Mining-claim land in Gilpin County needs survey homework

A century and a half of mining left Gilpin County stitched with old lode and placer claims, their boundaries drawn long before anyone planned to live there. Plenty of those claims and other metes-and-bounds parcels are sold as homesites today. They can be perfectly real land, but the paperwork has to catch up before a home plan gets far.

No building permit for a new residential dwelling will be issued without a contemporary survey. On a mining claim or a metes-and-bounds parcel, that survey has to have been done within the last 10 years. The site plan then has to line up with the survey and show the proposed and existing structures along with driveway details.

None of this is busywork. On steep, irregular mountain ground, a few feet decides whether the driveway has legal access, whether the house clears setbacks, where the septic field can go, and whether you are quietly building over a neighbor’s corner. A pretty map on a listing page is not a permit-ready survey, and the two can disagree by a lot.

So when a mining-claim parcel catches your eye, the first questions are about the survey: does one exist, how old is it, and does it actually cover the spot you want to build. A fuzzy answer is not a dealbreaker, but it is a line item in the cost of doing your homework.