ClaimWatch takes a mining company from where should we look to claims staked on the ground and filed with the agencies — one connected workflow across 12 BLM states. Exploration targeting, land status, ground verification, and automated staking packages, built on the complete federal mining claim record and an in-house archive of General Land Office (GLO) documents. Purpose-built for a country that, unlike every other major mining jurisdiction, has no centralized national system for mining claims.
Claims data, disposition records, historic mineral deposits, and land status — pulled together before the report hits your inbox. No more cross-referencing federal and state systems for days.
Federal case records speak in action codes, disposition flags, and cryptic remarks. Reports translate that into the narrative a principal or client can actually read — the story behind the ground, not the machine-readable exhaust.
Public browsing sites are fine for a casual look. They aren't something you can hand to investors, attach to a board memo, or file against a project. ClaimWatch ships a branded, formatted, print-ready report that's built to be delivered.
Nothing to install. Nothing to integrate. Every area of interest is delivered as a complete package — ready for the office, the field, the boardroom, or the filing.
The document of record. Executive summary, claims inventory, land status findings, geological framework, and a section-by-section register — professionally written, print-ready, branded.
Not a summary — the evidence. One tab per dataset, plus a Report Facts tab that ties every printed figure to the tab that backs it. If the report says 49 active claims, that tab has 49 rows.
A publication-ready map for the deck or the filing — and separately, the report's own data as GIS layers you can load into your project: claims, study area, deposits, ranked sections. Shipped as shapefiles, a file geodatabase, and pre-styled layer files that carry the same symbology as the printed map — ready for ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, or any GIS platform.
A regulatory context appendix defining every designation the report cites, with citations. Withdrawal orders reproduced in full text. Supporting publications where the source document itself confirms the link.
The actual General Land Office (GLO) documents for your ground — patents, mineral surveys, master title plats, withdrawals & orders, and the historical index — assembled automatically from ClaimWatch's in-house General Land Office archive and indexed one folder per section. Over 3.7 million GLO documents held locally across 13 western states, indexed to 35 million individual PLSS sections. Every document is marked held in archive, at BLM not yet pulled, or never digitized by BLM — so a gap in the archive is never mistaken for a gap in the record. Your package ships even when the government document sites don't.
Most exploration programs run the same sequence: find the ground, verify the ground, confirm what's open, stake it, then watch it and report on it. ClaimWatch runs that whole sequence — each step handing the next one a finished deliverable instead of a research project. Start anywhere. Most clients start at step one.
Scores and ranks candidate ground for a specific commodity across a region, basin, or mining district. Every candidate section is scored on mineralization signal and geochemical anomalies, then screened for whether the ground is actually open to location — so what comes back is a shortlist you can act on, not a pile of dots to sort. Claim activity and withdrawals are reported as current land status, deliberately kept out of the score: they tell you who holds the ground, not what's under it.
A section-by-section audit of everything on and under a defined area of interest — active and historical claims, patented ground, federal and state encumbrances, withdrawals, mineral reservations and split estate, historic deposits, and the geological framework. Ships with the General Land Office documents for those sections pulled from the in-house archive, an index of what exists versus what was ever digitized, and a regulatory appendix defining every designation it cites.
A report screens at the quarter section level and details active claim density. You want a closer look. So we plot the active claims and verify the open ground — mapping what third-party claims actually capture, resolving where senior positions really sit, and confirming what is open in the gaps. Done by a landman, on the record and on the ground — because the difference between "this quarter screens open" and "these forty acres are open" is the difference between a claim that holds and one that doesn't.
The layout is designed by hand to capture the open ground efficiently. Everything after that is automated: location certificates written to each jurisdiction's statutory requirements, corner cards with GPS coordinates, monument positions computed from that state's own posting rules, and a walking order optimized so the crew sets posts in one efficient pass. The claims get staked on the ground and monumented; then the certificates are recorded with the county and filed with BLM. The package for claim 500 takes the same time as the package for claim 1.
Once the ground is yours, the question changes from what's here to what moved. A recurring report on everything that changed inside your area of interest — new claims staked, closures, status changes, claims with no fee payment reported, and who is quietly building a position next door. Delivered on your cadence as a standing service contract.
Once a year, or whenever you have to put a number in front of somebody: exactly how much ground does the portfolio actually capture? GroundControl measures it — acreage captured claim by claim, third-party overlaps named by serial number, phantom gaps between claims that were never really covered, and discovery monuments that fall where they shouldn't. Built for regulatory disclosure, stakeholder and investor reporting, and the acreage schedule an attorney needs in a due diligence file.
