What better way to start the blog week than with a good old mining story from Australia? This one has it all: a clear night, a bright moon, midnight staking with hammers and pegs, and then the next morning a string of angry competitors trying to get the rights to more than two billion dollars worth of uranium deposits.  

Trailing along are regulators caught in the headlights. And now it is before the courts that have to decide if Norm McCleary’s old-fashioned hand staking of two lucrative uranium deposits at Angela and Pamela in the Northern Territories was legal and supersedes the electronically filed claims “staked” by forty other companies including six from China.

The Darwin’s supreme court is the aptly named location of the legal proceedings. It is here the issue of physical versus electronic staking and the timing of each will be decided in the next month. The question is what is the law in the Northern Territory? This may be one of those cases where difficult facts make for bad law. It is clear that “The consent of a mining warden is required to enter on any land, to mark out the land in the prescribed manner.” Some news reports of McCleary’s midnight staking venture say that he did not have the consent of a mining warden to enter the land in question. Some news reports tell of McCleary making two applications to the mining warden but receiving no reply. With two billion dollars of uranium at stake, this one will be fought long and hard.

In British Columbia we have electronic title staking. The literature is not clear that physical staking is now outlawed and no longer valid. Or is it? What if the Canadian equivalent of McCleary were to mount a midnight claim stake? And could this happen in the United States—or would a good Landman preclude such intriguing events. An interesting question to which you may have the answer, and if you do please post the answer in the comment box below.