Well 145 views and no replies so I will update.
I found a site mylandmatters.org that is awesome. From there I can get the maricopa county to print the up to date registered claim info and input the boundaries of claims myself. BLM office is worthless and 90 days out on claim info. They just want to refer you to others rather than do their job. I did get thru to phillis at the BLM cia phone and she was helpful after making a major goof and informing me all the yellow areas on their map is private property …. It’s not it is BLM land. Which she called back to correct. Either way I got some up to date maps by doing a lot of leg work. If anyone else needs help I can tell what direction I went in and have had luck

Justin,
Sorry man I was not informed by the system that there was a posting. All 3rd party systems run off the updated info from the BLM. If BLM is not up to date, then most of the sites out there are not up to date. I would suggest that you spend some time on the BLM new site MLRS. I use the site a great deal when I need the most current information on lands.
It is not the be all end all but it is getting closer all the time. I have used all of the 3rd party sites and still go back to the LR-2000 and now the MLRS for all that I do with claims.

Hey thank you Kevin for the reply. All good man. I am new to this BLM system. And there new system lol. I am So use to paper maps and COVID has changed everything lol. That and usually used the maps for BLM riding areas which when younger we figured ask for forgiveness not permission if you ended up in a out of bounds zone while dirt biking. But defiantly don’t operate that way any more especially that we are looking to take the kids out as they love panning. On a side question if someone only has a load claim on a spot can you placer mine by there claim. Off there claim but down the wash from it on BLM land? We’re taking the kiddos out to the culture bait claim this weekend but had eyed a few areas hence the trying to narrow down what is what on BLM because we defiantly do not want to be on someone’s area.
Thank again for the reply

Justin,
Technically you can place a placer over lode but most states simply will not process that claim with good reason, to much animosity between claim owners is a big one.
Also there are many lode claims that will pop back up to the surface and that opens up a whole other can of cats.

For Justin, when I prospect I do what you mentioned. I find out off the BLM website, now called MLRS, what the claims are. I go to the county office and get an unoffical copy of the claim like you mentioned. The other thing I do, is I pull up all claims filed from the county within the last 90 days. Maricopa does not make that easy since I can't limit that to a township, range and section, only the whole county. Yavapai does. I normally spend 40 hours researching and throw out dozens of areas in the process before I put boots on the ground.

If you find an open area, make sure you do your research, like you are, and can talk to it if you meet someone in the field. I had someone else do the work for me and was out one day to 20 open acres along the San Domingo Wash and met someone who convinced me that it was already claimed. Not having done the BLM search or not having searched county records, I backed down. Turned out the guy was outright lying to me and the ground was open. Only time I ever met anyone prospecting while looking for open ground.

I did a write up a few weeks ago on what I do for research for boots on the ground.

https://nuggetshooter.ipbhost.com/topic/37242-archived-tutorials/#comment-336150

Thank you both Kevin and cris. I look forward to some of these gpaa events may run into you fellas. And cris yes that’s exactly what I ran into with maricopa county. Luckily I am part of the construction crew remodeling the mcc county building and have visited the recorders office almost every day after work it’s a simple elevator ride lol. They were able to print more specific area for me this week and it helped narrow down. Thank you again for the great advice. Do you guys recommend and gps that works better than others in the field? I currently use a Garmin but it is older and only keeps map overlay that I upload which I pulled it out of storage as I mainly used it for sailing way offshore which in arizona …. Not a lot of sailing going on for me. I’m looking at updating to a unit more tailored for land base