Only 15% of AZ land is private owned. All the rest is Indian Rev. or Owned by Fed. AZ had Hugh gold mines. Vulture & Gladiator

Truth! I worked for a company core drilling a gold prospect east of Tucson and it was incredibly rich, Gold prices dropped, so they pulled the plug on the decade long permitting process. If they had stayed with it they'd be making bank now= it's about 10 years since they started permitting.

I owned 2 patented gold mines in the Bradshaw's across from Gladiator, the problem is its hard rock mines. Tough to mine and like you said expensive, Then you have all the restrictions, forest service fought for 7 years just trying to keep me off my own property. THE owls & ever green peace nut and hiker and then you got the sacred grounds BS

I owned 11 patented silver mines in Colorado. I knew the Forest Service BS from working natural gas in FS land, so applied immediately for an access permit even though the road was heavily used by the public and my mines built it when they were patented in 1906. They were so PO'd because they were planning to close the road, but couldn't because of my application Took 8 years to get the permit. Finally asked if I could contact my Senator to help them get more staff for their district office.
Forest service policy has been close close close for decades, even though more people want to use the Forest system. It has just packed more people into smaller spaces and intensified the negative impacts.
I'm sure the fruits and nuts came out of Phoenix in force if the Forest Service called for protests or opposition to permitting.
Core drilled an incredible rare earth prospect north of El Paso in New Mexico and the "native Americans" suddenly claimed it was a sacred site when they found out about it. Funny people who claimed no one owns the land want to own it. You probably know this, rare earths are the most common minerals in the soils on earth, just not in economic concentrations. And rare earths is a designation for a large number of different minerals. I think it was Eudialyte or Yttrium that was our primary target, can't recall without going back to notes. Larger deposit than Mountain Pass by a factor of at least 10.
Long story- sorry. The mining company I drilled for has the largest cobalt deposit in the world in Cameroon. Their business model was to prove out resources, sell them then prove out other resources. They were a bunch of oil field geologists who discovered minerals while exploring for oil for the Majors, who had no interest in minerals. A Chinese company was negotiating to buy the Cameroon project, but kept changing every MOU at the last moment. The board of directors kept saying it's like they are listening to us in the boardroom, I kept telling them every Chinese company is owned by the CHI COM military, and to break off the deal, but they burned through $200 million while negotiating the dead end deal and went bankrupt. No Gold prospect, no rare earths prospect, no cobalt, no uranium, no nickel prospects- all world class. Shame. Obama admin refused to intervene.

The first day of my adventure with FS they informed me i would never get access , I took their trail away from then , then gated the old wagon road and padlocked it, i had sole access to thousand acres by my PRIVATE road.

Yup, They come in like bullies then pee down both legs when someone isn't intimidated. Still can make life miserable. Good job!
Nat gas wells produce saline water, remnants of the ancient oceans where the organic material was formed in warmer times and settled to the ocean floor. Normal operations involve separating the water from gas, which has to hauled to evaporative disposal ponds. One FS thug pulled our road use permit, claiming we had damaged a culvert on a road and had not repaired it. I finally got the Tim Walz look-a-like to walk up one side of the "damaged road" and we looked through every single culvert, then walked down and looked through the opposite end of every single culvert. He agreed there were no damaged culverts, but refused to reinstate our road permit for haul trucks and heavier than a pickup traffic because he just knew we hadn't fixed the culvert. I did some work arounds to maintain everything without heavy equipment for 6 months and really pissed them off. The sole proprietor finally got fed up with the fight and retaliation for involving a Senator in an inquiry about his permitting problems and sold his holdings to another company that had bought off the FS staff (found that out after the fact, when several retired). Just another in my long list of great jobs ruined by politics.
Corruption runs much deeper than anyone imagines.
Keep on rocking in the free world, I upvote every one of your memes and comments that I see. Well no wonder- you're a gold miner!

Yes these clowns protecting these evil politicians have no clue of what's really going on.