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Show Salt Lake Teacher ' Get Pros. Sq. Claims Mining Planned I Two Salt Lake special I education teachers and hobby hob-by prospectors have apparently ap-parently gained control of the placer mining claims immediately east of the five acre Prospector Park site and adjoining Prospector Park subdivision. The claims are on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property and constitute approximately ap-proximately 20 acres south of highway 248. The claims n were located almost two years ago by LaVar Ingalls who announced plans to' begin placer mining the site on which valuable mine tailings were thought to have been left by past mining operations. Placer mining is similiar to strip mining. The surface is stripped away and processed to recover any valuable minerals it may contain. The operation is noisy and unless strict revegetation guidelines are followed it can leave the land irrepairable scarred. Ingalls maintained at the time the tailings on the site were worth millions and some speculated an average single family lot in Prospector Park subdivision contained minerals min-erals worth as much as back hoe and rely on two other teacher friends for help on weekends. They wanted permission to truck the ore through the Prospector subdivision, sub-division, a proposition that was definitely received with hostility by the property owners. The city in is the process of annexing the BLM property but even so City Attorney Tom Clyde feels the claims might have the priority and the city would be powerless to stop the mining but could I control it. I The city would like to see the marshlands on which the claims are located preserved as a natural wildlife santuary making an attractive entrance en-trance to Park City from the east. If the site was placer mined the natural quality of the site could be lost forever. The ladies were insistant they had no intentions of patenting the claims and . actually gaining title to the property. "They said they weren't interested in mining condo-miniumite" condo-miniumite" said Clyde, "only extracting the minerals miner-als and moving on. $750,000. Ingalls further claimed the five acre parksite owned by the city was worth $9 million in mineral value alone. The city however obtained a second opinion of the site from a reliable geologist who reported the mineral value of the property was questionable at best. The mining plans have rested in limbo until last week when the two lady school teachers called a meeting with city officials and Prospector Park residents. resi-dents. The teachers said they were amateur prospectors and had become interested in filing a mining claim. They said they contacted Ingalls for help in doing so because he had had "experience". The ladies continued they examined Ingalls's own claims and realized he had let the Prospector locations lapse. The ladies then went in and refiled on Ingalls' claims. They told residents they wanted to work the claims in the summer when they weren't teaching school. They added they planned to erect a spiral concentrator on the site to separate heavier minerals which would be shipped to Salt Lake for processing. , .Tftey pontiniued the v would lease a", small |
