine and remove minerals from a mining claim without a mineral patent.  However, a mineral patent gives the owner exclusive title to the locatable minerals.  It also gives the owner title to the surface and other resources.  This means:  You own the Land as well as the minerals. (Hall Realty Mining Claim Listings are all Patented Mining Claims.)

UNPATENTED MINING CLAIM:

An Unpatented mining claim is a particular parcel of Federal land, valuable for a specific mineral deposit or deposits.  It is a parcel for which an individual has asserted a right of possession.  The right is restricted to the extraction and development of a mineral deposit.  The rights granted by a mining claim are valid against a challenge by the United States and other claimants only after the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit.  This means:  You are leasing, from the governmnet, the right to extract minerals.  No land ownership is conveyed.

TWO TYPES OF MINING CLAIMS:

1. LODE CLAIMS: Deposits subject to lode claims include classic veins or lodes having well defined boundaries.  They also include other rock in-place bearing valuable minerals and may be broad zones of mineralized rock.  Examples include quartz or other veins bearing gold or other metallic minerals and large volume but low-grade disseminated metallic deposits.  Lode claims are usually described as parallelograms with the longer side lines parallel to the vein or lode.  Descriptions are by metes and bounds surveys (giving length and direction of each boundary line).  Federal statute limits their size to a maximum of 1,500 feet in length along the vein or lode.  Their width is a maximum of 600 feet, 300 feet on either side of the centerline of the vein or lode.  The end lines of the lode claim must be parallel to qualify for underground extralateral rights.  Extralateral rights involve the rights to minerals that extend at depth beyond the vertical boundaries of the claim.
2. PLACER CLAIMS: Mineral deposits subject to placer claims include all those deposits not subject to lode claims.  Originally, these included only deposits of unconsolidated materials, such as sand and gravel, containing free gold or other minerals.  By Congressional acts and judicial interpretations, many nonmetallic bedded or layered deposits, such as gypsum and high calcium limestone, are also considered placer deposits.  Placer claims, where practicable, are located by legal subdivision of land (for example:  the E 1/2 NE 1/3 NE 1/4, Section 2, Township 10 South, Range 21 East, Mount Diablo Meridian).  The maximum size of a placer claim is 20 acres per locator.

TWO TYPES OF MINERAL ENTRIES:

1. MILL SITES: A mill site must be located on nonmineral land.  Its purpose is to either (a) support a lode or placer mining claim operation or (b) support itself independent of any particular claim.  A mill site must include the erection of a mill or reduction works and/or may include other uses reasonable incident to the support of a mining operation.  Descriptions of mill sites are by metes and bounds surveys or legal subdivision.  The maximum size of a mill site is 5 acres.
2. TUNNEL SITES: A tunnel site is where a tunnel is run to develop a vein or lode.  It may also be used for the discovery of unknown veins or lodes.  To stake a tunnel site, two stakes are placed up to 3,000 feet apart on the line of the proposed tunnel.  Recordation is the same as a lode claim.  Some States require additional centerline stakes (for example, in Nevada, centerline stakes must be placed at 300-foot intervals).  An individual may locate lode claims to cover any or all blind (not known to exist) veins or lodes intersected by the tunnel.  The maximum distance these lode claims may exist is 1,500 feet on either side of the centerline of the tunnel.  This, in essence, gives the mining claimant the right to prospect an area 3,000 feet wide and 3,000 feet long.  Any mining claim located for a blind lode discovered while driving a tunnel relates back in time to the date of the location of the tunnel site.

The above Mining Claim information is from http://www.1881.com Investments.

Good news for Colorado, Good Economy has yet to filter over to the Western Slope

Colorado’s Economy is ranked second best among the nation’s 50 state economies and Washington, D.C., according to Business Insider.  Colorado’s housing market had the most improvement in the country, with house prices rising 11.2 percent between Q1 2014 and Q1 2015.  The state’s 2014 gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 4.7 percent also was very strong, and was the fifth best among the states.  Business Insider ranked the economies of the states and D.C. on seven measures:  unemployment rates, gross domestic product per capita, average weekly wages, and recent growth rates for nonfarm payroll jobs, GDP, house prices, and wages.  While not factored into the ranking, the study looked at Fortune 1000 companies headquartered in each sate, as well as the industries that had a disproportionately large share of employment in each state according to their location quotients.  This provided a little more insight into what makes each state economy tick.  Dish Network, Western Union, and Chipotle are three of the 23 Fortune 1000 companies headquartered in Colorado.

A few hours’ drive takes my team to the hushed beauty of the remotest place in the lower 48.  By Debi Boucher

Wildflowers, not power lines.  That’s what the seven of us from Colorado Springs want in our late summer photographs, so we pick the remotest place in the lower 48, the place with the fewest roads, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, for a road trip.

