Wells, Nevada..A slice of life in our neck of the woods

An Act…to steal land from the states’
As for the BLM… I live in rural NE Nevada – an area whose economy is anchored in ranching and mining.
I sit on the Wells, Nevada planning and zoning committee and also represent Wells on the Elko County Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC). Wells has a population of around 1,400.
In the Wells P&Z, once a year we look out within a 30-miles circle surrounding us – called the ‘sphere of influence’ – on how we will impact the area and how it will impact us going into the future.
Economically, the housing bubble came and went without affecting us much here and people wondered when we were ever going to be affected by the economic boom taking place the rest of the country.
That began to change a couple of years ago when gold was discovered in the Pequop Mountain Range 20 miles to our East and various exploratory companies began drilling to find that the mountain was one of the richest deposits of gold ever found in the U.S..
The primary companies doing the exploration were Frontier on the east and AuEx on the west side of the mountain. Frontier made a deal to buy the AuEx and recently sold their holdings to Newmont Gold. Frontier, like Barrack Gold – the largest gold mining corporation in the world – presents itself as a Canadian company.
A few years back I heard someone say in a radio interview that Newmont Gold was owned by the Crown. I emailed him and asked him what his source of that statement was and he said that is what they told him when he took the executive tour.
Newmont and Barrack do the lion’s share of the gold mining in Nevada and own the entirety of the Carlin Gold Trend reserves.
In doing a search on Barrack, I found the corporation went to Canada, and that corporation – like Newmont – was owned by a parent corporation in South America – and that corporation was held by another entity called Crown Holdings
An insight into the crown is provided in this short (3:38) video…
‘World Economic Super Power’

“Contrary to popular belief, the Crown is not the Royal Family or the British Monarch – the Crown is the private City State of London. It has a council of 12 members who rule the corporation under a mayor called the Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayor and his 12-member council serve as proxies or representatives to sit in for 13 of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful banking families…” 
So, the question is:  Why would we allow foreign holdings of our natural gold resources?
Let’s put that on the shelf for a moment.
About the same time as the exploratory gold drilling began, a company called ICI (International Charter Incorporated) approached the City of Wells saying they wanted to rent the city owned airport hanger. The CEO of the company was Oregon State Senator Brian Boquist who said the had a grant for the reforestation of Pinion Pines – which are generally considered to be an invasive nuisance to ranching. ICI is listed as a Private Military Company (a PMC) and Boquist is a Special Forces lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Reserve. It also came out that the land granted to him from BLM would also be used as a private military training facility.
Let put that on the shelf for now also.
Not long after that, Madeline Pickens came into the area saying that she wanted to establish a wild horse sanctuary. She expressed the intention of acquiring a half million acres and now, through land purchase and BLM leases, and she now controls just over a half million acres about 20 miles to the south of Wells.
She says she is not here for the water – even though her husband, T. Boone says he expects to make a billion dollars over the next 20 years on the sale of water – and, as related to me from a local rancher, the Ely water line (sending water to Las Vegas) conveniently ends just south of her land holdings – but I have yet to acquire the map of the pipe location. This area is said to sit atop one of the largest untapped aquifers in the nation – but I’m finding the county aquifer water maps are classified.
Both she and Boquist are in the same basic area and both have expressed the intention of putting in a private air strip.
Putting that on the shelf for now…
This last winter, to the North of us, El Paso gas acquired the permits to run a 40” gas line across Northern Nevada from a gas depot in Wyoming and into Oregon. About the time they were getting started on the construction, LV reporter George Knapp reported that British Petroleum had acquired a half interest in the pipeline – this as their oil platform in the Gulf was melting down.
What is of interest here is not only the (again) foreign ownership, but that extensive oil and gas drilling has been done throughout NE Nevada over the last several years and all seem to have ‘dry well’ caps on them (even though oil can openly be seen on the ground) – and very large sums are being paid to tie up the oil and gas leases.
I talked with a driller working in the area 2 years back who was drilling his last well before retiring. He had located the two largest wells for Arco in Alaska and he told me there is a natural gas deposit south of Winnemucca (North central Nevada where he lives) that would power Northern Nevada for at least the next 200 years.
For some time now I’ve translated ‘federal’ to mean ‘foreign’ – so it’s not surprising to hear you relate that the BLM is a ‘federal’ corporation.
I also strongly believe that the BLM will be the legal arm of the United Nations ‘Agenda 21’ program that has as its mission the abolition of private property except by permission of the Crown.
A slice of life in our neck of the woods – Gary Jacobucci / Wells, Nevada