When a company buys claims from another party rather than staking new ground, the seller's filing history is the asset — and the closing attorney needs it examined before anything signs. ClaimWatch automates the bulk of that review: every required filing, maintenance fee, and assessment-year obligation across the claims' entire life, reconstructed from the BLM record and translated out of action codes. Findings are then confirmed against the stamped lead file documents once they are obtained from BLM. Pairs with a Land Status Report on the same ground and a GroundControl audit of what the block actually captures.
The workflow above covers what most exploration and land teams order. These are the narrower jobs — run on request, against the same data foundation, when a specific question comes up. If the question you need answered isn’t here, ask. Most of what we build started as a client asking for something that didn’t exist yet.
An on-request investigation into who is actually behind a filing. Starts from one claimant, address, or serial number and links the related entities operating behind it — so a name you don’t recognize on the ground next door becomes a company you do.
A narrow but high-stakes legal exposure. A 2011 drafting error left pre-1993 lode claims, mill sites, and tunnel sites without their fee-payment protection for one assessment year. Affects a small share of the claim base — but if it’s your claims, it’s the whole conversation.
Maintenance fees are due September 1, but BLM does not close non-paying claims for months. The watch reports exactly how many claims have no payment reported on the BLM site, re-checks each against BLM’s live case records, ranks the holders, and tracks each claim across successive data loads. It reports what BLM reports. A claim with no payment of record is not the same as an unpaid claim — confirming that takes further investigation.
Who holds the ground in a given state, ranked. Per-holder profiles with claim counts, geographic concentration, commodity exposure, filing activity, work authorizations, and parent-subsidiary roll-up where the relationship is verified.
A monthly read on claim-staking activity across the western states — county-level maps, year-to-date trends on a location-date basis, and profiles of who is staking the most ground. Publication-ready.
New datasets, new report sections, and new deliverable formats get added when a client needs them. If you need a state, a dataset, or an output the platform doesn’t cover yet, tell us — that is generally how it gets built.
Watch your project areas. Track competitor claim activity. Know when new claims are staked adjacent to your ground — and who staked them — before it shows up in a press release or market report.
Layer active claim density over historic production and documented mineral deposits. Identify ground worth walking based on a combined signal of mineralization, district history, and industry positioning.
Full claimant chains, disposition history, land status, and withdrawal overlays in a single deliverable. Built by landmen who have spent decades in the BLM system — for landmen who need answers fast.
Royalty companies, PE funds, and institutional investors evaluating mineral asset acquisitions need the same claim intelligence their target companies have. ClaimWatch delivers it independently, on your timeline.
The public sites are free for a reason. They'll tell you a claim exists. They won't tell you what to do about it, hand you a report you can sign, or put a map in your deck. ClaimWatch does.
Reports ship as a branded Word document and print-ready PDF, structured the way title professionals expect, with the evidentiary workbook alongside. Hand it over. It's done.
Each figure in a report is computed once, from the same fact base that fills the delivered workbook — a printed number equals the row count of the sheet behind it, and an automated gate enforces that on every report generated. Narrative is written around verified facts and cannot invent a figure.
Two decades of BLM research, mineral title examination, and claim staking experience — turned into a production tool. Every section of every report exists because a landman or geologist actually needed it on a real project.
Filing-ready staking packages generated at any scale, statutory monument placement applied automatically per jurisdiction, and GroundControl acreage and overlap analysis. These aren't off-the-shelf — they're purpose-built by ChoraQuest and available exclusively through this platform.
The federal GLO and BLM document sites have grown increasingly unreliable — outages, timeouts, missing images. So ClaimWatch holds the record set itself: over 3.7 million General Land Office documents across 13 western states, indexed down to the individual PLSS section. And the index is honest about its own gaps: every document is marked held, not yet pulled, or never digitized by BLM in the first place. When the government sites are down, your deliverable still ships — with the source documents in the package.
ClaimWatch is the automated delivery arm of ChoraQuest, LLC, a GIS and mineral title consultancy serving the mining, energy, and renewable development sectors across the western United States. It was designed and built by Mike Sandoz, founder of ChoraQuest and a 20+ year GIS and mineral title professional — and it reflects a working practice, not a whitepaper. Every report type exists because a landman or geologist actually needed it on a real project.
Beyond the workflow above, ChoraQuest provides full mineral title examination, publication-grade GIS cartography for exhibits, investor decks, and regulatory filings, and custom GIS tooling and workflow automation built to a client's operation. For the story behind the firm — the full team, the client work, the services beyond ClaimWatch — see ChoraQuest.com.
Tell us the ground you are looking at and the decision you are trying to make. We will recommend where in the workflow to start and scope it. No sales call unless you ask for one.