As attention focuses upon the specific target area, it is sometimes necessary to make adjustments in property or in the conditions of mineral ownership. For example, it may become obvious that a certain area may be the only suitable site for disposal of mill tailings, and planning should begin to consider this as a relatively inflexible fact. Before actual discovery of ore is made, a minor overlapping of prior claimants' locations might easily be resolved by a simple agreement to share royalty on production that might come from the disputed area. It may be possible to secure agreement from all mineral claimants that vertical sidelines will determine mineral ownership rather than leave open the complexities of extralateral rights. Careful surveys of particularly troublesome claim boundaries may be contracted to a U.S. Mineral Surveyor with everyone's agreement to abide by his survey.
Reasonable discussion is usually possible before ore is found.
After ore is found, the same suggestion might result in an immediate lawsuit or the threat of lease cancellation. In the earliest stages of planning physical exploration work, consideration must be given to the operating plan to be submitted to the Forest Service if the claims are on National Forest land. Up to this point, particularly if it was possible to locate the claims without doing bulldozer work or constructing roads, the surface disturbance being minimal, the job may have been done without an operating plan. Construction or improvement of access roads, drill sites, trenches, pits, or landing areas for aircraft make it necessary to secure an approved operating plan. The location and nature of the work must be specified, and the work done in such a manner as to minimize surface damage and coordinate with other surface uses.