Home base for Operation Wildflower is Ouray, where we rent 4×4 jeeps (sedans can make the trip – but it’s not advisable) and with military precision pack them with an abundance of camera gear, water and food.  We’ll need everything because we’re headed to a convenience food desert – Hinsdale County, Colo.  We won’t see civilization again until we reach Lake City, beyond two rugged mountain passes along the Alpine Loop – a combination of two 4×4 roads over two passess:  Engineer and [Cinnamon].

Our journey begins on the Million Dollar Highway and continues over Red Mountain Pass.  We caffeinate in Silverton.

Our route through the wilderness, the foresaid Alpine Loop, is an ancient one.  Native Americans cut hunting paths.  Those paths much later became roads for hauling supplies to prospectors seeking gold.  From the comfort of our heated vehicles, we marvel at the “no-guts-no-glory” gumption that propelled these hunters and pioneers into places and situations beyond what most of us urbanites can imagine.

The ghoslty evidence of that gumption is in the scattered remnants of a mining town.  Animas Forks, at the crossroads of California Gulch, Cinnamon Pass and Engineer Pass.  Once the home of 450 residents, with stores and 30 cabins, the community moved on when mining stopped.  Fire and avalanche consumed what remained.  Today you see a three-story “bay window house,” built by a postman and miner who struck it rich in the mines, and since then lovingly restored.

A quarter mile farther down the road rests the skeletal frame of an old mill, transported by the Silverton Northern Railroad, loaded into wagons and hauled to the site for assembly in the summer of 1912.  Today, it is silently flanked by a sea of yeallow wildflowers.

We drive slowly over the top of Cinnamon Pass, named for the spice-colored dirt.  From this 12,640 – foot vantage point, we see three of the nation’s highest mountains – Handie’s, Redcloud, and Sunshine Peaks.  At the foot of Handie’s Peak lies American Basin, one of the most photographed locations in the San Juan Mountains.  Columbine, scarlet paintbrush, lupine, sneezeweed and others bloom in abundance.

We see wildflowers everywhere along the drive, but now and then, nature puts on a show with a force that lifts our feet off the accelerator and plunge the brake pedal.  At some unlabled location on the road high above timberline, we see a field of vibrantly colored mixed wildflowers.  A little further along, a valley of purple; only one flower – elephant head – blooms here.

On the way up Engineer Pass, we chatter like school kids on the steep, seat-bouncing, switch-back grade.  Then we reach a pull-out known as Oh! Point, aptly named.  Spread before us is the green, grassy tundra of American Flats, surrounded by dozents of peaks, many of them fourteeners.  Here the clouds enclose us.  The hush is otherworldly, as if we had entered an entirely new space, or dimension.

Cinnamon Pass Road takes a northeasterly direction as it approaches Lake San Cristobal.  The lake sits at 9,003 feet, the second largest natural lake in Colorado, damned by a massive landslide 700 years ago.  The yellow earth, known as Slumgullion Earthflow, a name deriveed from a miner’s stew of similar color, continues to slide at a rate of about 20 feet per year.

Among the willows at Lake San Cristobal, I watch a bull moose and a red-winged black bird test each other’s tenacity.  The bird perches on the bull’s antlers.  The bull shakes off the bird, which attempts several more landings, until the bull rises up on his hind legs and angrily paws the air, finally ridding himself of his annoying visitor.

The only incorporated town in Hinsdale County is Lake City (summer population:  800).  Founded in 1875, it’s one of the oldest and best preserved historic communities in the state.  There are no fast food restaurants here, no chain stores, and many businesses in town close for the winter.  But in the summer months Lake City bustles with the one industry that survives — tourism.  The mouthwatering smell and smoke of BBQ greet you from a converted 1950’s era gas station with an old Texaco sign and gas pumps.  Consuming brisket tacos and BBQ by the pound, our hunger and our solitued are forgotten.

Along the historic boardwalk, we wander into galleries and gift shops, and admire the late 19th-century architecture.  The Operation Wildflower team agrees that spending some time at the San Juan Soda Company’s old-fashioned soda fountain would be a good idea.  An over the top cherry ice cream soda caps my day in the remotest spot south of Canada.

Hinsdale County

• 1,123 square miles, 96 percent public land.
• Five fourteeners and more than 20 thirteeners.
• The Continental Divide crosses twice:  Weminuche Wilderness and Gunnison National Forest.

Courtesy On The Road

• Stay on designated roads.  Obey posted signs for parking and trails.
• Drive slowly and watch for on-coming traffic.
• Stay on your side of the road on blind curves.  Honk to warn on-coming traffic.
• Uphill traffic has the right-of-way.
• Do not park or stop on narrow sections of the road.  Use pull-outs or wider areas of the road to park.
• Respect private property.
• Stay out of mine buildings, tunnels, and shafts.
• Let others know your travel plans.
• Plan your route and carry essential equipment and water.
• Be prepared for changing weather.
• Keep track of you time.  Travel her is difficult in the dark.

Debi Boucher is a freelance writer and photographer and a regular contributor to EnCompass by AAA Colorado.